The Spirit of Burlesque

In an 1888 article in The Universal Review, the British dramatist F.C. Burnand set out to defend burlesque, not the sexy strip-shows of today that we call by that name, but the comic plays of the 19th century that spoofed the hit plays then popular on the stage.

According to Burnand, "'To burlesque' is to make ridiculous by means of exaggeration, mimicry, parody, grotesque distortion, travesty, and caricature." Originally, though, the term had been used along with "melodrama" and "burletta" to define the types of plays that could be performed by the minor theatres that did not hold royal patents like the Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden had.

Prior to the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843, the minor theatres in London had to add a certain amount of music in order to prove they weren't invading the territory of the patent houses. (Exactly how much music they needed to add was a matter of some debate and considerable litigation.) For Burnand, though, the spirit of the burlesque goes back to the Miles Gloriosus of Roman comedy and the comedic Ancient Pistol of Shakespeare's history plays.

Burnand himself was a prolific writer of burlesque plays, but he looked back admiringly on earlier work by James Planché, whose Olympic Revels was a hit when produced by Madame Lucia Elizabeth Vestris. Planché also wrote an adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes that utilized the structure of the original while poking fun of topics current in the 19th century. The play featured Charles Matthews as a one-man Greek chorus, comically dressed in a Doric chiton over his modern clothes.

Burlesque, in the hands of a skilled dramatist like Planché, is "the candid friend" of the drama, according to Burnand. He writes that burlesque "by means of parody, travesty, and mimicry, publicly exposes on the stage some preposterous absurdities of stagecraft which may be a passing fashion of the day, justly ridicules some histrionic pretensions, parodies false sentiment, and shows that the shining metal put forward as real gold is only theatrical tinfoil after all.” It is just such parody that "killed the old blood-and-thunder melodrama," he concludes.

Burnand should know, as he wrote burlesques of previously successful melodramas such as Black-Eyed Susan by Douglas Jerrold, as well as burlesques of Shakespeare classics like Richard III. The spirit of burlesque is present whenever we pull back the artifice of theatre and comically expose the rude mechanical conventions that lie beneath it.

Used Up

The Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault had his first big hit in 1841 with London Assurance, which opened at Covent Garden, managed at that time by Lucia Elizabeth Vestris and her husband Charles Mathews.

Though the play was a success, Vestris spent lavishly on the production, as well as on subsequent plays, including Boucicault's own The Irish Heiress. In 1842, only a year after the triumph of London Assurance, Vestris and Mathews lost their lease on the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden.

In 1844, Vestris and Mathews opened a new Boucicault comedy, Used Up, at the Haymarket Theatre. The piece was based on a French farce by Félix Auguste Duvert and Augustin-Théodore de Lauzanne. Mathews, who played the leading role of Sir Charles Coldstream, contributed much of the dialogue, and his acting was largely responsible for the play's success.

Sir Charles is a wonderful role, and the novelist Charles Dickens later performed it in an amateur production. Dickens's friend, the artist Augustus Egg, even painted a portrait of the writer in the part, which you can see here, courtesy of ArtUK and the Charles Dickens Museum. Boucicault himself played the role in the U.S., first in New York in 1854, and later in New Orleans.

In the play, the spoiled Sir Charles is so bored with life that he resolves to propose marriage to the next woman he meets. That woman ends up being his neighbor, Lady Clutterbuck, who in a rather unlikely turn of events, was previously married to a blacksmith hired to install a balcony outside a window in Sir Charles's house. Even the prospect of marriage doesn't relieve the young aristocrat's boredom, but he begins to feel alive again as he fights the blacksmith, and the two topple out of the window and into a river.

In the second act, both Sir Charles and the blacksmith are presumed dead. Both, however, are alive but in hiding, fearing they'll be charged with one another's murder. While disguised as a simple plough-boy, Sir Charles falls in love with Mary Wurzel, the niece of one of his tenant farmers. Eventually, he learns his lesson, which he sums up for the audience in true Boucicault fashion:

...a man's happiness, after all, lies within himself--with employment for the mind, exercise for the body, a domestic hearth, and a mind at ease...

