Notes on Post-War Drama

Singing and Dancing Through War

As disastrous as the First World War was, the Second World War was even more devastating for humanity. Eight and a half million soldiers died in World War I, the majority of them in the trenches of Europe. Civilian casualties were even higher, especially when factoring in a world-wide pandemic of influenza, spread by the massive deployment of soldiers. During World War II, however, the distinction between military and civilian deaths became almost irrelevant, as both sides targeted cities in massive bombing campaigns. Perhaps ten times as many people died during World War II than perished on the battlefields of World War I.

Moreover, the end of the war in Europe brought the revelation of what had been going on inside the concentration camps set up by Germany's Nazi government. Prisoners who weren't worked to death, starved, or summarily shot had been ushered into gas chambers to be murdered, and their bodies cremated at an astounding rate. This purposeful liquidation of human life shocked people not so much because of its cruelty, but because of the cold, calculating manner in which it had been carried out by people who had once been the friends and neighbors of many of their victims. Then, the end of the war came, not with a whimper, but with two terrifying atomic blasts over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world learned that more than a hundred thousand people could be killed by a single bomb.

Throughout all of this, the theatre not only continued, but thrived. For the most part, theatre produced through the war was unabashedly escapist. In Europe this meant that variety acts and musical reviews predominated, while in the United States, where the civilian population was relatively safe from the ravages of war, the musical dramas that had developed before the war became ever more sophisticated, integrating song and dance ever more into a fully imagined storyline. The idea of having an integrated musical with song and dance serving to advance plot and characterization rather than just provide entertainment, was hardly new. Playwright Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern had been able to do that in their 1927 musical Showboat, and George and Ira Gershwin had even won a Pulitzer Prize for drama with the politically themed Of Thee I Sing which opened in 1931.

After the Second World War broke out over Germany's invasion of Poland, however, the still neutral United States churned out musical after musical featuring toe-tapping tunes that were in the service of something far more serious than just selling sheet music. In 1940 lyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers opened the musical Pal Joey based on the popular short stories of John O'Hara. Songs like "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" brought a new level of sophistication to the musical genre while helping to establish vibrant characters on stage. Having to flee Europe, Kurt Weill made a new home on Broadway, penning integrated musicals like Lady in the Dark in 1941. Rodgers and Hammerstein then teamed up to write Oklahoma!, which opened in 1943, two years after the U.S. had officially entered the war. The dark yet still nostalgic look at frontier life seemed to fit the mood of the country perfectly, and the show was a hit, in no small part due to choreography by Agnes DeMille that communicated story and character through dance.

While the war was still raging, Rodgers, Hammerstein, and DeMille opened a new show, Carousel, which went even further both in integrating song and dance with story, and in dealing with serious and even disturbing themes. Based on the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar's play Liliom, the musical Carousel addresses domestic violence, suicide, and speculations about the afterlife. After the war ended, Rodgers and Hammerstein turned their attention to telling the stories of those who had fought it, adapting James A. Michener's book Tales of the South Pacific into the musical South Pacific. The play opened in 1949, just a few years after the events it recounts. In the years that followed, Rodgers and Hammerstein continued to have hits with the musicals The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music.

Questioning Society

As serious as those musicals were, they still tried to create a happy ending that could reconcile audiences to the disturbing aspects of the world they presented. Other dramatists, however, having lived through the horrors of World War II, used the theatre to openly question a society that could create such death and destruction. Eugene O'Neill, who rose to fame as a writer of expressionist dramas, wrote his most famous plays during the war, though they were not performed until later. O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh was completed in 1939 when World War II first broke out, and returns to a much more realistic style than many of his previous plays. The play opened on Broadway in 1946, and was followed the next year by another play O'Neill had written during the war, A Moon for the Misbegotten. That piece includes a character from the previously written Long Day's Journey into Night, a play considered by many as O'Neill's masterpiece, but which the author did not allow to be performed until after his death in 1953. 

Tennessee Williams, who rose to fame during the war with his memory play The Glass Menagerie, continued to challenge the conventions of society after the war with A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both of which make allusions to the forbidden topic of homosexuality. While Williams was questioning conventional sexuality, Arthur Miller was questioning economic and political assumptions with plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. Miller's plays, which were basically realistic, but included harsh social comedy, helped to inspire similar American plays in the 1950s that urged reform. These included William Inge's popular dramas Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, and Bus Stop. The professional theatre in New York also began to open up more to African-American dramatists, allowing Alice Childress to have an Off-Broadway success with Trouble in Mind and Lorraine Hansberry to reach Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun.

