A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  It becomes easy to see the conventionalized nature of plays from the past. Classical Greek theatre is so clearly stylized that, even in comedy, it is difficult to identify the characters with ordinary people. Shakespeare’s drama now appears far more overtly theatrical than it would have done to his Elizabethan audience. By contrast, since Naturalism is still the dominant mode of staging today its conventions are accepted as norms. There are, of course, other contrasting styles that have become common in twentieth-century theatre – most notably Expressionism and the epic theatre pioneered by Bertolt Brecht – which emphasize the artifice of performance. But these gain at least part of their effect from challenging Naturalism. As a norm, naturalistic conventions are in practice invisible. Yet indeed Naturalism is no less “conventional” than any other form of theatre. However close to everyday conversation it may sound, “the straightforward, plain language spoken in real life” is highly structured in any dramatic dialogue. The more closely a stage setting replicates a real place, the more it becomes a fake – and the further it moves away from the actual nature of theatrical performance. Even the most ordinary chair, borrowed from the home of people in exactly the same socioeconomic group as the characters (like the furniture in Antoine’s early Théãtre Libre productions), automatically acquires a different signification on the stage, becoming emblematic in being a focus of attention. The familiar irony of the phrase “the illusion of reality” is particularly applicable to naturalistic theatre, since the nearer it approximates reality the more illusory it in fact is.

  Theatrical conventions are perhaps less changeable than those of other art forms, because of the economics of performance, which generally require a mass audience and so exert a normative pressure. To some extent this may explain the continued presence of Naturalism on the stage, despite the rapidity of political and technological change in the last decades. However, the lifestyle and social concerns represented in the defining works of Naturalism – the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, or Shaw – are now almost as distant from us in time as Restoration comedy was for the early naturalists. This presents the issue of historical perspective in an acute, but frequendy unrecognized way.

  From today’s perspective, the key plays of Naturalism are in almost every sense historical. Social circumstances are no longer the same as those they reflect. The burning legal or moral topics that preoccupy their characters have little in common with current concerns. The fashions of clothing they wear are strongly associated with the past – yet, unlike plays from most other eras, they are hardly ever performed in modern-dress productions. In a very real sense, while many have been adapted by modern playwrights or completely rewritten as contemporary versions – for instance Nora Helmer, a television version of A Doll’s House (Werner Fassbinder, 1974), or the film of Vanya on 42nd Street (adapted by David Mamet and directed by Louis Malle, 1994) – naturalistic plays do not seem to offer suitable material for updating. This is largely due to the central importance of the relationship between characters and their environment, together with the highly specific details of that social context built into the action. These plays not only have the status of modern classics, they are literally period pieces.

  At the same time they are specifically modern in their approach and tone. The language their characters speak (albeit for most naturalist plays in translation) is still so close to contemporary usage that it sounds “normal”. The way their dramatic action is structured continues to be used, particularly by Broadway and West End playwrights. While we may perhaps not share the characters’ specific concerns, the general subjects explored in many of the plays – such as the position of women in the family, social inequality and economic exploitation, the destructive effect of rigid morality – are still being debated, even if in different terms. The mainly nineteenth-century or Edwardian society and its attitudes, depicted by the naturalists, may appear archaic; but the people who inhabit it are recognizably our near relatives. And this sense of familiarity is heightened by the fact that the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw are still being staged today, almost as frequently as Shakespeare’s plays.

  It is this double vision through which turn-of-the-century Naturalists are perceived – as simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary – that creates problems of historical evaluation. To the extent that these plays are indeed based on accurate observation of society at the time, they can be treated as historical documents. However, there is a fundamental difference between them and the type of “documentary drama” developed by the German director Erwin Piscator and others from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Dealing directly with recent events, docu-drama relies on an impression of total factuality in the material presented, combining filmed scenes with stage action, and actors made up to resemble precisely well-known political figures (as in Piscator’s 1927 Rasputin, the Romanoffs, the War and the People, Who Rose Up Against Them), or uses unaltered transcripts for dramatic scripts (as with The Investigation by Peter Weiss in 1965). Docu-drama is a derivative of Naturalism, extending its environmental principles to make society itself or historical processes the active agent, and reducing individuals to cyphers. By contrast, in naturalistic plays the focus is on a conflict between an individual and his or – more frequendy – her environment. And as with the main figures of A Doll’s House or Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, these individuals have at least a chance of emerging from this conflict with a conditional victory, liberating themselves from some destructive aspects of their environment. The level of factual reference is equally different. Clearly by the standard of docu-drama both the characters and plots of Ibsen or Chekhov are invented – although some of Shaw’s figures are loosely based on composites of real people (as with the “merchant of death”, Undershaft, in Major Barbara, who contains aspects of the leading arms manufacturers and salesmen in 1905: Nobel, Zaharoff and Krupp). Indeed, both Ibsen and Chekhov emphasized the existence of an underlying poetic vision in their naturalistic plays, while Shaw referred to the “mystic” qualities of Heartbreak House – qualities which are the antithesis of docu-drama.

