The Modern Era IV: Symbolism, Cabarets, the Germans, the Irish, the Russians...and the U.S.

Dr Jack mentioned symbolism in Ibsen's late drama and in nearly all of Chekhov’s plays.  At the end of the century a 

group centered in Paris broke from the realist/naturalist mode and called themselves symbolists.  Symbolism was a movement that affected all the arts, but in the theatre Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) a Belgian who lived and worked in Paris, led the way. He argued that 

there was a higher truth than outward appearance, and that it lay in spirituality and mysterious forces.  The way to evoke this higher truth was through symbols.  One of Maeterlinck’s best known plays is Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) in which a young woman, after marrying a young prince who has found her in a forest, falls in love with her prince/husband’s brother, and dies of grief.  More important than the love triangle itself are the symbols which evoke the mood. Another is The Blue Bird (1908), about the search for happiness.

      

Maeterlinck’s plays were presented by Aurélion-Marie Lugné-Poe (1869-1940) at his Théâtre de L'Oeuvre (begun in

 1893), an experimental space where scenic drops were painted by the likes of artists Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, which quickly became the foremost symbolist theatre in all of Europe.

But Lugné-Poe did not limit his repertoire to symbolist plays.  In 1896 he presented Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907),

which depicted a grotesque world void of human decency.  Ubu walks out on the stage and utters the first line of the play -- “Merdre!” The audiences are shocked, which is just what Jarry wanted. This play, a crazy distortion of Macbeth -- Ubu, urged by his thoroughly repulsive wife, wants to be king of Poland – in addition to being what I can only assume is the first Polish joke, has been hailed as a forerunner of theatre of the absurd. 

       

In this era, some of the most interesting experiments were attempted not in theatres but in cabarets. Le Chat Noir in 

Paris (1881) was the first, a place where monologues and songs (often on subjects considered taboo by the mainstream), shadow plays, dances and all sorts of theatrical experiments were performed in a “hall of incoherent art.” Le Chat Noir began a craze for cabaret throughout Europe. It 

was followed in Barcelona by Els Quatre Gats (1897), Die Elf Scharfrichter in Munich (1901), Schall und Rauch in Berlin (1901), Die Fledermaus in Vienna (1907) and the Lukomorye, Crooked Mirror (both opened 1908) and Stray Dog (1911) cabarets in St Petersburg

      

In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, a young writer and cabaret performer named Frank Wedekind 

(1864-1918) was experimenting with expressionism even before Strindberg’s “dream plays” were written.  Wedekind’s first important work was Spring’s Awakening (1891), which concerned young people struggling with sexual awareness and experience, and the need for a repressive society to recognize these stirrings of sexuality, was written in a style that mixed 

brutally frank language with lyrical prose poetry.  Its most famous scene is the last, in which a young man is visited by his dead friend, who holds his head in his hands.  The play was so shocking that it was not produced until 1906.  Wedekind’s so called “Lulu” plays Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904) were even more scandalous.  When

male admirers seek to bring Lulu under their control, they die! After a number of such incidents, Lulu becomes a prostitute while engaging in an explicit lesbian relationship, but the last of her customers is Jack the Ripper, who murders her in brutal scene played like a cabaret number.   Alban Berg used

Wedekind’s works on Lulu as the basis for his own rather 

shocking opera called Lulu. Wedekind’s plays became more popular after World War I, were major influences on the expressionist movement in Germany, and in the last 20 years have been played regularly in theatres through Europe, and occasionally in the States. The recent musical version of Spring’s Awakening was quite a success in New York, if not on tours to the hinterlands.

Another famous German-language playwright of the period was Austrian Arthur Schnitzler, based in Vienna.  His 

most famous play is Reigen (1900), though most American and British productions of the play call it by its French translation, La Ronde.  The play is about a series of sexual encounters of all sorts (some more shocking than others, and all fairly shocking for the time) between its ten characters.  There was a fine film version made in France, a musical version Hello Again, played Lincoln Center in the mid-90s, and most recently Nicole Kidman performed in David Hare’s adaptation of it, The Blue Room, in both London and NYC.  By the way, Kidman also made the film Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick, who based his screenplay on a short story of Schnitzler’s.