Even if that sentiment feels a little trite today, the play is a great deal of fun, and it helped Boucicault learn his craft so he could go on to pen better plays, including The Poor of New York.

Lillah McCarthy as Dionysus

Euripides's masterpiece The Bacchae won a posthumous first-place prize for the author when it originally premiered at the City Dionysia in 405 BCE. However, it was not generally performed after the collapse of the classical world. In fact, the play's premiere in English did not occur until 1908, when the role of the great god Dionysus was played by none other than the actress Lillah McCarthy.

David Bullen has an excellent article on this production in the most recent issue of Theatre Notebook. Originally, Dionysus would have been played by a man, of course, given the conventions of Greek drama, and throughout the twentieth century, the part has almost always been cast as male. However, Bullen puts McCarthy's portrayal in the context of nineteenth-century actresses like Elizabeth Vestris who expanded the repertoire of female performers by taking on traditionally male roles.

The 1908 production lasted only two matinees, due to a dispute between translator Gilbert Murray and director William Poel, who was famous for his stagings of Elizabethan classics but appears to have been unsuited for a Greek revival. In spite of the fact that the chorus was supposed to consist of frantic maenads, Poel had the women speaking the chorus's lines stay virtually still for the entire play, while other dancers playing maenads danced in a small space at the center of the stage.

McCarthy herself complained about Poel cutting many of her lines and having her stand like "a statue in Ivory & Gold." This was quite a change for the vigorous actress who had originated the role of Ann Whitefield in Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. The production was apparently so far away from the Dionysian passion Murray imagined that the translator withdrew his consent. McCarthy asked Murray for permission to re-stage the piece if she could find a new director, but alas, nothing came of those plans.

Bullen argues that the ill-fated production still had an effect on British drama, though, including influencing Shaw's Misalliance. Shaw originally crafted the part of Lina Szczepanowska in that play for McCarthy, though the part ultimately went to another performer. Lina literally descends from the heavens in Misalliance (albeit in an airplane rather than on a cloud of glory) and introduces a new Bacchic energy into the lives of a rather staid English family. As Bullen notes, the play is not an adaptation of The Bacchae, but it is certainly influenced by it.

Even more important to Bullen is the play's engagement with the women's suffrage movement, which was backed by many of the artists involved in the production, McCarthy included. Sometimes simply performing a role can be a political act, and the on-stage maenads in many ways reflected the frenzied protests of suffrage advocates off the stage.

Immigrant Dramatists

Today there were protests all across the United States in support of immigrants, so I wanted to blog about some of the great American dramatists who were immigrants:

Dion Boucicault - Born in Ireland, Dion Boucicault moved to England where he rose to fame with his play London Assurance, which Madame Vestris produced at Covent Garden. After a string of hits in London, he moved to New York, where he conquered Broadway with his melodrama The Poor of New York. The play was actual adapted from a French work, but Boucicault went on to write the quintessentially American play The Octoroon, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently adapted for the 21st century. Boucicault is perhaps the first truly great American playwright. (Though you could argue for the French-born Anna Cora Mowatt.) And, of course, he was an immigrant.

Kurt Weill - Don't you love "Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "The Saga of Jenny"? All of those hit Broadway songs were written by the German immigrant Kurt Weill. "Mack the Knife" of course came from The Threepenny Opera, which Weill originally wrote in Berlin with Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. Being as he was a gay Jewish leftist, Weill had to flee Hitler's Germany, first to Paris, then London, and eventually New York. That's where he collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us the jazz standard "September Song." "The Saga of Jenny" comes from Lady in the Dark, and featured lyrics by the all-American Ira Gershwin, who was--incidentally--the son of immigrants.

Maria Irene Fornes - Born in Cuba, Maria Irene Fornes moved to New York in the 1950s. Her play Fefu and Her Friends has become a modern classic. I've always been a fan of her brutal one-act play The Conduct of Life, and spoke about it when she received the 2015 Edwin Booth Award. Recently, the Signature Theatre produced her short play Drowning, which reimagined a story by Anton Chekhov, but was told from the point of view of aliens from outer space. Fornes wasn't from outer space, but she was once an alien to this country, before become one of America's great playwrights of the 20th century.

