BY ED FELIEN
Before the 20th century, drama entertained by telling a story. The first modern innovation came with Henrik Ibsen’s introduction of social purpose to the story; his plays used drama to prove a thesis: a woman’s need for self-actualization—“A Doll’s House”; the need to confront a community about its hypocrisy—“An Enemy of the People.” I loved it that Ibsen wrote a new play every two years in time for the Christmas shopping season, and his characters always alternated between his two favorite polarities. First it was Gyntian, after Peer Gynt, an easy-going, morally compromised character who at the end of the play is met by a Button Molder who says Peer will have to be melt down with the other spoilt goods. This is contrasted in the next play by the uncompromising idealist, Pastor Brand, who takes his congregation to the foot of a glacier to consecrate a new and difficult faith, and, when he defies the avalanche and is about to be consumed by the mountain, he hears in the roar of his destruction, “God is love.” The Brandian act of Nora in leaving her husband and children to become something more than a doll in a doll’s house is matched in “Ghosts, the next play, by the morally compromised Mrs. Alving, who stayed with her philandering husband and contracted syphilis.
The title of my dissertation was “The Evolution of Form in the Modern European Drama.” I used Aristotle’s elements of drama: plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle to illustrate the collapse of 19th century dramatic form and the beginnings of modern dramatic structures that represented significant leaps in cultural consciousness in the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht and Beckett.
Ibsen’s plays follow the structures of the well-made plays of 19th century melodrama, but by turning the plays into an argument he begins the process of alienating and calling attention to the plot. This forces the audience to see a plot unfold and imagine a different ending.
Strindberg wrote plays in that mold until he went mad in Berlin with Edvard Munch, and after that his plays took on a more expressionistic tone. Plot no longer is significant. It is arbitrary. “To Damascus” is a journey to and from in a series of epiphanies. The plot doesn’t matter. What matters is the agony of the protagonist. “A Dream Play” is a series of surrealistic tableaux with the stage finally exploding into a giant chrysanthemum. The dramatic focus was now the character. What happened in the plot was not as important as the revelation of the character.
Brecht began writing after World War I. German Expressionism in the theater in that period was dominated by learning plays like Georg Kaiser’s “Gas I,” that showed the exploitation and dehumanization of capitalism. The personality of the leading character is irrelevant to the central argument of the concept that must be explained. Brecht developed the Alienation Theory to explain this new theatrical device. The plot is irrelevant. At the beginning of the play actors explain what is going to take place, and each scene begins with a summary of the action. There are no revelations of character, no idiosyncratic psychology, only the unrelenting argument of the play. Plot and character are gone, only the thought and conclusions of the audience are important.
Samuel Beckett takes this progression to its logical conclusion. If life is meaningless, then thought is without purpose. We spend a large part of our life waiting, waiting for buses, waiting to see the doctor—all in the hope of getting somewhere or getting somehow better. We are waiting for Godot, a self-constructed meaning that we know is illusory. If plot, character and thought are no longer useful in understanding the human predicament, then all that is left is the diction (poetry) and song to accompany the spectacle.
I began my dissertation with the quotation from Bertrand Russell’s 1904 essay, “A Free Man’s Worship.” “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
