Last week we addressed the proposition that popular theatre is killing off serious theatre because its direct appeal to laughter and light entertainment has dominated the audience and serious drama is struggling to survive. We argued that this is not supported by the evidence and is a false dichotomy.
The case might be made in the Caribbean where comedy and farce certainly command the stage and producers hesitate to produce tragic and artistic plays because tickets will not sell. But elsewhere around the world in larger, more developed theatre communities the situation is a bit different. Furthermore, the use of the term serious theatre is questioned and it might be found that the supposed conflict is overstated, as can be seen in a survey of the history.
This week we go deeper into history to show that there was hardly any division between popular and established mainstream theatre, which often occupied the same space. Again, we use examples from western theatre, even though there are different interpretations of what is popular and surprisingly, the findings will be similar in a look at traditional theatre. Throughout history the lines are quite blurred; it is often easy enough to see what was popular, but in most cases no clear divisions developed and there was no dichotomy with what was taking place on the established mainstream stage. Let us take a look at how several popular elements influenced the stage as a whole.
Seneca
Take Seneca, for instance. In many ways the Classical drama served as a model for western theatre because of the way it was widely adopted during the Renaissance. Forms of drama passed seamlessly on the formal stage from the Greeks to the Romans. One of the conventions in Greek drama was that violence and killings were never shown taking place on stage, but were revealed and reported afterwards. However, Roman audiences were thrilled by exhibitions of conflict, combat, and bloodshed which were part of popular entertainment. These found their way on to the mainstream dramatic stage and plays were written to suit.
The playwright Seneca developed the Revenge Tragedy, which became known as the Senecan or the Senecan Revenge Tragedy. It followed a formula in which the hero seeks vengeance for the killing of a relative or someone dear to him. The course of justice or revenge was never smooth, and several obstacles, resistance and acts of hostility and villainy along the way caused the plot, and especially the ending, to be littered with violence, typically with slain characters scattered around the stage.
One might expect these bloody plays to create their own genre of popular theatre, but instead, they infiltrated and became a part of the regular scheme of mainstream drama. The Seneca play had other characteristics which were weighty, intellectual and polemic, such as arguments, reasoning and discourse upon relevant issues. Characters delivered long speeches debating and articulating moral questions, but there was also the unleashing of the passionate, vengeance, hate and love. All of these ended up integrated in the same play.
Elizabethan Drama
These plays had great influence on the strongest body of drama in English history – the Elizabethan. Sixteenth century playwrights adopted the Senecan model of tragedy, which became very popular during that age. They liked the blood-thirsty and the passionate with the stage strewn with corpses at the end. One may therefore regard this as a popular genre. Its influence was equally potent on the greatest playwrights such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd. The revenge plays often had ghosts and plots that were driven by a ghost or a character called Revenge, spurring the protagonist on to vengeance.
Some of the foremost Elizabethan plays regarded among the best dramas were of this type and were never classified as popular theatre. Kyd wrote the famous The Spanish Tragedy (1587), the most perfect Senecan model full of the type’s characteristic murder and betrayal. Shakespeare interspersed the ghost, the blood and the mixed-up quest for justice and revenge in the great tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1599 -1601) as well as in the outstanding Roman tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599 – 1600). The latter contains some of the most bombastic speeches and rabble rousing delivered by Marc Antony, right alongside the most beautiful lines of oratory and logical rhetoric by the same character.
The Restoration
The effects of Restoration comic drama in the years after 1660 and well into the eighteenth century were quite similar. Popular theatre, once entrenched, had a form changing influence over serious drama, and what is more, over all of English literature. What the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as “broad satire, farce, wit and bawdy comedy” coexisted with the serious drama of John Dryden and the comedies of William Congreve in the 1660s and 1670s until they altered even poetry and the novel in later years. And this is how it happened.
The growing influence of the Puritans and the Republicans caused Parliament to pass a law on September 2, 1642 declaring that “public stage plays shall cease and be forborne”. All theatre performances, deemed sinful by the Puritan Christians, were banned, the English civil war escalated until King James I was murdered in 1649 and the Republican Commonwealth led by Oliver Cromwell ruled England. The Royalists kept fighting for 11 years until they defeated the Republicans and restored the Monarchy. King Charles II ascended the throne in 1660 (called the Restoration) and in August of that year, he removed the ban on public theatre.
This was a significant rebirth for drama with many changes. The introduction of women onto the stage was most influential. For the first time in history, actresses performed on stage. Previously, all female roles were played by young boys. Among the new plays that were written were those that took full advantage of the presence of actresses, which meant there was much more close contact between the sexes and love and romance became more popular on stage. Even more popular were the broad satire, farce, wit and bawdy comedy, especially the bawdy comedy. Sexuality and hilarious sexual encounters claimed a place in the Restoration comedies. These popular plays co-existed with Comedy of Manners and Heroic Tragedies.