Nilo Cruz - Speaking of Cuban-American playwrights, Nilo Cruz, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Anna in the Tropics, was born in Matanzas in Cuba, but immigrated to Miami as a child when his parents fled communism. Cruz's play Sotto Voce tells the story of a woman mourning the failure of both Cuba and the United States to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. As a former refugee himself, Cruz certainly knows the importance of showing compassion to those who arrive on your borders.

Martyna Majok - And who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize for drama? That would be Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok. I haven't seen The Cost of Living, which garnered her the award, but her play Ironbound is wonderful, and deals quite poignantly with coming of age in urban America.

So thank you, immigrants. You make America great!

Isaac Pocock

Originally a painter, Isaac Pocock began writing for the stage with the musical farce Yes or No? which opened in 1808 at the Haymarket Theatre in London. More farces followed, such as the 1810 smash Hit or Miss! with Charles Mathews.

Pocock wrote numerous melodramas, the most famous being The Miller and His Men, which featured music by Henry Bishop. The composer would later become famous for writing the melody to "Home, Sweet Home," which first appeared in John Howard Payne's play Clari, or the Maid of Milan. Pocock later wrote his own "operatic entertainment" entitled Home, Sweet Home!, which also featured Bishop's music and included the famed Madame Vestris in the cast.

Artistic training can come in handy, as when Pocock painted this portrait of his famous collaborator, Bishop. Pocock's stage directions also suggest a penchant for visual composition. Consider the opening description from The Miller and His Men:

The Banks of a River in Bohemia. On the right, in the distance, a rocky eminence, on which is a windmill at work--a cottage in front, R. Sunset.

Music. The MILLER'S MEN are seen in perspective, descending the eminence--they cross the river in boats, and land near the cottage, with their sacks, singing the following round....

Clearly, Pocock knew how to take advantage of the scenic effects available to him. These effects helped to make The Miller and His Men the most popular play of all for 19th-century toy theatres. At the end of the story, the mill explodes, and this dramatic scene was used in advertising toy theatre versions of the play. A young Charles Dickens is said to have delighted his schoolmates with toy-theatre productions of Pocock's melodrama.

Later, Pocock penned operatic dramas adapted from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His adaptation of Rob Roy Macgregor opened in 1818 at Covent Garden with William Charles Macready in the title role. This play was also a favorite of the toy theatre.

Towards the end of his life, Pocock provided the text for the Christmas equestrian spectacular King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which ran during the winter of 1834-35. He passed away later that year, but still had a couple of his plays produced posthumously.

Madame Vestris and the London Stage

Lucia Elizabeth Bartolozzi, later known as Madame Vestris, was born into an interesting family, to say the least. Her father, Gaetano Bartolozzi, was an art dealer and son of an engraver to King George III, and her mother, Therese Jansen Bartolozzi, was a musician to whom the great Haydn had dedicated five different piano pieces.

When she was just 15, she met Armand Vestris, a ballet dancer at the King's Theatre in London. The two married at the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields in 1813. At the age of 18, Madame Vestris made her debut as a performer, taking the title role in Peter von Winter's opera Il Ratto di Proserpina. She made quite an impression, winning even the admiration of Princess Charlotte.

Though Madame Vestris was gaining the affection of the crowds, that audience did not include her husband. He took her to Paris, where he hoped to renew his career, and then left her there, heading off with another woman to Naples, where he had an engagement at the Teatro San Carlo. They never saw each other again.

Returning to London, Madame Vestris made her debut at Drury Lane in the comic opera The Siege of Belgrade. Seeing her there, the critic Leigh Hunt called her "a true singer, a pleasing actress, and a handsome woman; three graces not very frequently united in the same woman."