  Key themes

  What gives naturalistic plays historical status is, in fact, their position in the history of ideas; and paradoxically, it is on this level that they are most contemporary. The challenge to social orthodoxies, which naturalistic playwrights introduced into the theatre, is a characteristic feature of much twentieth-century art and thought. The avoidance of stereotype characters and moral categories – as Shaw put it, “The conflict is not between clear right and wrong; in fact the question which makes [modern drama] interesting is which is the villain and which the hero” – corresponds with the relativistic morality of today. In particular the treatment of women in their plays strikes a modern chord.

  From Thérèse Raquin on, the number of naturalistic plays with women as their title figures or central characters is striking. These include, most notably: Nora in A Doll’s House, the title figures of Hedda Gabler, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Nina who identifies herself with The Seagull, Blanche in Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren and her daughter, as well as Candida and Major Barbara, the daughters and fashion models of Granville Barker’s The Madras House – also Becque’s La Parisienne, Brieux’s Blanchette, The Three Daughters of M. Dupont and Maternity, plus D.H. Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughter-in-Law. The theatrical franchise also extends to female children: Hedvig, the young girl who is the most obvious analogue to The Wild Duck, or Galsworthy’s teenage title character in Joy. Of course there are examples of major female characters in classical and pre-naturalistic drama, from Medea to Lady Macbeth, or Racine’s Andromaque, Bérénice and Phèdre, even Scribe’s L’Héritière(The Heiress) or Adrienne Lecouvreur, up to Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. However, these are a distinct minority, and are almost all presented as evil, immoral, or as tragic victims – implicitly condemned, or punished for playing an active male role or for achieving
a prominence at odds with the traditional ideals of submissive and self-effacing women. An exception is Restoration comedy (Wycherley’s The Country Wife, or the three contrasting wives of Edward Ravens-croft’s The London Cuckolds – but even there the female figures are all (apart from Hellena in Aphra Behn’s The Rover) type-characters. The naturalistic emphasis on women is something decisively new in theatre. Indeed, it could be seen as even more crucial than the other elements, such as the focus on environment and heredity, or the objective techniques, which Naturalism introduced.

  The factor that makes this new is not the number, or even the centrality of female characters, but the way female experience is presented. Their views are given equal weight to those of the men in the plays. Indeed, since in general the women assert themselves in opposition to the male-dominated society ranked against them, their voice predominates. This is doubly significant, given that all the major plays in the naturalist movement were written by men. There are only a bare handful of plays by women over the whole period: Alan’s Wife (1893) by Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, an actress particularly associated with Ibsen’s plays including Hedda Gabler, which she performed in 1891; Constance Fletcher’s Mrs Lessingham (1894); Dorothy Leighton’s Thyrza Fleming (also 1894); Mrs Daintree’s Daughter (1895) by Janet Achurch, the actress who first performed A Doll’s House in England; Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women! (1906) – and these, mainly unpublished and forgotten, are never revived on the stage. The fact that it was largely male playwrights who voiced female concerns and created the figure of the “new woman” not only reflects the reality of gender inequity in the period, even ironically as an illustration that men felt it right to speak for and define women. It also indicates the intrinsic connection between Naturalism and the movement for female emancipation.

  This was obvious to critics at the time, since the outcry when naturalistic drama (particularly Ibsen) first appeared on the stage was as much directed against the “new woman” as against the attack on established morality (of which, indeed, women were the primary victims) . However, the significance, and even the newness of this treatment of gender has subsequendy become all too easy to overlook. The specific causes for which the playwrights fought and their female characters suffered have been long won. Indeed the first steps predated A Doll’s House. In Norway, for example, laws had already been passed giving women equal inheritance rights (1854) and – for unmarried women – independence from male guardians (1863), and the right to work in any trade or profession (1866). It was only much later, after naturalist drama had become the standard form of mainstream theatre, that women were granted the right to vote: 1913 in Norway, 1918 in England. To put this in context it is necessary to remember that until shordy before this working-class men too had been denied voting rights, and that general male suffrage (for men over the age of 25) had only been introduced in Norway in 1898. The five-year gap between Norway and England can also perhaps be seen as a measure of literary influence – with A Doll’s House only reaching the English stage in 1889, ten years after its first performance in Norway. It is now over 70 years since women gained full legal emancipation in England (1928); and with the batdes having moved on to other areas of sexual and economic equality, the naturalist treatment of gender may now seem dated.

