A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  One of the best ways of defining a literary movement is through shared sources and influences; and these are particularly clear with Naturalism. In addition to the directors and actors who (as already mentioned) were influenced by Antoine, connections among the dramatists are equally direct, leading back to Zola, whose writings also determined Antoine’s theatrical approach, and to Ibsen. Chekhov’s major connections were through naturalistic novelists such as Flaubert and Maupassant. However, he was certainly aware of Zola’s theories, and one of his letters refers to Thérèse Raquin as “not a bad play”, while one of his later letters paid distinctive tribute to Ibsen:

  As I am soon coming to Moscow, please keep a ticket for me for ‘The Pillars of Society’. I want to see the marvellous Norwegian acting, and I will even pay for my seat. You know Ibsen is my favorite writer….

  (7 November 1903)

  Indeed the new approach pioneered by Ibsen directly influenced the change in Chekhov’s drama marked by The Seagull (which was initially attacked for its “Ibsen-ism”), and having read Strindberg’s Miss Julie some years earlier, he enthusiastically sent a new Russian translation of the play to Gorky in 1899. Strindberg, who specifically claimed to be following Zola, wrote his naturalistic plays in conscious opposition to Ibsen; and it was O’Neill’s reading of Strindberg that (as he stated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech) “first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me to write for the theatre myself’. In addition O’Neill’s late play, The Iceman Cometh (1939) is an obvious rewriting of Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902), which in turn derived from one of Chekhov’s early censored one-act plays, On the High Road (1885). Shaw too was explicidy influenced by Ibsen, following the dramatic principles he had analyzed in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1890 and 1891), while Hauptman’s Lonely Lives (1891) is obviously inspired by Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.

  The connections are equally clear in the work of directors associated with Naturalism. It was Otto Brahm’s enthusiasm for Ibsen’s plays that led him to found the Freie Bühne in Berlin, where his repertoire between 1899 and 1904 focussed specifically on Ibsen and Hauptmann, as well as including plays by Shaw. Over exactly the same five-year period Stanislavsky focussed on productions of Ibsen, as well as Chekhov and Gorky – who corresponded with Chekhov and used his plays as a model – and both Chekhov and Gorky remained in the Moscow Art Theatre repertoire until 1917.

  However, limiting Naturalism to the era before 1920 gives an inaccurate picture. Naturalism is not simply an historical phenomenon. Although today there are competing forms of theatre (as indeed there were during the period from 1873 to 1906 when melodrama continued to hold the stage, and the Symbolist movement was also at its height with poetic mood plays by Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal and W.B. Yeats), on a more general level the influence of Naturalism still pervades Western theatre. Arthur Miller, for instance, modeled his first play, All My Sons (1947), on Ibsen, and adapted An Enemy of the People (1950) as part of the preparatory work for The Crucible. Ibsen’s techniques of dramatic construction, together with naturalistic settings that reproduce a physical environment in careful detail form the standard for mainstream plays and productions. And perhaps the most dominant theory of acting is still Stanislavsky’s system, which he expounded in An Actor Prepares (first translated into English, 1936). This was promoted in particular by the Actor’s Studio in New York under Lee Strasberg, who joined the Studio in 1949 and as its artistic director from 1951 to 1982 direcdy influenced several generations of leading actors. The Stanislavsky system gave rise to the whole school of “Method acting”, epitomized by Marlon Brando, which has been called the quintessential American style.

  Questioning the canon

  If the generally accepted historical boundaries of the naturalistic movement are questionable, the usual canonical selection of playwrights is no less tendentious. The playwrights whose work is presented as representative of Naturalism are primarily the trio of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. Yet only a small fraction of Strindberg’s work is in any way naturalistic: just two plays; and those rely heavily on non-naturalistic elements. Conversely, although one of his early plays, Mrs Warren’s Profession, may be occasionally listed as “naturalistic”, Bernard Shaw – the other major playwright of the period – is always excluded. Rather than being taken as evidence that Shaw is in the same camp as Ibsen, The Quintessence of Ibsenism tends to be seen as idiosyncratic (though in fact it is far less so than Strindberg’s interpretation of Zola) to the point that it revises Ibsen into the basis for a very different form of – specifically Shavian – drama. At the same time Shaw’s characteristic comic tone seems, according to conventional definitions of Naturalism, the antithesis of the naturalistic approach. So too does the intellectual articulacy and musical structure of his dialogue, as well as his use of paradox, and his preference for emphatic acting, all of which have overtones of artificiality. In addition, Shaw’s output – like Hauptmann’s – is eclectic. It would certainly be difficult to classify his 1903 Man and Superman as naturalistic, with its central act being a dream sequence set in Hell and involving symbolic figures; and after 1920 his later work alternates between historical chronicles and fantasy.