This "handsome woman" had such fine legs that audiences flocked to see her dressed as a man. She appeared as a Persian prince in Artaxerxes and then as the great libertine in Giovanni in London, a burlesque sequel to Mozart's Don Giovanni that follows the arch-rake after he gets kicked out of Hell for trying to seduce the Furies. More trouser roles followed, including Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

Hunt wrote disapprovingly of these roles, claiming: "The more we are pleased with her in trousers and boots, the more we long to see her out of them.... In a word, we never remember an instance of an actress who contrived to be at once so very much of a gentleman and yet so entire and unaltered a woman." Whether or not Hunt was entirely aware of the sexual nature of these comments, the male admirers of Madame Vestris were certainly drawn to her, and for more than just her acting skills.

By 1822, Madame Vestris had taken up residence on Curzon Street, where she earned the nickname "The Siren of Mayfair." She gathered a bevy of admirers, jokingly referred to as her "Vestry-men." Her husband died in 1825, but it was not as if the swells of London had considered her unavailable before then. That same year, Madame Vestris had her breakout hit, appearing opposite John Liston in John Poole's comedy Paul Pry at the Haymarket. She sang the song "Cherry Ripe," a ditty whose sexual double-entendres were surely not lost on the audience. The play was performed 115 times that season, giving it the longest initial run of any play in London since the original production of The Beggar's Opera.

Gossipmongers endlessly speculated about which "Vestry-men" had made it into her bed. However, as William W. Appleton puts it in his biography Madame Vestris and the London Stage: "Her reputed stable of lovers would have taxed the energies of a full-time courtesan, let alone those of an extraordinarily busy actress." In fact, the letters of some of her admirers suggest that while she might have been a great flirt, she tended to hold off sexual relations, much to their frustration.

As interesting as her career as an actress was, Madame Vestris is known primarily for her role as a theatre manager. Certainly, women had managed theatres in Britain before, but none had been quite as prominent as Madame Vestris. In 1830, while she was working at the Tottenham Street Theatre, Charles Kemble, then the lessee of Covent Garden, brought suit against the minor theatre, arguing it had no license to perform "legitimate" drama. On December 6, the theatre announced it would have to close, and that same day, Madame Vestris rented another theatre, the Olympic, from John Scott for a thousand pounds a year.

As head of the her own theatre, she abolished benefit nights, which did not always function to an actor's benefit anyway, and hired the gifted comic actress Julia Glover. She also got rid of the long lists of people to receive free tickets, offering complimentary admission only to the press. Similarly, the Green Room became more exclusive, as she ushered out any outsiders who did not need to be there, which simultaneously made the theatre more respectable.

Acutely aware of the dangers of presenting "legitimate" serious dramas that might compete with the two patent houses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Madame Vestris produced elaborate light entertainments, many written and designed by James Planché. She played the central character of Pandora in Planché's Olympic Revels, which aimed to please but not intellectually challenge its audience.

In 1835, she hired for six pounds a week Charles James Mathews, the son of the famous comedian Charles Mathews. By the next year, there were already rumors they were sleeping with each other. He was only seven years younger than her, but the pairing turned heads. It was one thing for a man managing a theatre to have a relationship with a younger actress. For a woman manager to take up with a pretty-boy novice whose main claim to fame was his celebrity dad was another matter.

(However, some of the men spreading rumors were probably just jealous. Not yet 40, Madame was still recognized as having the best pair of legs in London.)

Though gossip persisted, the couple kept mum. Then, on July 18, 1838, a week before the company was scheduled to set sail on an American tour, the two were quietly married. The service was over and the two were out the door of the church before the public had a chance to come and gawk. Cruel commentators noted that recent productions at the Olympic had included You Can't Marry Your Grandmother and What Have I Done? It didn't matter. The couple was to enjoy a long, happy union, in spite of the naysayers.

The following year, the great actor William Macready announced he was giving up the management of Covent Garden. Madame Vestris, as she was still called, or Mrs. Mathews, which was her more proper legal name, jumped at the opportunity. She announced that she would be taking over the lease of one of the two inner sanctums of British high drama. Reassuring the public comic actors would not be usurping great tragic roles, she declared: "Mr. Mathews will not play Macbeth and I have positively refused Queen Katharine."

