Epic theatre, Theatre of Cruelty, Absurd Drama, Kitchen- Sink Drama, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Drama, Background to English Literature-III, B.A English Literature 2nd Year 3rd Semester

 University of Madras

Syllabus with effect from 2020-2021

B.A English Literature

[2^nd Year, 3^rd Semester]

Background to English Literature-III

UNIT 1.3 :   DRAMA

Epic theatre, Theatre of Cruelty, Absurd Drama, Kitchen- Sink Drama, Bread and Puppet Theatre

EPIC THEATRE:

Epic theatre was a theatrical movement that began in the early twentieth century and last through the middle of the period. It consisted of new political dramas and was inspired by the social climate of the time.

Epic Theatre was a reaction against popular forms of theatre, particularly, the naturalistic apporach pioneered by constantin Stanislavski. Epic Theater was theatrical movement arising in the early to mid 20th Century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practiontioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky,  Vsevolod Meyerhold and most famously Bertolt Bercht. Although many of the concepts and practices involved in Berchtian epic Theatre had been around for years, even centuries, Brecht unified them, developed the style and popularized it epic theatre incorporate a mode of acting that utilizes what he calls gestures. The epic form describes both a type of written drama and a methodological approach to the production of plays. “Its qualities of clear descriptor and reporting and its use of choruses and projections as a means of commentary earned it the name epic.” 

One of the most important technique Brecht developed to perform epic theatre was the ‘alienation effect. The purpose of this technique was to make the audience feel detached from the action of play, so they do not become immersed in the fictional reality of the stage or become overly empathetic of the character. Brecht’s influence may be seen in the plays of John Arden, Robert Bolt, John whiting and Peter Shaffer. 

The chief goal of epic theatre is for the audience to always be aware that it is watching a play. It is most important the one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from the engendering of illusion. 

Common production techniques in epic theatre include a simplified, non-realistic scenic design offset against a selective realism in costuming and props, as well as announcements or visual captions that interrupt and summarize the action. 

Brecht used comedy to distance his audiences from the depicted events and was heavily influenced by musicals and fairground performers, putting music and song in his plays. 

THEATRE OF CRUELTY:  

The term is associated with famed French playwright Antonin Artaud. A former member of the surrealist movement, he defined the Theatre of Cruelty in The Theatre and its Double.

Originally a member of the surrealist movement, Artaud eventually began to develop his own theatrical theories. The Theatre of Cruelty can be seen as break with traditional Western theatre, and a means by which artists assault the senses of the audience, and allow them to feel the unexpressed emotions of the subconscious. Gesture, dance, and movement were all more powerful in Artaud’s manifesto of theatre than a language was. His works were incredibly influential on 20th-century avant-garde theatre, influence the symbolist and surrealist movements. While Artaud was only able to produce one play in his lifetime that reflected the tenets of the Theatre of Cruelty, the works of many theatre artists reflect his theories. These artists include Jean Genet, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook. 

The Theatre of Cruelty is a type of theatre in which the audience’s senses are constantly stressed and engaged by lights, sounds, movements, and more. Text and dialogue are far less important in this genre of experimental theatre than the relationship between the performers and the audience members. Often, Artaud’s plays centered the audience and structured the performance physically around them. Trapped inside the drama, the audience would have a very different experience from the traditional. They would also have a sense-based experience that was unrivaled by other theatrical forms. 

Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese Theatre, in his book The Theatre and Its Double (1938). It was at the Colonial Exposition of 1931, where he saw the Balinese Theatre, that he was struck by the tremendous difference between those plays and our traditional Western play. He was impressed by the “instinctive survival of magic” in Balinese Theatre and was taken in that it gave little emphasis to words. Artaud was convinced that words are incapable of expressing certain attitudes and feelings, and that by rediscovering universal physical signs, or hieroglyphs, they would be revealed, while verbal expression became incantation. 

ABSURD DRAMA:    

'Absurd', in the literary sense, means 'out of harmony'. The implication is that the absurd drama is out of harmony with the drama, as it is conventionally staged. 

Absurdism refers to humans struggle to find the region in his life and his inability to find it due to humanly limited constraints.

The designation of 'absurd' was given by Albert Camus, ridiculing the situation of a life, where he has simply an entry and an exit. Camus belonged to the time of World Wars and hence he had seen mass killings of people that made him believe that there is no meaning of life and that every person gives his own meaning to it. His work The Misunderstanding is one of the best examples of Absurd Drama.

