Late 19th Century Theatre: Realism and Naturalism I: France and Italy

French Romanticism, born suddenly in 1830 by riots at Hugo’s Hernani, died rather quickly, largely because of conditions in over-crowded cities, working conditions under greedy bosses, people oppressed by old fashioned, autocratic governments, not only in France but throughout Europe.  Revolutions for democratic rights were fought in many European cities in 1848; all were put down by the old order, whose leaders became even more despotic afterwards.

      

Plays began to reflect these less than romantic conditions, and the first important plays in this new mode were written by the French.  The writer who signaled the shift out of Romantic and into realistic

 drama was Eugène Scribe, who began in his plays to examine situations in a detailed, realistic manner.  One of his dramas is titled A Glass of Water.  Scribe wrote formulaic plays in a manner guaranteed to please an audience -- the pièce bien faite or the well-made play.  His formula included careful exposition, cause and effect incidents, building each scene to a strong climax, and the use of withheld information, sudden reversals, and lots of suspense.  The well-made play was strong on 
plot, usually at the expense of character.  But it was tremendously 

popular, and before he died Scribe scribbled out over 300 plays, which were the rage of Paris during the 1840s.  Scribe’s artistic heir was Victorien Sardou, who wrote many plays in the same style, including the realistically titled A Scrap of Paper and Tosca for Sarah Bernhardt.  Tosca is now more famous in Puccini’s opera version, but it was a very popular piece, as were other of Sardou’s plays, which George Bernard Shaw wittily damned as “Sardoodledom!”

      

Other French writers used Scribe’s well-made play formula to voice their concerns about society, and their work, dubbed pièce à these or the thesis play, was the first to combine realistic subject matter 

with strong social commentary.  Alexandre Dumas-fils (1824-1895) wrote about society’s injustice in La Dame aux Camélias, about a woman with a past, in this case a “whore with a heart of gold” as many such characters would be called, Marguerite Gautier.  In the play, the courtesan Marguerite, touched for the first time by true love – for young Armande Duval -- gives 

French film version of Dumas-fils's play

up the debauched, profligate life she led in Paris, but Armande’s father skillfully pressures Marguerite, convincing her that if she really loves his respectable son, she must give him up.  She makes the great sacrifice and does so, but Armande follows her to Paris, and insults her at a party. She collapses, falls into a consumptive decline, and just as Armande, having 

A huge hit for Garbo, Camille was a U.S. film version

learned the truth from his father, bursts into her sickroom and holds her in his arms, she dies. Paris went wild, and the play was made into one of Verdi’s finest operas, La Traviata.  Dumas-fils used Scribe’s formula in crafting his plots, and he very carefully and precisely set up the milieu in Paris in which Marguerite and her kind thrived, known as the demi-monde, so it was very realistic in this sense, and of course to use a prostitute as the sympathetic leading lady in a play just wasn’t done!  But although Dumas used a prostitute relatively realistically and though his play was filled with realistic touches, the main thrust was still romantic, even melodramatic. 

Emile Augier also wrote thesis plays, and also used the well-made play formula to build his plots.  Augier’s first important play was Olympia’s Marriage, written in 1855 as a response to La Dame aux 

Camélias.  Augier accepted the concept of a reformed prostitute, but what, he argued in this play, could happen if a prostitute only pretended to reform? In this play, Olympia is a woman who, after living a life of sin, makes her former life go away by moving and assuming a new name, another “woman with a past.” In her new identity, Olympia marries a naive young Marquis, Henri.  His father welcomes her into their aristocratic circle.  Her nature, however, is evil; she yearns for the excitements of her early life, and in her boredom Olympia creates a scandal, ruining nearly every character in the play.  At the end the old Marquis, Henri’s father, shoots her to protect the honor of his family, and is shown re-loading the pistol to kill himself, as the curtain falls. As a playwright, Augier was more versatile than Dumas, but this didn’t stop La Dame aux Camélias from being much more popular than Olympia’s Marriage.

Realism in France was dethroned by a darker version of its own self: naturalism.  Darwin’s revolutionary Origin of Species was published in 1859.  This shocking study defined evolution, “the survival of the fittest,” and argued that an individual’s traits are determined by heredity and environment.  Naturalist writers rallied round Darwin’s theory and characters in this form of literature were reduced to the status of natural objects to be scientifically examined. The stage proved a fine operating room for this examination.  Plays in the style of une tranche de vie -- a slice of life -- began to be presented.

      

Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading literary figure of naturalism.  He argued that the stilted neoclassical rules had merely

 been replaced by equally artificial formulas, the contrived romantic melodrama and then well-made and thesis plays.  Zola called for no rules, no thesis, but life itself on the stage.  To demonstrate his theory he wrote a theatrical version of his own naturalistic novel, Thérèse Raquin. Both novel and play shocked and angered Parisians:

French film version of the play

Thérèse is unhappily married; she and her husband live in close quarters with his mother.  Thérèse takes a lover and the two decide to break free by murdering her husband.  They 

British film version w/Brian Cox

do, and it seems they may get away with it, because the only one who witnessed it, the mother, was so shocked and terrified by the murder that she suffered a stroke and could no longer speak.  But the guilt of the lovers gets the best of them, they are trapped in the same cramped space that she’d lived in with her husband, and his mother, sitting in a rocking chair, is a silent reminder of their deed. By the end of the play, as the mother begins to recover from the stroke and threatens to tell all, they are driven to a double suicide.