For her debut production at Covent Garden, she revived Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, which had not been seen on stage since the days of the Bard himself. "I have done great things in a small theatre so you will not now find cause to complain that I have done small things in a great one," she announced before the curtain went up. She herself played Rosaline, the best female part in the play, but in spite of the production's ambitions, it did not please the audience.

Taking seriously Covent Garden's mission to provide high art, Madame Vestris produced Leigh Hunt's poetic drama A Legend of Florence, but it came off feeling like a watered-down version of Romeo and Juliet. She had better luck producing more of Planché's extravaganzas, like The Fortunate Isles and The Sleeping Beauty.

She still stuck to her ambitions of producing great Shakespearian comedy, first with The Merry Wives of Windsor and then with A Midsummer Night's Dream. The latter play had not been performed in its original form since the Puritans had closed the theatres in 1642. Instead, the Restoration era had transformed it into an opera. The landmark production she staged in 1840 marked an important milestone in the return on Shakespeare productions to the original texts.

An even bigger theatrical milestone came in 1841 with the production of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance. Though the play did not have the first box set in England (in fact, Madame Vestris had already given the public a rudimentary box set at the Olympic for the play The Conquering Game), the scenery was so magnificent it drew its own applause. Covent Garden was enjoying great artistic success, even though the high rent kept the company only just solvent.

Then, Charles Kemble struck again. The same man who had shut down the Tottenham Street Theatre when he was running Covent Garden decided he wanted his old theatre back. He maneuvered to get the proprietors to terminate the lease for a temporary shortfall of 600 pounds, allowing them to seize 14,000 pounds worth of properties Madame Vestris still had in the theatre.

After being thrown out of the theatre in which they had made their livelihood, Madame Vestris and her husband found themselves living hand to mouth. In 1847, facing competition from other great actors, "Mrs. Mathews" went on a farewell tour of the provinces. The farewell tour proved so lucrative, she was able to return to London with her husband and lease the Lyceum Theatre. So much for farewells!

At the Lyceum, they produced popular extravaganzas, but money troubles continued to plague them. In 1856, Madame Vestris died, and her husband made sure the funeral was solemn and private, much like their wedding. She was buried at Kensal Green, but her legacy lived on, in a London theatre scene that would be forever changed.

Poor Julia Glover!

The life of an actress is rarely easy, but Julia Glover had it harder than most. Born Julia Betterton to a family of 18th-century actors, she went to work early. By the time she was six years old, she reportedly had appeared more times on stage than most actors do in their entire lives.

As a juvenile actress, she soon outshone her own father. Young Julia acted the part of the child Duke of York to George Frederick Cooke's Richard III. Her father drove hard bargains managing her career in the provinces, and in 1797 she made her London debut as Elvina in Hannah More's tragedy Percy.

While Mr. Betterton was living off of his daughter, he treated her horribly, and by one account even had her horsewhipped for slight or non-existent transgressions. Eventually, he decided to sell the goose that laid the golden eggs. In return for a thousand pounds, he agreed to coerce his daughter into marrying Samuel Glover, a so-called gentleman who was anything but.

Samuel said he loved Julia more than anything. He also said his bond for a thousand pounds was totally good. Mr. Betterton should not have believed him on either count. The two were married, and soon after, it was found that Glover's entire family had been reduced to poverty. Even had they still kept anything, Samuel wouldn't have received it. His father cut him off for marrying an actress, and Mr. Betterton was never paid.

Julia went from being forced to support a dead-beat parent to being forced to support a dead-beat husband. Fortunately, the theatres were willing to pay. John Philip Kemble gave her a three-year contract to play at Covent Garden. She played for four, and then after not getting what she asked for, left. In 1810, she joined the company of Drury Lane. Their theatre had burned down the previous year, so they were performing at the Lyceum, but when the new Drury Lane Theatre opened in 1812, hopes for the company were high.

Though Julia was known for her comic roles, she did a turn as Alhadra in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's gothic tragedy Remorse. Even more memorable for her contemporaries were her portrayals of Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and Mrs. Candour in Sheridan's The School for Scandal. The real scandal, however, was her husband Samuel. In addition to living off of Julia himself, he used her earnings to support a mistress. When she discovered this, she left him. But as he was still her husband, he demanded that Drury Lane pay her salary directly to him. The theatre balked. He sued. He won.