      

One of the most important figures in German language theatre before World War I was a director who expanded the profession by his virtuosity and by his interest in diverse 

styles.  Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) belonged to no single movement, advocated no single -ism. When he chose a naturalist play, he worked in the naturalist style; but he also chose symbolist pieces, expressionist works.  Reinhardt was eclectic in his choices, and because he was sought after he directed all over the western world in all sorts of styles, and in all sorts of 

theatrical spaces, and in some non-theatrical spaces -- he presented Everyman at the first Salzburg Festival on the steps of the cathedral, and at its close, when everyman dies, the bells of all the churches in Salzburg rang out.   Because he worked eclectically, and because he worked in so many places, Reinhardt was a major introducer of new styles and experiments, and also did much to champion the career of the professional director.

In England, William Poel (1852-1934) sought to simplify Shake-spearean production by attempting to reconstruct the Elizabethan stage, which was a vital move towards the twentieth century thrust stage -- you’ll remember that the German Ludwig Tieck had made similar experiments in the 1840s with “open” staging.  

     

Important work was being done in Ireland, where in 1904 W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), Lady Augusta Gregory (1863-1935) and J.M. Synge (1871-1909) formed the Abbey 

Theatre, Ireland’s contribution to the Independent Theatre Movement, and a theatre that is still alive and well today.  This was a time of newly awakened pride in the Irish people, and the new plays written for the Abbey demonstrated it by introducing complex characters as opposed to caricatures of drunken Irishmen seen in earlier melodramas 

and comedies.  Yeats, better known for his poetry, wrote plays in the symbolist vein, Lady Gregory wrote in the realistic style, and Synge, the finest dramatic writer of the three, combined realism and prose-poetry in powerful pieces, the best of which is Playboy of the Western World (1907).  As with so many great plays of the modern era, this play also shocked the public.  It’s a tragicomic piece which tells the story of a 

boy who claims he murdered his father -- and is hailed as a hero because of his deed by the small village he stumbles upon. Until his father, not quite dead after all, turns up! Father and son are metaphors for the old and new Ireland, as well as being tremendously powerful characters in their own right. And Pegeen, one of the women who falls for the “playboy” is one of the finest young women’s roles in Irish drama.   The play shocked, in fact it created riots when it opened. Then in 1911 when the Abbey Theatre toured the play through America, the entire company was arrested in Philadelphia!  As usual, police and politicians read the play literally and not metaphorically (their story is our story!) and the irrepressible GB Shaw, having heard about the arrests, could not resist a zinger:

“All decent people are arrested in the United States.  That is why I’ve refused all invitations to go there.  Besides, who am I to question Philadelphia’s right to make itself ridiculous?” Shaw’s own play, Mrs Warren’s Profession, by the way, had also been closed for obscenity in America.

       

Another important place to visit before we move past World War I is Russia.  At the same time Stanislavsky was working in a naturalistic mode, anti-realists began fascinating 

experiments that were as important to later theatre as were those experiments centered in Paris.  In fact one of the most famous Russian innovators moved his company to Paris, as that city was the acknowledged center of the artistic revolution going on throughout Europe.  Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) began his career in St. Petersburg editing a journal called The World of Art, which advocated and supported the new experiments in theatre, art, and dance.  

He then became the impresario of a ballet troupe that overwhelmed Paris beginning in 1909 and toured Europe under the name the Ballets Russes.  Michel Fokine was perhaps his most famous choreographer, producing exciting new composer Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird in 1910, and his Petrouchka in 1911.  On stage Nijinsky and 
other amazing dancers lit up the stage in the shocking new 

works, which were decorated by abstract and stylized settings and costumes by the likes of Leon Bakst and Alexander Benois and Natalia Goncharova, one of the earliest great female designers that I’m aware of.  Nijinsky himself choreographed and starred in perhaps the most provocative of all the works by the Ballets Russes, The Rite of Spring (1913).  Here is a description of the ballet and the reaction:

The visual concept is of spring in Russia, an explosion of fertility, the season when the earth’s face changes 

overnight.  Such a potent natural phenomenon gives birth to superstitions and religious rites.  In that tribal culture the sacrifice of a young virgin was a tribute to that force, the unknown god who cannot be seen but who produces wonders.   With The Rite of Spring we enter the world of contemporary music, for the rejection of order, symphonic logic, and “charm” in this score signal the end of an era.  The conventional romantic concept of beauty was knocked sideways by the barbaric rhythm of the composition.

On its opening night the ballet was greeted with riotous disapproval; right from the beginning there were whistles and boos, soon countered by applause. 