  However, the 1890s image of the new woman has striking similarities with contemporary feminist concepts. As a recent commentary sums it up:

  She was not so much a person, or even group of people, as a constructed category which expressed metonymically some of the historic challenges being brought to bear in the 1890s on traditional ideas of women, in particular, and gender as a whole. Individuals did not often identify themselves as New Women; and when they were so identified by others, the term seems usually to have been freighted with disparaging meanings, although these meanings were different, or contradictory, even while cohering as a symbol of ‘disorder and rebellion’ … One version of the New Woman defied traditional codes of female beauty, smoking cigarettes and dressing in simple and ‘manly’ fashion which seemed to complement her discontented mouth and a nose ‘too large for feminine beauty’ but indicative of intelligence [H. S. Scott and E. Hall, Cornhill, 1894]. New Women were often perceived to be masculine in other ways too, sometimes devoting themselves to a profession or business in preference to the bearing and bringing up of children. This abrogation of a woman’s supposed highest duty was perhaps the chief illustration of what one writer described as the New Woman’s ‘restlessness and discontent with the existing order of things’ [H. M. Stutfield, Blackwoods, 1895]. Sometimes the New Woman was perceived to be freer in her dealings with men than custom allowed, and at other times a cold and ‘apparently sexless’ creature who rejected out of hand all relations with men [Stutfield, Blackwoods, 1897].

  (Kerry Powell, in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, 1998)

  This figure of the new woman was particularly promoted on the stage, although she also appeared in the novels of Sarah Grand and others. The challenge to gender stereotypes, as well as provocative statements on women’s rights, and attacks on sexual inequality are a fundamental basis of theatrical Naturalism. Indeed, the defining moment of naturalistic drama is the slamming of the door, as Nora leaves her husband at the end of A Doll’s House.

  The naturalistic movement

  The literary “canon” usually refers to “great works”. These have usually gained such a designation through custom (in the sense that they have retained their appeal to a broad readership or audience over the generations), or because they are held to be superior in vision or technique. A work might also enter the canon because it represents a historical period particularly well, or if it epitomizes a specific style. In all cases canonization reflects critical opinion, which has become entrenched through educational practice. Plays or novels designated as great works are selected for studying, which in turn confirms their importance; and the effect is to obscure other works outside the canon. It is a normative process, which in the past has tended to marginalize writing by women or expressing non-European sensibilities. And since most of the critics who set the criteria have been European males, this has recentiy led to attacks on the canon and the process of canon formation – in particular by feminists and Black American writers. Batde has been joined in the cause of “multiplicity” and “inclusiveness” versus “aesthetic quality” and “standards”. Right or wrong, the challenge is useful in forcing us to question conventional criteria and re-evaluate our approach to literature.

  The same process of selection also occurs on a more specialized level. Critical labels (such as Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism) refer to ways of seeing the world, or styles of representing what is seen; and literary movements are defined and delimited by the correspondence of particular works to the way these labels have been interpreted. These too then become a canon against which other works are measured, and canon formation is intrinsically exclusive. No matter whether the artist might have seen his own work as part of a movement, if it does not appear to fit the way a category has subsequently become defined, then it is omitted. At the same time, where works that are indeed considered part of the movement contain Other elements, then these tend to be ignored. The effect is doubly distorting. It both narrows down the usage of a critical label, and obscures the real nature of the works it is used to describe.

  This is as true of theatrical Naturalism as it is of the overarching literary canon. Ibsen’s plays from The Pillars of Society in 1887 and A Doll’s House in 1879 through Ghosts and An Enemy of the People to The Wild Duck in 1884 and Rosmersholm in 1886 are accepted as major texts of Naturalism (with some critical reservations about the last two). However, his later drama – sometimes including Hedda Gabler – is excluded due to its perceived “non-naturalistic” elements. Just two of Strindberg’s plays are held to qualify: The Father and Miss Julie (1881 and 1888). Similarly only Chekhov’s last four plays, from The Seagull (1896) to The Cherry Orchard (1904) are generally
seen as true examples of Naturalism – a perspective largely determined by their interpretation in Stanislavsky’s productions. The other major figure in the canon of Naturalism is the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. A number of Hauptmann’s plays from Before Dawn (his first play in 1889) to Rose Bernd in 1903 are clearly influenced by Zola’s theoretical writings and follow directly in Ibsen’s footsteps – although much of his work is eclectic, including neo-Romantic allegory and poetic fantasy. Other single plays by various dramatists are also generally identified with Naturalism. These include Zola’s proto-naturalistic Thérèse Raquin (1873), Tolstoi’s The Power of Darkness (written in 1886, and banned in Russia until 1895), Maksim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902), and D.H. Lawrence’s working-class plays (1906–12, though none were performed until 20 years later), as well as O’Neill’s early, semi-autobiographical sea-plays such as Bound East for Cardiff (1915–18). The dates of such plays, covering 45 years over the turn of the century, are usually taken as the limits of the movement proper, with its high point between 1881 and 1904 – although there are numerous later examples indicating the continuing influence of Naturalism, for instance O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–41).