As if that weren't bad enough, Samuel tried to get custody of their children, in spite of never having taken an interest in them before. Presumably, his real motive was to extract more money from his wife. Whether he got it or not, she kept custody of the kids. Her eldest daughter ended up making a fine actress, taking the role of Juliet opposite Edmund Kean in a production that featured Julia as the nurse. Julia went on to play numerous older characters as she continued to act well into her twilight years. She gave her final performance in the role of Mrs. Malaprop on July 12, 1850. She died four days later.

For all her tragedy in life, Julia never lost her comic timing. According to an anecdote, she was once gossiping with two other actresses after the renowned Madam Vestris had married fellow actor Charles Mathews. Supposedly, before Vestis had accepted the proposal, she had made a full confession of all her previous lovers. "What touching confidence!" cried one actress. "What needless trouble!" cried another. "What a wonderful memory!" cried Julia.

A woman of such wit deserved better in life.

Notes on Realist Drama

The Failure of '48

In 1848, the Romantic spirit erupted in revolutions throughout Europe. Though some fighting had already begun in Sicily, the upheavals began in earnest in February with a revolt in France that toppled the moderate King Louis Philippe and established a French Republic for the first time since the ascension of Napoleon. Revolutions soon swept through Italy, Germany, Denmark, and the Austrian Empire. The Irish rose up against British rule, and England itself narrowly escaped revolution when a protest of more than 100,000 people in London ended with a peaceful petition for greater reform.

One after another, however, the revolutions collapsed. Pope Pius IX, once viewed as a potential champion of Italian independence, sided with reactionaries, setting back the unification of Italy by more than two decades. Czar Nicholas I came to the aid of the Austrian empire and sent hundreds of thousands of troops who aided in imposing martial law. Polish fighters failed miserably in their attempt to resurrect their country, which had been partitioned in the eighteenth century. Across Germany, scores of uprisings collapsed, and liberals went into exile, many of them fleeing to the United States. A year that began with such hope for change ended with many progressives falling into despair.

Though moderate reforms sometimes gained ground, the forces of conservatism largely restored the status quo, often with great bloodshed. Even France's new republic did not last long. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, a nephew of the former emperor, staged a coup in 1851, ending constitutional rule. He later crowned himself emperor, taking the name Napoleon III out of deference to Napoleon's son who never actually ruled. Instead of moving forward, history seemed to be comically inverting itself.  The political change young intellectuals across the continent had hoped for seemed an illusion.

In one of the last uprisings of the movement, the people of Dresden rose up against the King of Saxony in 1849. Among then was the young composer Richard Wagner. Banished after the failure of the revolt, Wagner wrote that the revolution must be carried out by other means. Not only Wagner, but artists of all kinds turned to the theatre as a means to change society in ways that arms and violence had failed. The Romantic dreaming of the past half century had ended in ruins, so many people believed the theatre should return to cold, hard facts, presented as realistically as possible.

The Box Set

One of the most important elements of the new, more realistic aesthetic of the theatre was the box set. The actress and theatre manager Lucia Elizabeth Vestris, better known as Madame Vestris, first introduced London audiences to this new technique of stage design in 1832 at the Olympic Theatre. The box set presents a room with a floor, ceiling, and three fixed walls, as if it were a real room with an imaginary fourth wall removed. The side walls and ceiling typically slope back away from the audience, so a box set is not an exact reproduction of a room, but it comes close. A few theatres in Europe had experimented with lashing together a few flats to create something approximating a box set, but the designs introduced by Vestris outdid anything that had been seen previously.

Together with her husband, the actor Charles Mathews, Vestris later took over the Covent Garden Theatre. That was where she introduced even more elaborate box sets for the 1841 premiere of London Assurance, a comedy by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. The play frequently calls for the actors to speak directly to the audience, a technique that later became known as "breaking the fourth wall." London Assurance only has one setting per act, a tradition the box set helped to solidify. While backdrops could be quickly lifted up into a theatre's fly space, box sets were cumbersome to change, meaning scene changes were often limited to intermissions.