The American theatre, while pushing boundaries in terms of subject matter, tended to remain very conventional in terms of form. Occasionally, plays like The Glass Menagerie or Death of a Salesman might utilize flashbacks and memory sequences, but they still remained essentially realistic. European writers were more adventurous. The poet T.S. Eliot had already had moderate success with verse dramas in Britain, including Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, when he wrote The Cocktail Party, a modern drama inspired by Alcestis by Euripides. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, later transferring to London and New York.

By that time, the French playwright Jean Genet had already shocked audiences with his 1947 play The Maids. Though based on a real-life murder, the play brought a non-realistic sensibility to its subject matter, portraying servants who role-play their employer in a sado-masochistic game. Genet followed up that play with his prison drama Deathwatch. Though the play has elements of realism, it purposefully pushes characters to outrageous extremes to show the venality and purposelessness of mundane ordinary life. In his most famous play, The Balcony, Genet pushed these ideas to a new level, blurring the identities of authority figures including judges, generals, and bishops, and the ordinary people who merely pretend to occupy these roles. Life's meaning itself seemed to be flexible and uncertain, an idea picked up upon by a new movement in the theatre.

Theatre of the Absurd

When the critic Martin Esslin wrote his 1960 essay on Theatre of the Absurd, he was looking back over more than a decade of drama that had mystified audiences. Esslin focused on three playwrights who entertained crowds in spite of the fact that their plays seemed to lack any sort of coherent plot. These authors were the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the Armenian writer Arthur Adamov, and the Romanian writer Eugene Ionesco. All three seemed to write not so much plays as "anti-plays" in which neither the time nor the place of action is ever clear. Rather than telling a traditional story these plays are pure theatre, creating a magic on the stage that exists completely outside of any normal framework of conceptual reality. Works of Theatre of the Absurd portray the world as an incomprehensible place where dialogue moves in circles and full meaning is never revealed.

Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot draws upon vaudeville acts and circus performances to tell the story of two tramps waiting for a man who might or might not show up to meet them. To call the play an allegory about mankind's search for meaning is not incorrect, but the play does not present clearly identifiable allegorical figures, as a work like Everyman does, or as might be found in expressionistic drama. Instead, the characters are individualistic and highly idiosyncratic. Their dialogue frequently repeats, and they face the world with incomprehension. Beckett's subsequent plays, including Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, all follow a similar vein, presenting fascinating characters in dreamscapes where little makes sense.

Arthur Adamov's works have largely faded from the theatre's collective memory, but his 1955 play Ping Pong managed to entertain audiences with nothing other than philosophical conversations about the nature of pinball machines. Ionesco's plays have had a greater staying power. His early one-act plays The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs make little sense, yet continue to entertain. In fact, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson have been playing continually at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris since 1957. With his 1959 play Rhinoceros, Ionesco married the absurd with the political. The play shows a succession of ordinary people as each transforms into a titular pachyderm. For audience members who had seen many of their friends and neighbors embrace murderous totalitarian ideologies during the Second World War, the relevance of the absurd play to their own lives was clear.

Peter Brook and Director's Theatre

One of the most towering figures of theatre during the post-war era was not a playwright, but a director, Peter Brook. His career began with productions of Shakespeare and other classic authors in the 1940s, but his re-interpretations of classic plays were far from traditional. When asked to direct the Richard Strauss opera Salome, based on the play of the same name by Oscar Wilde, Brook commissioned sets by the surrealist painter Salvador Dali. His production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in 1955 utilized ritual techniques to have ribbons of red fabric stand in for the play's infamous bloodshed. Brook brought his non-realistic stagings even to the works of playwrights generally known for their realism, as when he directed the premiere of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, complete with a choral character providing narration as if the play were an ancient tragedy. Brook also introduced a number of foreign experimental playwrights to English-language audiences, including the Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose play The Visit Brook directed in 1958.