The forms gradually moved closer together until the power of popular theatre was much in evidence in the eighteenth century (Neoclassical or Augustan period). It is called “the Age of Satire” because of the dominance of humour, ridicule and the derisive satirical types. Mainstream literature took a lead from popular lampooning and shaped some of the writers and the great works of English literature.
The Opera
The novel made great leaps forward and shone brightly in the satirical age with Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and, especially, Henry Fielding whose parodies and satires evoked side-splitting laughter and contained as much irreverent content as any popular fiction. Defoe and Swift were also poets and contributed as much to the satirical poetic genres that developed. It was the age of the famous Alexander Pope and such forms as mock heroic, high burlesque, and low burlesque. Indeed, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock remains among the highest forms of English literature, acclaimed for its genius and intellectual weight, yet it stands out for its popular appeal, hilarious techniques, and its share, too, of irreverence. By the middle of the eighteenth century the highest examples of mainstream serious literature were hardly divisible from what was popular.
So was it, too, with drama. Fielding was also a playwright in the line of parody and other entertaining drama. Burlesque was also a theatrical form as satire reigned. Musical theatre – opera – was very strong in Italy, but around the 17th to the early 18th century was very little performed in France and England. But it was sufficiently known for its name to be adopted to one of the very popular genres of theatre that emerged in Britain. Opera was comedy – spoken drama with songs interspersed. The songs were often lyrics put to already well known tunes, entertaining and always had a happy ending. It was popular, but in the hands of some of the most acclaimed dramatists of the Neoclassical Age was transformed into very strong mainstream serious drama.
The most outstanding was John Gay who produced The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a caricature of the British government, high society, and a parody of the Italian opera. Here was a popular genre of theatre at its best that made Gay famous and rich as a playwright and influenced drama for centuries after. This impact is exemplified by its influence on drama in the 20th Century. Bertold Brecht’s famous Broadway hit musical The Threepenny Opera (originally 1928) and Wole Soyinka’s African adaptation Opera Wonyosi were based on Gay’s play. Where the rest of Europe is concerned the plot is similar. You will recall that when popular theatre developed in the Middle Ages there emerged travelling companies of men performing at street corners on the backs of pageant wagons. They performed Morality Plays into which they introduced farce and slapstick to attract and entertain the paying audiences; but out of the practice of travelling players evolved the Commedia Dell ‘Arte originating in Italy. This was a popular pantomime of musical presentations developing into a rough dramatic plot involving stock characters – the same characters re-appearing in different plays using similar story lines. This popular pantomime, which included farce and slapstick, was at the root of leading theatre that developed on the continent. A good example of such drama is the famous French play The Miser (L’Avare) (1668) by Molliere, which was modelled directly on the Commedia Dell ’Arte.
Modern Theatre
Modern theatre is much too complex to properly summarise here. The historical periods had very interesting stories to tell, but it must be remembered that much of modern theatre can be traced to popular origins in the past. Today there are several types of popular theatre and they co-exist with the several genres of serious plays and audiences have choices (the Caribbean needs to be treated separately). The two giants of western theatre communities are the London West End and New York’s Broadway. They offer infinite varieties but there are discernible limitations as well as ironies where popularity and seriousness are concerned.
In London there is ‘the fringe’ – the name given to a group of smaller, less established theatre houses at locations outside of the West End. These venues are known for offering plays that do not get a place in the big theatres, but what is significant, the fringe is reputed for staging experimental, arty or unconventional plays that the West End would not handle. Many of those plays are box office risks because they are not what multitudes of patrons would buy tickets for. The West End plays need to be guaranteed a large audience; if they do not sell tickets they are closed. Ironically and paradoxically, the West End, which is established, elite, prestigious, mainstream serious theatre depends on popularity and is more popular than the fringe.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, there’s ‘off Broadway’. There is where works that did not quite get a place in the big Broadway theatres end up, but it is where really interesting artistic work can be seen. Broadway does not entertain those kinds of risks and basically presents what the people want. It is where you see the most accomplished playwrights like August Wilson, and the Pulitzer Prize plays, but it is where crowds clamour to see the big Broadway musicals. Hugely popular, they represent the crown of established theatre in America and they are the modern descendants of the comic opera of 18th century London.
The musicals in both America and Europe supply something that the modern audiences demand, the same ingredient found in the comic operas – a strong, emotional, human content and a happy ending. We are reminded that in the early 20th century the main theatre in the USA was the melodrama, known for those popular emotional pulls. Around 1922 this was replaced at the top of the ladder by the theatre of Social Realism introduced by playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Today there are many genres of theatre existing side by side, each with its own audience, but many competing for attention in the same space. Comedy is universally popular, while there are types of serious plays that attract a smaller, more educated crowd. But there is not enough evidence to conclude that one is threatening the other, and what is more, often it is not so easy to distinguish one from the other.