The protests grew more noisy as the performance progressed until, during the Sacrificial Dance, pandemonium broke out.  Bravely the company carried on to the end although it was almost impossible for them to hear the orchestra.  Conditions in the audience were indescribable; some spectators actually came to blows.  What enraged the public, 

apart from the brutality of the subject and the violence of the music, was Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography, which sought to convey a feeling of the savagery and eroticism of primitive religious rites by turning all the conventions of academic ballet technique inside out.  [The Russian choreographer-dancer imposed a whole series of positions and movements on the company; feet turned inwards, arms twisted round; jumps, polyrhythmic steps of terror and uncontrolled frenzy.  What might seem powerful and expressive today struck the unprepared audience of 1913 as ugly and, what is worse, ridiculous.] 

The look of the new ballet

Nijinsky dances the faun

Another Russian upended the realistic style of Stanislavsky only shortly after it was established.  In fact Vsevolod 

Meyerhold was one of Stanislavsky’s greatest students, and played the role of Konstantin Treplev in Chekhov’s The Seagull, as well as Tusenbach in Three Sisters.  Not long after, Meyerhold began to experiment with non-realistic techniques and left the Moscow Art in 1905.  He was hired by the famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya (1864-1910) as the artistic director of her theatre in St. Petersburg.  There Meyerhold staged Hedda Gabler in symbolist style, each character wearing a distinctly colored, non-realistic costume.  From 1908-18 Meyerhold continued to work in St Petersburg, and began experimenting with commedia dell’arte and circus techniques, but we’ll find out more about this important innovator and a few of his colleagues in our post World War I lectures.      

One of Meyerhold's anti-realist productions, based on a story by Lermontov

In America, on the other hand, I fear there are few new experiments to report. Rather, the business of theatre became increasingly important between 1896 and 1914.  Touring (the result, in fact the logical progression from ever-increasing, ever-widening circuits, which you’ll remember were the way theatre spread through the U.S. in the nineteenth century) had become a nightmare for theatre managers in the hinterlands.  Trying to decide what plays to book, from which company to book, which stars to import, etc was taking all of their time, and as touring towns became more numerous, the confusion became enormous. Often companies did not even show up at a town in which they’d been booked, especially small ones.

      

To create order from this chaos, in 1896 a group of businessmen appeared which became known as the Theatrical Syndicate (some of whom were knowledgeable about the theatre, some were knowledgeable only about the art of the deal). These men, the Frohman brothers, Klaw and Erlanger, offered theatre managers in the hinterlands entire seasons of plays, presented by reputable players and nearly always featuring a star. Of course there was a catch, and the catch was that the theatres that accepted the Syndicate’s services must use ONLY the syndicate’s services.  The Syndicate’s plan worked and paid off in spades, and these businessmen created a huge monopoly that effectively controlled theatre in America until 1915. 

Opposing the Syndicate: Minnie Maddern Fiske as Hedda Gabler

Scruffy independents opposed the Syndicate, but only David Belasco was successful against them because he was so 

hugely popular a writer/director/producer in his own right.  Another fierce independent, actress Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932) was married to a wealthy publisher who leased a theatre for her in New York City. In this way she could stay independent, and help to move America into the modern age by producing several plays by Ibsen, and by generally championing new theatrical ideas.

     

In the year 1916, what did NOT happen was for the people of America to wake up and realize that ART and not BUSINESS should drive the American theatre.  Instead, by 1915 the stranglehold of the Syndicate had been gradually broken by an even tougher group of businessmen, who we affectionately sometimes call the boys from Syracuse, because that’s where the Shuberts got their start.  They began to buy up theatres in that town and around upstate NY, and by 1905 had entered in a small way into competition with the Syndicate, sending out shows of their own to theatres to which they offered a better deal than the Syndicate had.  By 1916, the Shuberts had upended the Syndicate and were in virtual control of the “road.”  In fact the Shuberts retained their own stranglehold (many towns throughout America have theatres which are to this day called The Shubert) until 1956, when antitrust laws were passed which forced them to break up their monopoly and to sell off many of their theatres. But the Shubert organization remains a tremendous power in commercial American theatre today. As often as not, they’re the ones who are up on the stage to receive the last and most prestigious Tony Award (not the author, not the director, not the star -- but the producers!)

    

Now let’s see what came of the “modern” after WWI.