Brook was heavily influenced by the theories of Antonin Artaud and attempted to bring his hypothetical Theatre of Cruelty to life on the stage. This included performing Artaud's play The Spurt of Blood for the first time, albeit in a modified version. In 1964, Brook combined the theories of Artaud with the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht in a production of a play by the German writer Peter Weiss called The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, often called Marat/Sade for short. Based on the fact that the notorious pornographer Donatien de Sade frequently did stage plays that were enacted by his fellow inmates in an insane asylum, the drama imagines what one of those performances might have been like if it had portrayed the assassination of a famous leader of the French Revolution. Though the play takes place in 1808, and the play-within-the-play is set in 1793, both reflect on the conditions of a society in the shadow of the Holocaust and nuclear warfare.

Some of Brook's productions departed from the written text, occasionally replacing words with shrill screams or intense physical movement. Though he frequently had productive relationships with playwrights, actors, and designers, critics tended to hail Brook as the genius behind the productions he staged. Other directors followed Brook's lead in taking a strong hand in the work they staged, frequently leaving their own unique stamp on a piece, whether it was a revival of a classic or a brand new play. This was true of the Polish directors Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, as well as other directors later on, including Ariane Mnouchkine in France and Peter Stein in Germany. For better or for worse, Brook paved the way for theatre moving away from the spoken word and toward a total experience of the senses.

Theatre of the 1960s

The 1960s were a tumultuous decade for the theatre, as well as for the world in general. Durrenmatt, in his 1962 play The Physicists, pictured the world as an asylum, just as Marat/Sade would do later. What made The Physicists so powerful was its overwhelming pessimism, predicting that mad, evil individuals would gain ever greater power. The following year, Durrenmatt premiered Hercules and the Augean Stables, which had begun its life as a radio play. Like The Physicists, it was strikingly pessimistic, portraying an environmental catastrophe for which there is simply no solution.

In the United States, dramatists frequently blended pessimism together with optimism, as was the case in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? During the Black Arts Movement, African-American authors brought the civil rights movement to the stage in plays like Blues for Mister Charley by James Baldwin. LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, captured the spirit of the era in his short play Dutchman. The same year Dutchman premiered, Adrienne Kennedy pushed African-American drama further away from realism with her play Funnyhouse of a Negro, which fractured one woman's personality into a variety of characters played by different actors. She followed that play up with The Owl Answers and A Rat's Mass, which pushed boundaries of form even further by combining the human world with the animalistic.

The British stage was still subject to censorship until 1968, but some playwrights like Joe Orton tried to bring forbidden topics to the stage in spite of government prohibitions. Orton's early play Entertaining Mr. Sloane was a financial failure, though it drew praise from some critics. Orton's break-out play was Loot, a hysterical farce set in a funeral parlor. The work refuses to honor anything, even the dead. Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, premiered after the abolition of censorship in Britain, so it was able to be even more outrageous. Unfortunately, the production was posthumous, as Orton had been murdered by his lover two years previous to the premiere.

Censorship was also a problem with theatre in Eastern Europe. The Polish writer Slawomir Mrozek began writing Theatre of the Absurd, and his first play The Police was performed in Warsaw and subsequently abroad as well. As Mrozek's work became more political, however, the communist government in Poland became less amenable. His play Tango premiered in the small town of Bydgoszcz rather than in Warsaw, and many of his subsequent works had difficulty getting past censors. In Czechoslovakia, the absurdist writer Vaclav Havel had even greater problems with censorship. His 1965 play The Memorandum made fun of constant changes in language and the government's efforts to spy on its citizens. Though the play managed to get by censors, many of his later plays were not so fortunate, and the writer endured multiple imprisonments for speaking out against the government. Later, however, after the fall of communism, Havel was elected his nation's president.

Mourning Peter Brook

I am in London right now for a research appointment tomorrow and then a Dickens conference later this week. Tonight, I saw Kathryn Hunter in King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe.

A lot of people know Hunter as Puck in Julie Taylor's filmed production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I also saw her in the title role of Timon of Athens, so I was very much looking forward to seeing her.

After the show, however, she stepped forward to address the audience. She could hardly speak. She said that many of us might not know, but that Peter Brook died last night. Several members of the audience gasped.

I wish I could remember what precisely she said, but the general thrust of it was that Peter's spirit was with us that night. For theatre artists everywhere, that is a comforting thought, as we mourn the loss of one of the most important directors of the 20th century.

Like many people, I first came to learn about Brook by reading his book The Empty Space. Brook started out directing Shakespeare, and became one of the most respected young directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He directed a particularly famous production of King Lear with Paul Scofield.