 

Awful musical version of Thérèse Raquin

Plays such as Thérèse Raquin were not written for the Comédie Française.  A new kind of theatre was required to stage naturalist plays -- the Théâtre Libre (Free Theatre).  Andre Antoine, a 

former worker with the Paris gas company, founded this theatre to produce the new drama.  In order to escape censorship, Antoine organized it as a sort of private club.  Antoine’s theatre was much smaller than the large houses where stars played melodramas to thousands; Antoine’s intimate audiences peered into settings as close to literal reality as possible.  In a play called The Butchers, for example, real sides of beef were hung on the stage.  In the play Old Heidelburg, Antoine simply bought the interior of a student’s room and transferred it piece by 

piece onto the stage.  Antoine’s naturalistic stagings were perhaps more important and revolutionary than the daring plays that he produced.  And as so often happens, when a radical experiment has proved successful, mainstream theatre copies it.  This was the case with the conservative Comédie Française, where for example in the play My Friend Fritz real water flowed on the stage, and real food and drinks were served.  

The new trends in theatres throughout Europe at the end of the 19^th century took two directions: towards the small, intimate stages that began to imitate the Théâtre Libre, or towards more comfort and splendor in mainstream theatres. The quintessential example of the latter was the new Paris Opéra (now the Opéra Garnier).  Designed by Charles Garnier, it was begun in 1862 and not completed till 1874. It consisted of a huge auditorium (seating 2100), a large stage (the proscenium opening was 55 feet, the stage

was 175 feet wide by 85 feet deep), and scenery was changed by flying set pieces in from above and raising them from below stage.  In this opulent building more lobby space was made available for gathering, communing, drinking before the show and during intermissions, increasing the role of the theatre as social gathering place, as well as a space in which to watch plays.

     

Given the new realistic writing, actors began to insert realistic touches into their performances. It was perhaps the first era in which props were used to increase the realistic feeling of a piece -- 

men smoked on stage, women knitted.   And while they might seem silly today, very serious attempts at realistic actor training occurred in this period.  The science of acting was addressed by François Delsarte in France.  Delsarte charted how each different body part should be placed to convey particular emotions, attitudes, or ideas.  One of Delsarte’s charts displayed the 9 positions of the eyebrow!       

     

While new trends began to influence and change some acting styles, traditional methods remained strong.  Star actors often 

defied any new rules, still wearing a costume out of tune with the rest of the production, acting in the older, more declamatory style.  The most famous male star of this era combined a relatively old fashioned approach with many of the new touches.  Perhaps that was one reason he was so popular with all sorts of audiences.  His name was Constant-Benoit Coquelin (1841-1909).  He played at the Comédie Française for 26 years, then toured throughout the world.  His most famous role was Cyrano de Bergerac.

      

The most famous French star was a woman -- and what a woman! 

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) made her reputation at the Comédie Française, then after her controversial departure from that theatre she made several tours of the world.  Some of her greatest roles included Marguerite in La Dame aux Camelias, and the title characters in Tosca and Phèdre, but she took on all sorts of challenges.  She played Hamlet with great success.  She was old school and eccentric, but apparently possessed a mighty talent.

A Brief Glimpse at Italian Theatre in the Late Nineteenth Century

Several Italian actors gained international reputations at the end of the nineteenth century, and all but one worked in the older style.  

Three, sometimes known as the Italian Shakespeareans, are interesting because although they played standard Italian roles as well, they invested much of their time in plays of the Bard of Avon.  Adelaide Ristori was probably the greatest Italian actress in the late nineteenth century, and toured extensively, most notably as Lady Macbeth, which role she learned in English as well as Italian.  In fact she performed the famous 

sleepwalking scene in several European languages, depending on which country she visited.  Ernesto Rossi toured Shakespearean and other roles through Europe and the US but has the rather dubious distinction of playing all five acts of King Lear in Italian while the rest of the company spoke English, in both New York and London. Both attempts were poorly received.  Rossi’s other prominent Shakespearean roles

included Hamlet and Othello.  In the latter role, Rossi was eclipsed by Tommaso Salvini, one of the greatest international stars towards the end of the nineteenth century.  In his Othello, Salvini’s descent from intellectual coolness into savage rage was regarded as definitive in its time. 

      

The most important of the Italians was Eleonora Duse (1859-1924), another internationally famous actress. She began her career from the time she was four years old, and performed until she died while on tour in the United States, in Pittsburgh to be exact.  She was born in northeastern Italy, in Asolo.  She first played Marguerite Gauthier in La Dame aux Camélias in St Petersburg, she played in Boito’s translation of Antony and Cleopatra (Boito 

also wrote the libretto for Verdi’s great operatic version of Otello), she championed the work of Ibsen, including A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, but was also at home in many of Sardou’s plays.  Her love affair with poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio was tempestuous and he rather cruelly gave the lead role in his play La Citta Morta to Duse’s great rival, Sarah Bernhardt, though Duse subsequently played it to great acclaim.  While conservative critics (including her older rival, Ristori) criticized the subtlety of Duse’s playing, discerning critics like GBS had nothing but praise for it.  If Bernhardt was the last of the old style stars, Duse was the first of the new, for though she didn’t completely abandon the old method, she invested it with a simple, quiet, internalized manner that heralded a more realistic and modern style. 

While we have been discussing new movements, one thing didn't change, at least
in some theatres - spectacle!

France definitely led the way in Realism and naturalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, but realistic writing and staging occurred in countries throughout Europe, as well as in England and America at this time.  One of the more interesting theatrical genealogies is this one: John Oxenford wrote the short farce, A Day Well Spent in 1835. Viennese writer Johann Nestroy’s Out for a Lark, made use of the Oxenford’s plot to create a play about two shop assistants who pretend to be their boss. As such it is the inspiration for a host of plays, including the early American Musical A Trip to Chinatown (1890) and Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers, which was refined into The Matchmaker and musicalized as Hello Dolly.  This play, written at the time Scribe was crafting well-made plays in Paris, is one of the early plays outside France to feature realistic characters.

The "spectaculist" approach to theatre