After finding success with London Assurance, Boucicault worked on both sides of the Atlantic, continuing to write plays that exploited elaborate set designs. He adapted the French play The Poor of Paris as The Poor of New York, sometimes known as The Streets of New York, which debuted in 1857. Boucicault reset the play during a recent financial crisis and used place names that were familiar to New Yorkers. The climactic scene took place in a tenement in Five Points, the worst neighborhood in the city. The building spectacularly went up in flames on stage in full view of the audience.

Returning to England, Boucicault changed all of the local references and presented the play in Liverpool as The Poor of Liverpool, and later in London as The Streets of London. Rewriting plays to suit the tastes of local audiences became a hallmark of Boucicault's drama. In 1859, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, he wrote the slavery melodrama The Octoroon, which managed to win popularity with Northerners and Southerners alike. The plot involves a white man in love with the title character, who is one-eighth black and legally a slave. In the U.S., many people considered such a "mixed" relationship unthinkable, so the heroine tragically died in the end. British audiences had no such qualms, so in 1861 he presented the play in London with a new, happy ending.

While Boucicault was busy writing and rewriting plays based on spectacle, Vestris quietly built up her own theatrical style. She banished the public from actors' dressing rooms and moved curtain times earlier so families could attend. Both of these reforms made the theatre more respectable. Even more importantly, she insisted on realistic sets, so that, in the words of her actor husband, "Drawing rooms were fitted up like drawing rooms." Other theatre artists praised her for her scrupulous attention to detail that helped to perfect a new style of theatrical illusion. However, Vestris could only do so much with hackney plays by the likes of Boucicault. For true realism, the theatre needed more than just box sets.

The Well-Made Play

By the middle of the nineteenth century, many playwrights, especially in France, were championing a tighter, more streamlined form of drama in which logic dictated the plot rather than a desire for spectacular stage effects. The French dramatist Eugéne Scribe set the standard for these new plays with his 1842 comedy The Glass of Water. Like many Romantic dramas, the play is set in an earlier historical epic, but instead of presenting a sweeping history drama, as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas had done, Scribe reduced the affairs of nations to trivialities. What is more, he had the entire plot hang upon the seemingly minor act of the queen asking for a glass of water. Because the plots of Scribe and his followers were so tightly constructed, their works became known as well-made plays.

Sometimes, well-made plays took on important social issues. This was the case of the 1852 drama Camille by Dumas' son, who is known as Alexandre Dumas, fils. Camille tells the tragic story of a virtuous courtesan in love with a young man. She leaves him for his own good, but the two reunite by the end, when she dies of consumption (tuberculosis). Giuseppe Verdi adapted the play as the opera La Traviata, which opened the following year.

Camille questions conventional morality, but more often well-made plays confirmed the status quo. This was the case of the1855 play Olympe's Marriage by Émile Augier. Angier's play inverts the story of Camille, making the courtesan a scheming villainess. In the finale, a nobleman shoots the sinful woman in righteous indignation, declaring that God is his judge. For decades, these more conventional dramas dominated the stage. Even when important issues like slavery arose, such as in the spectacular stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, virtuous and villainous characters remained clearly demarcated as a way to help the audience enjoy the action rather than having to think seriously about complex issues.

Well-made plays frequently emphasized important stage props, as was the case in A Scrap of Paper, the 1860 comedy by Victorien Sardou. Sardou's characters seem less like people and more like cogs in a machine as they relentlessly chase the titular scrap of paper, a lost love letter, throughout the play, nearly burning it, throwing it out the window, and using it as blackmail. Sardou later wrote the play Tosca as a vehicle for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. As the play's protagonist was an opera singer, the composer Giacomo Puccini logically turned the piece into a popular opera. In spite of Sardou's popularity, however, some found his plots to be too neatly constructed, and the critic (and later playwright) George Bernard Shaw derided such plays, coining the ridiculous word Sardoodledom to connote a mechanically contrived and trivial play.