Albert Camus's denomination resulted in the further interpretation of the position of the modern man in the world with which he is not at all conversant. The noted literary critic Martin Esslin, recognising the presence of such strange situation and characters in the theatre of the 1950s, published a powerful treaties ' theatre of the Absurd' in 1961. He has clearly indicated here what seem to be the actual features of this absurd drama. Metaphysical absurdity in theme and situation, an aberrant dramatic style and somewhat strange characters mark the absurd drama.

The theatre of the Absurd was never a formal movement, but centered in post war Paris.  But the absurd group attained an unexpected success with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the Absurd Drama has since then a vital force in the sphere of the modern drama. Other important contributors to the theatre of the absurd drama include Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter.  

According to Camus, there are 3 solutions to Absurdism:

1. Adopting or creating a meaning Framework like religion the exists consider it as philosophical suicide because by submitting to an idea or being which is considered to be beyond the observed limits once freedom.

2.  Suicide: it is a solution in which a person considers life meaningless boring or painful and that ends his life according to Camus, death is not observed but once attempt to kill himself is.

3.    Acceptance of the Absurd: it is the solution in which a person accepts the absurdity of life he needed submits to any religious or moral constants know as his life and lives at his greatest extent of freedom.

Characteristics:

·   Absurd dramas are lyrical, like music: they describe an atmosphere and an experience of archetypal human situations.

·      Life is essentially meaningless, hence sorrowful.

·      There is no hope because of the inevitable futility of man’s efforts.

·      Reality cannot be borne unless relieved by illusions and dreams.

·  The absurd play includes conventional speech, slogans, technical jargon and clichés in order to make people aware of the possibility of moving beyond common speech conventions and communicating more authentically.

·     Objects hold a more significant position than the language.

· Man is fascinated by death which permanently replaces dreams and illusions.

· There is no action or plot. What happens is very little as nothing meaningful can happen.

·      The final situation is absurd or comic.

·     Absurd drama is not purposeful and specific as it solves no problem. It is like an abstract painting which does not convey a particular meaning.

· It negates rationalism because it feels that rational thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of things.

· It considers language a failure to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface.

·    There is no dramatic conflict in the absurd plays. 

KITCHEN-SINK DRAMA:

Kitchen sink realism or kitchen sink drama is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose ‘heroes’ usually could be described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism, which often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.

The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions.

The kitchen-sink drama is placed in an ordinary domestic setting and typically tells a relatively mundane family story. Family tensions often come to the fore with realistic conflict between husband and wife, parent and child, between siblings and with the wider community. The family may also pull together in unity against outer forces that range from the rent-collector to rival families.

Kitchen sink dramas may also framed as 'serious art', intending to impress rather than entertain. They may capture social setting for posterity and gain admiration in later days by students of history. They may even be a cathartic act by their authors, expunging the traumas of a deprived childhood. Kitchen sink drama is a genre in which the British seem to specialize. Americans prefer their soaps and dramas to be a bit less dismal. There was in particularly a group of 'angry young men' in the 1960s UK playwright scene who specialised in such plays.

Writers and Works:

The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the idiom. The gritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as Coronation Street and East Enders.

A Taste of Honey is written by a British dramatist Shelagh Delaney. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalise British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented. A Taste of Honey is set in Salford in North West England in the 1950s. It tells the story of Jo, a seventeen-year-old working class girl, and her mother, Helen, who is presented as crude and sexually indiscriminate. A Taste of Honey comments on, and puts into question, class, race, gender and sexual orientation in mid-twentieth-century Britain. It became known as a "kitchen sink" play, part of a genre revolutionising British theatre at the time.

The Glass Menagerie is a four-character memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on Williams himself, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister Rose. 

BREAD AND PUPPET THEATRE:

Bread and Puppet Theatre was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann, who regarded bread and theatre as equally sacramental and distributed home-made bread to the audiences. He brought people power to New York's Lower East Side. The type of work presented was close to performance art and visual impact was all-important, not least in the use of huge puppets (up to twenty feet high). Anti-materialist in spirit, Schumann’s presentations were often in the open air.

The Bread and Puppet Theater was deeply involved with the civil rights and anti-war protest movements and is marked by their political moralism in two important respects: its concern with domestic issues, the home front, and its primitivism of technique and morality.

Schumann said that, "It's the freedom that you get when you can do things because of America's garbage and the freedom of doing gigantic things for almost nothing, with just collaboration, with just people power".

        He grew up in Germany as a refugee of World War II. His company's name comes from the peasant bread his mother baked to survive. Schumann's low-tech, home-made puppetry became part of New York's thriving avant garde art scene, and early on Bread and Puppet put on free shows with inner city kids, including one called Chicken Little in Harlem.

More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street. During the Vietnam War, Bread and puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people.

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