Brook was always about more than just directing Shakespeare, though. He had his finger on the pulse of a number of theatrical movements, and was highly influenced by Antonin Artaud. The Theatre of Cruelty envisioned by Artaud became popularized after Brook directed the first English-language production of Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade, utilizing many of Artaud's ideas.

A truly international artist, the British Brook spent much of his career based in France, and was profoundly influenced by the culture of India. His stage adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabharata is considered by many people to be his masterpiece.

Was Brook's spirit present at the Globe tonight as so many artists influenced by his work carried on his legacy? We can only hope so.

Giving a Hand to Titus

Titus Andronicus is the first and bloodiest of Shakespeare's tragedies.  It piles horror upon horror in a way that is scarcely believable for modern audiences.  In Act III, scene i, Aaron cuts off Titus's hand on stage.  This futile attempt to save the lives of Titus's sons turns out to be merely a ploy of Aaron's. Titus exits the stage bearing--in his remaining hand--the severed head of one of his sons.  His own severed hand is carried off by his daughter Lavinia.  She, however, must carry it between her teeth--because after she was raped, both of her hands were cut off and her tongue was cut out of her mouth.  Such a grim catalog of horrors might seem impossible to take for some audiences.

All indications, however, seem to affirm that Titus Andronicus was an immensely popular play in Shakespeare's day.  The critic Julia Briggs, in discussing Titus Andronicus and similar gory revenge tragedies, postulated that the modern reader's failure to understand these works "reflects more on our own limited sympathies and tastes than on any innate failure in them."  Of course, Shakespeare's audience today, like in his own time, need not rely on text alone.  Over the last century, Titus Andronicus received more productions than perhaps during any other period since Shakespeare's day. These productions were often extremely successful and aided audiences in expanding their "sympathies and tastes" to better understand and appreciate a very difficult but very powerful play.

Before the twentieth century, productions of Titus Andronicus were scarce and generally poor.  One version, rewritten for the noted African-American actor Ira Aldridge, even warped the play so much as to make Aaron, the villain, into the hero.  A 1923 production of the play at the Old Vic, though generating more than a little derisive laughter, proved that the play could still be done as written.  The time was becoming ripe for a revolution in how audiences see Titus Andronicus.

That revolution came in 1955 with Peter Brook's production of the play starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.  In his book The Empty Space, Brook described his production as "a ritual of bloodshed."  Brook's stylized staging used such theatrical devices as red streamers for blood.  These unrealistic choices did not take away from the audience's bond with the characters, even in the most gruesome scenes.  As one critic noted, "the enormous physical agony of the severed hand was almost unbearable."  The response of both audiences and critics was overwhelming.  Brook was hailed as a "genius," the production as "pure theatre," and Olivier's Titus as "one of the finest performances of his career."

Brook's surprisingly successful production immediately received several imitators.  These interpretations, like Brook's, were all inherently theatrical.  One production at The Old Vic was staged as a play within a play, as wandering Elizabethan actors performed Titus Andronicus in the courtyard of an inn reproduced on stage.  Brook had begun a trend away from Realism, and toward the stylized and theatrical.  The Old Vic production continued this trend by placing the play in its original context, but the play could also succeed in very different contexts.

Producer Joseph Papp had already tried staging Titus Andronicus--with limited success--when in 1967 his groundbreaking production opened at the outdoor Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.  Directed by Gerald Freeman, this Titus drew upon the theatrical traditions of ancient Greece and feudal Japan, employing music, elaborate costumes and masks, and a chanting chorus.  In the infamous first scene of Act III, the heads of Titus's sons were represented by empty masks.  Despite the lack of gore, the audience gasped at the sight of them.  The production drew rave reviews.  By placing the work in a new context, it succeeded in getting past stomach-churning gore and in helping the audience to see the pure psychological horror of the play.

The seventies saw several more productions in the theatrical tradition of Peter Brook. A 1971 production in Glasgow used black paint to signify missing hands.  The 1974 production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival used an off-stage chanting chorus and had scarves signify blood.  This production, directed by Laird Williamson, also included some more naturalistic touches.  When Lavinia was raped and mutilated, for instance, she shed realistic blood, unlike Brook's ravished innocent.  The 1978 production at the Globe Playhouse of Los Angeles also managed to avoid sensationalism, and be "horrific but not grotesque" according to one reviewer.  In the same year, the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival produced a ritualistic Titus Andronicus in which the entire cast remained on stage for most of the play.

