The age of modern drama in the Western world was ushered in some 130 years ago and we are still in that ‘age’ today. Some of what emerged in the 1870s and after, fairly well shook up the world at that time. Since then it is surprising that although much has changed, much less has changed than one would have expected for such a long period of time and so many generations of new dramatists. But if that is surprising, it must be remembered that the Western classical theatre emerged and held centre-stage more than 2,000 years ago and despite several triumphant curtain calls, has not exited the spotlights yet. Similarly, the ‘modern theatre’ has prevailed after several different types of experimentations, some of which pushed the frontiers so far back, it is sometimes unrecognisable.
Among the dramatists who were largely responsible for registering the modern age, two stand out on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The first is the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) who lived in Germany and Italy for several years. Although his plays were mostly set in his native Norway, they had a powerful effect upon the whole of Europe because of their subjects and treatment. His influence later extended to the entire Western world. The plays he produced were strong agents of change and have caused Ibsen to be regarded as the founder of modern drama.
The plays of Ibsen, like August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which exposed the Sweden of the 1880s, were among those that shook up the world then, and make an impact on the audiences even today. It was Strindberg who wrote in the preface to the play that theatre was
“A Biblia Pauperum, a bible in pictures for those who cannot read what is written or printed; and I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form, popular enough for the middle classes, mainstay of theatre audiences, to grasp the gist of the matter without troubling their brains too much. For this reason theatre has always been an elementary school for the young, the semi-educated and for women who still have a primitive capacity for deceiving themselves and letting themselves be deceived.”
Strindberg dealt with the changing age and social order, gender issues, sexual politics and, more than most others, female sexuality, in a frank way only seen before in Ibsen’s plays.
Ibsen then, “the father of truly modern drama,” wrote poetic drama before 1877, the year named as the year of change, when he wrote the play Pillars of Society, the first of a series of dramas which really undermined the complacent pillars of his society. The plays give faithful reproductions of mainly middle-class life and ushered in several decades of what were sometimes dismissed as ‘drawing room’ drama. But these faithful reproductions confronted serious and controversial social issues in a way not attempted before. In A Doll’s House (1879), women’s rights is a central issue; Ghosts (1884) dealt with the medical and social effects of venereal disease; The Wild Duck (1884) with sexuality, corruption and exploitation; and Hedda Gabler was concerned with gender politics and the social place of women.
His forthright treatment of social problems aroused such public indignation that he came under attack from members of the complacent, conservative middle-class society. This outcry caused Ibsen to respond by writing “a scathing indictment of society” (Theodore Hatlen) in another play, the very ironic An Enemy of the People, (1883) in which a scientist is caught in a dilemma of social responsibility and the consequences of truthful exposure, very much the situation in which Ibsen found himself. Emile Zola’s famous J’Accuse is reminiscent of Ibsen’s statement in which he chastises the society for making him an enemy because of his candid contributions to social development.
The most devastating of those plays was A Doll’s House. Ibsen attacks the unprogressive nature of the narrow provincial societies of that time in which there was blatant male dominance and female inferiority. His heroine, Nora Helmer of Norway, found herself in a domestic situation in which, despite the fact that she was forced to critical decisions to save her husband and her household, she was relegated to the inferior place of all wives and women. As the play progresses, she begins to discover that her growth and self expression were being intolerably stifled, her husband was selfish and lacking in consciousness and she could not continue in the marriage. She walked out of it.
The society was shocked. Even before the play hit the stage, the actress whom Ibsen engaged to play Nora could not take it and walked off the set claiming she could not possibly play such a role. Both actress and society found it quite unnatural that a woman could leave her husband and children; that was unthinkable. But the drama also showed other reversal of gender roles in which the women were beginning to take control of their place and destiny. Hedda Gabler is another play about a woman who makes shocking discoveries about herself in a male-dominated social order that she tries to reverse, and becomes a victim of it all.
The other outstanding shaper of modern drama was Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) who did it for America. The corresponding year named for the transformation of the American theatre and the rise of realism in the modern theatre was 1920. That was the year in which O’Neill first gained real critical recognition as a major national playwright. In that year he had two big openings on Broadway, The Emperor Jones and Beyond the Horizon, the play credited with having fashioned the turning point for American drama.
O’Neill’s life was literally the theatre. He was born in it, it was in his ancestry, and his plays contained a good deal of autobiography. His father was the famous American melodramatic actor James O’Neill, and he was born in a hotel on Broadway, the home of one of the two most dominant theatre communities in the world (the other being the London West End). The family travelled about the country on theatre tours, which had repercussions. Mrs O’Neill took drugs and Eugene drifted into the life of a “vagabond.” At 19 he was expelled from Princeton University for drunken pranks and spent three years sailing around as a seaman on ships, followed by another year drifting on the docks of New York. He got ill, recovered and became a playwright.
