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Modern British Drama
12
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Modern British Drama
Theater in England
- During most of nineteenth century English drama was so poor in quality that some critics had pronounced it to be dead.
- Age of Shakespeare: English theater enjoyed a period of exceptionally high artistic greatness.
- The periods after Shakespeare, like the Civil War or when the monarchy was restored in 1660 only lent English theater to decline even more
Typical day in 1900
George Bernard Shaw
Theater in England
- News talking about the British Army fighting a bloody war against the Boers. The Boers were rebelling against British colonial rule
- The causes of the lack of good drama in the nineteenth century are obscure, but a few explanations suggest themselves.
- 1856 - 1950
- Sales of motor cars - Horseless carriages - were improving
- Difficulty to express purely subjective feelings; talented authors shied away from writing plays; there was no longer a living theatrical tradition in England
- To revert the situation, the tradition needed to be revivified and inspired from beyond the shores of Britain
- Options to entertain themselves: lots of shows with catchy songs, well-worn jokes told by standup comedians and theater plays.
- His mother was a music teacher and concert soprano; Her love of music had a lasting influence on Shaw, who used his excellent ear for music to set down dialogues in a musical rhythm that enchants the listener's ear
- The inspiration came from a Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen.
- The principal defender of Ibsen's ideas in England was Bernard Shaw
- Theater critic
- A society based on the equal distribution of wealth was the only one capable of calling itself truly civilized
Man and Superman
- For Shaw, the main obstacle to man's self-realization was his ignorance
- Philosophical comedy
- The woman who courts the and eventually wins the man
- Believed man would become a creature of wisdom, virtue and superior intelligence, and he expressed that in most of his plays
- One act consists of a dream where the characters conduct a philosophical debate in hell
- Shaw's hell is a paradise of sensual delight and a region of intellectual contemplation and meditation
- Took ideas from Nietzsche and from Henri Bergson
- No one wins the debate, the reader is left to draw his own conclusions.
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