  Yet Shaw was directly involved in the naturalistic movement. Together with the critic William Archer (who collaborated on Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses) he was instrumental in introducing Ibsen to the English stage. Like Zola, in his profession as a drama reviewer during the 1890s Shaw promoted the new naturalistic plays, and attacked traditional drama for its romantic idealization and conventionalized morality. He admired Brieux, and wrote a preface for a collection of Brieux’s plays. He subtided one of his plays, Heartbreak House, as “in the Russian manner” – in other words, following Chekhov. In fact his expanded lecture on The Quintessence of Ibsenism offers remarkably acute insights into Ibsen’s dramatic methods: the substitution of discussion for a traditionally melodramatic climax; the successive undercutting of false moral positions within a play; the social radicalism and the presence of a “definite thesis” in Ibsens’ work. It is certainly true that in this extended essay Shaw is also highlighting qualities that became his own dramatic principles – but the very extent to which this is so underlines that his aims were essentially naturalistic. It is easy to find passages in his writings where he seems to reject some of the defining qualities of Naturalism. For instance:

  For [William Archer] there is illusion in the theatre: for me there is none. I can make imaginary assumptions readily enough; but for me the play is not the thing, but its thought, its purpose, its feeling and its execution … In these criticisms by Mr Archer… he still makes the congruity of the artist’s performance with the illusion of the story his criterion of excellence in the acting… To him acting, like scene-painting, is merely a means to an end, that end being to enable him to make believe. To me a play is only the means, the end being the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the musician.

  (Our Theatres in the Nineties, 1895)

  Or his rejection of verisimilitude (the accurate reproduction of actual social conditions) in favor of veracity (philosophical truth):

  It is the business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can they be made intelligible to the audience … All I claim is that by this inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude I have secured in the only possible way sufficient veracity to justify me in claiming that as far as I can gather from the available documentation, and from such powers of divination as I possess, the things I represent these … exponents of the drama as saying are the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing.

  (Preface to Saint Joan, 1924)

  Yet over half the full-length plays Shaw wrote between 1892 and 1919 – 14 out of 25 – were placed in recognizable contemporary settings, while others set in the past were historically accurate. Indeed Stanislavsky, generally considered a
n epitome of Naturalism, made exacdy the same distinction between authenticity and verisimilitude:

  Like all revolutionaries we broke the old and exaggerated the value of the new…

  Those who think that we sought for naturalism on the stage are mistaken. We never leaned towards such a principle. Always, then as well as now, we sought for inner truth, for the truth of feeling and experience, but as spiritual technique was only in its embryo stage among the actors of our company, we … fell now and then into an outward and coarse naturalism.

  (My Life in Art, 1926)

  Shaw’s plays do indeed have an overdy theatrical quality. They frequentiy build on the most conventional types of nineteenth-century drama, such as the military melodrama (Arms and the Man; Caesar and Cleopatra) or domestic and romantic comedy (Candida; Pygmalion), although they reverse the model in order to discredit its underlying assumptions about human behavior. His emphasis is indeed comic, which means that the action is structured by literary, rather than realistic needs. There is a clearly discernible thesis in his plays, which of course means that his approach cannot be completely neutral or objective. The underpinning – and even, in Heartbreak House, the surface tone – is usually symbolic.

  None of these qualities (at least in theory) are “naturalistic”. However, ruling them out has effectively distorted Naturalism. In addition to imposing arbitrary limits on the movement, it disguises central elements in the plays that are assigned to the naturalistic canon.

  Like Shaw, some of Ibsen’s plays copy traditional dramatic models to reject them – most obviously A Doll’s House, which incorporates clear elements of Scribean domestic melodrama. Chekhov specifically subtitled both The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as “comedy”; and there are extensively comic, even farcical, sequences in both these and his other plays – although (as Chekhov complained) Stanislavsky’s stricdy limited view of Naturalism turned them into tragic expressions of “blank despondency”. There are clearly discernable theses about society and sexual relations in Strindberg’s naturalistic plays (as well as in Ibsen). In addition, almost all naturalistic dramatists in fact use symbolic elements as key devices to communicate wider meanings.

  Given its poetic basis, implying an idealized and interior depiction of human activity, symbolism is generally seen as the opposite of Naturalism. However – more obviously even than in Shaw – the major plays of the naturalistic canon are structured around symbols, and their central importance is demonstrated by the frequency with which these controlling symbols appear in the titles. Examples are Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which also includes a highly symbolic dance, the tarantella; The Wild Duck, in which extreme near-sightedness also becomes deeply symbolic; and Ghosts, with its symbolic use of light (the burning orphanage, dawn) and darkness – or Chekhov’s The Seagull:; and The Cherry Orchard, which also introduces heavily symbolic sounds (a breaking string, the thud of axes). Symbolism is equally prominent, even plays where the title is naturalistically neutral, referring to the name of the major character. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Strindberg’s Miss Julie both revolve around heavily loaded objects, which take on symbolic significance: for instance, the General’s portrait and pistols, the Count’s boots and razor. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya includes a Helen of Troy figure and a “wood demon” (the title for an earlier version of the play).