Not all productions, however, followed the lead of Brook.  The 1972 production at the Champlain Shakespeare Festival in Vermont had nothing symbolic about its violence. Played with grim cruelty, and attempting to make the characters as realistic and human as possible, the play was a hit with some while it alienated others. Audience members called the play "appropriate for viewing by a board of pathologists" and "X-rated" among other things. Some patrons reportedly fainted at the performances, and when the severed heads were brought in during Act III scene i, people left the theater. While undoubtedly a moving and unforgettable performance, it failed to create the more intellectual understanding of the play that more stylized productions tended to encourage.

This bloody trend was continued in the next decade by such productions as Vincent Dowling's in Cleveland in 1980.  Like the Vermont production nine years earlier, Dowling's realistic gore caused some people to become ill and others to faint.  There was little applause from the shocked mid-western audience.  An unimaginative production by the Royal Shakespeare Company the following year failed to impress the audience with even shock and horror.

A more successful production, staged by a Canadian cast and directed by Brian Bedford, was "devoid of blood while gripped with inner tension" according to one reviewer.  The 1981 American Players Theatre production used a similar approach, hiding violent acts from view.  Lavinia, for instance, had her back to the audience the whole while as she held her father's hand in her mouth.  While drawing praise for showing restraint, these productions simply toned down the violence, as opposed to converting it into a different, more theatrical and ritualized form.  They never made a break into a different style that might allow the audience to become more connected to the text, and perhaps come to a greater understanding of Shakespeare's intentions.

The Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play again in 1987, this time with great restraint. Shakespeare calls for Titus's hand to be cut off while he is still on stage, but the production hid the horrific moment from view.  Likewise, severed body parts were carried in bags, not seen.  William Freimuth, on the other hand presented the play in the same year at the opposite extreme.  His production at the Source Theatre in Washington, D.C. took the excessive violence of the play to its logical--or illogical--extreme.  Titus Andronicus was reinterpreted as a parody of revenge tragedy.  In Act III, scene i, for instance, Titus had the heads of his sons delivered to him by a paperboy on a bicycle. The absurdity of such a production shows the difficulty, if not impossibility, of presenting a Titus Andronicus in the spirit of Shakespeare while still using the stage conventions of modern Realism.

Not all productions of the eighties, however, left behind the symbolic theatrical trend.  In 1989, the Stratford Festival in Ontario presented cut versions of Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors as two one-acts. Heavily influenced by Japanese Kabuki theater, the production had a marked Asian style. Such elements as a lavishly staged puppet show clearly placed the play in the world of the theatrical. Reviewer Wallace Sterling remarked, however, that while the puppetry "might have worked in a fuller, broader version of this play," it ended up appearing as "an unnecessary appendage."

Paul Barry's 1989 production at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival combined the theatricality of Brook with the restraint that had saved the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in 1987.  Barry concentrated on the theater of rituals, as funerals, weddings, and coronations were highlighted, and choral chanting filled the stage.  Barry avoided the excesses of both stage blood and symbolic scarves and ribbons.  Instead, hands were simply bandaged, and Lavinia's mouth was left open to represent her severed tongue. This restraint from both extremes of the realism spectrum was mirrored by James Bazewicz's sparse but effective set design.

A similarly minimalist set was used in Julie Taymor's production at Playhouse at St. Clement's in 1995. Acknowledging her debt to Peter Brook, Taymor had the ravished Lavinia appear with a line drawn across her mouth to represent her severed tongue, and had branches sprout from the stubs on her arms. Not all aspects of the production, however, were this stylized.  With a grisly naturalism, blood continued to seep through the rag that bound Titus's stump where his hand used to be.  The production drew from two very different traditions, but it did so successfully.  Many of these elements also made it into Taymor's 1999 film version Titus.

In 2011, I saw the Public Theater do a splendid production of Titus Andronicus with Jay O. Saunders in the title role. The production featured literal buckets of blood being poured onto the stage. But is it time for a new production? New York Shakespeare Exchange thinks so! The company recently announced they will do the play in early 2015. I saw that company do King John back in 2011 and was rather impressed. It will be interesting to see what approach they take to this fascinating play.