  At best, viewing these plays through the lens of strict naturalistic theory downplays such elements. At worst, it distorts the plays by ignoring them. The way the theory of Naturalism has been generally applied creates equal difficulties for more sensitive commentators, who recognize the presence of these elements but are unable to categorize them. In these cases even key plays in the canon tend to be excluded from the movement; and the reception of Chekhov is a particularly good example:

  W.H. Bruford defined the Chekhovian method as ‘psychological naturalism’ [Anton Chekhov: Yale, 1957]. Francis Fergusson, however, came to a different conclusion; analyzing The Cherry Orchard he said that ‘Chekhov’s poetry … is behind the naturalistic surfaces; but the form of the play as a whole is “nothing but” poetry in the widest sense….’ [The Idea of a Theatre: Double-day, 1949] … Maurice Valency diverged even further. He saw The Three Sisters as ‘the flower of impressionism in the drama’ [The Breaking String: Oxford, 1966]. Even earlier a synthesis of sorts that lumped together symbolism, realism and naturalism was attempted by John Gassner; yet his statement that ‘if Maeterlinck’s plays are mood pieces, so are the plays of Chekhov, who is considered a supreme realist or naturalist’ [Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama: Holt, Reinhart, 1966], was also readily disputed by N. Efros who categorically proclaimed that ‘Chekhov is an artistic realist; no other definition can be applied to him’ [in Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences, ed. S.S. Koteliansky: New York, 1927].

  (Nicholas Moravcevich, in Comparative Drama, 1970)

  Clearly the theory of Naturalism, and the canon created to exemplify it need revision.

  Even for theatre artists of the time who explicitly labeled themselves as part of the movement, “Naturalism” was understood very differently in terms of practice. For instance there were clear divergences in the concept of naturalistic acting – although the style of performing might seem fundamental to portraying natural-istically conceived characters. Thus Antoine’s actors physically “lived” their roles, reproducing mannerism and gesture based on close observation of the type or class of person represented, and moving with a sense of spontaneity. But a letter by Frank Fay, the lead actor of the Irish Players and an admirer of Antoine, reveals a widely divergent view.

  I saw Antoine twice and was somewhat disappointed. Curiously Archer’s comments in this week’s World agree with mine. He says Antoine had no facial expression, of that I could not judge being too far away. I could not see anything vitally different in his method for the others, except that once or twice he spoke more quietly than the others with little or no regard for the necessities of a theatre and though the effect was very ‘natural’ in an everyday sense it was, I think, the sort of naturalness that, like the Duse’s Italian company is of doubtful value. His intonation (a vital thing after all) did not strike me, whereas I think Réjane’s tones would strike anyone from anywhere as being absolutely real. Antoine is very restless, moves about and fidgets with his tie and collar.

  (Letter to Maire Garvey, 30 June 1904)

  Shaw made a similar comment on seeing Antoine’s production of The Wild Duck.

  The garret scene was admirable; but there would not be room for it at the Court. It was played at great speed and raced to the end of every act to get to a curtain. Gregers described by Relling as an expectorator of phrases, went full steam ahead all through. There was no character in Gina or old Ekdal [acted by Antoine] – indeed there was no character in the acting at all as we understand it, but it was a bustling piece of work … Stage management ad lib.; Gregers and his father walked ten miles in the first act if they walked a foot.

  (Letter to Granville Barker, 7 May 1906)

  To some extent (as both commentaries acknowledge) this critical reaction may have been due to the size of theatre in which Antoine was now staging his productions, compared to the small-scale intimacy of the early Théãtre Libre. However, the unanimity of these responses indicates a significant contrast between the style of acting Antoine had developed, and the type of performance seen as naturalistic in Britain that took the intrinsic artificiality of theatre into account. This emphasized achieving a convincingly realistic effect translated through orchestrated and histrionic means, while in France actors and directors focussed on transferring real-life behavior direcdy to the stage.

  Both should be seen as aspects of the same movement, marking two extremes in a spectrum of Naturalism. Expanding the concept of Naturalism in this way includes Shaw as one of the major examples. It also makes it easier to recognize the true qualities of playwrights previously established in the canon, such as Ibsen and Chekhov.

  2

  THE CON
TEXT OF NATURALIST THEATRE: A CHRONOLOGY

  Theatre Art and society Politics

  1830 Victor Hugo: Hernani. First box set is introduced on a stage in London. Poland revolts against Russian rule (1830–1831)

  1833 Victor Hugo: Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor. Edmund Kean (1789–1833) dies; K.F. Gauss and Wilhelm E. Weber invent the electromagnetic telegraph. British Factory Act is enacted, regulating some of the abuses against workers.

  1834 Abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

  1835 Georg Büchner: Danton’s Death. Hans Christian Andersen publishes the first four of his 168 tales for children.

  1836 Nikolai Gogol: The Inspector General. Caroline Norton: poetry, A Voice from the Factories. The People’s Charter marks the first national working-class movement in Great Britain.

  1837 Robert Browning: Strafford. Limelight is used for a Covent Garden pantomine. Victoria succeeds William IV to become the queen of England; reforms affecting state-owned serfs in Russia are introduced (1837–1841).

  1838 Victor Hugo: Ruy Blas. London Working Men’s Association adopts the People’s Charter, the main document of the Chartist movement.

  1841 Johan Ludvig Heiberg: A Soul After Death. Asbjørnsen and Moe publish Norwegian Folk Tales.