The German playwright Gustav Freytag wrote few lasting plays of merit, but he composed one of the most important manuals on how to construct a well-made play. In his 1863 book The Technique of the Drama, Freytag laid out a prescriptive structure for plots. Known as Freytag's Pyramid, this structure begins with exposition, in which the audience receives important background information, often through unlikely conversations between minor characters. The exposition is followed by rising action, in which the play's excitement builds toward the climax, which is the peak of the audience's interest. After the climax comes falling action in which the chief conflict unravels. The play then ends with the final resolution, which Freytag described using the French term dénoument. Though Freytag's plays never caught on, his dramatic theory had a long-lasting impact on later writers.

The Total Work of Art

In 1849, following the failed Dresden uprising, the young revolutionary and composer Richard Wagner published a long essay entitled "The Artwork of the Future." Wagner had already established a reputation with such operas as The Flying Dutchman, but the essay looked forward to a new art form that would go beyond the music-centered world of traditional opera. He advocated a new form of "music drama" which would be a "Gesamtkunstwerk" or "total work of art" arising out of the collective consciousness of "the people." Dance, tone, and poetry would all become one. There would no longer be separate arts, but one art, uniting all the others in a single vision.

Wagner tried to put his ideas into practice by writing both the music and lyrics of a massive four-opera cycle known as The Ring of the Nibelungen and then attempting to stage all four operas himself. Based loosely on Norse mythology, the opera's showed the gods building their homeland of Valhalla, disputing with one another, witnessing the rise of a hero, and then ultimately being destroyed, as Valhalla goes up in flames. To contain this epic drama, Wagner envisioned a special festival house designed specifically for its performance. Gaining the support of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner finally got his theatre, and in 1876 he staged the entire cycle in a specially designed opera house in the town of Bayreuth. No one had ever seen anything like it.

The Bayreuth Festival Theatre was purposefully built with few ornaments so as not to distract the audience from the stage. Wagner made sure the seats were laid out in a democratic fashion with no galleries or box seats, so that everyone got a good view of the action. A special double proscenium made the stage appear further back than it actually was, and a recessed orchestra pit created what Wagner called a "mystic gulf" between the stage and the audience. Advances in lighting allowed Wagner to place the audience in complete darkness, something that had never been done in the past. Lavish costumes and sets transported the scene to a realm that was mythic and magical, but he had each detail crafted with painstaking realism.

Today, the Bayreuth Festival continues to operate, bringing tens of thousands of people to the theatre every summer. Though many of Wagner's dreams never materialized precisely as he envisioned them, he has had a profound impact on the theatre. Wagner helped to codify the separation of the audience from the action of the play, solidifying the metaphorical "fourth wall." He also introduced technical innovations in lighting, sets, and theatre design that became standard practice in the late nineteenth century. Most importantly, he showed how powerful theatre could be when all elements, words, music, acting, lighting, set and costume design, together worked toward a common artistic vision.

Wagner was not the only theatre artist to work towards such a vision, or even the only one in Germany. Unlike Wagner, Georg II, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, had no need for noble patronage, as he was a noble himself, taking over a powerful duchy in 1866 upon the abdication of his father. The Duke took over the Meiningen Ensemble and introduced numerous reforms aimed at making plays more realistic and historically accurate. He had seen the antiquarian productions of Shakespeare that Charles Kean had staged in London, and the Duke wanted to take Kean's verisimilitude to a new level. For eight years, he maintained a vigorously trained company dedicated to performing a repertory of classic plays.

In 1874, the duke took his plays on the road, exhibiting his cutting-edge productions first in Berlin, then through Russia, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. The company gave thousands of performances throughout Europe, frequently putting local theatres to shame. Audiences were shocked not just by the historical accuracy of the sets and costumes, but by the way the ensemble of actors worked together as a unit. There were no stars in the Duke's company. When an actor was not cast in a leading role, he or she had to appear onstage in a minor part or as a supernumerary, one person in a crowd of others.

Those crowd scenes particularly impressed audiences. In the Duke's production of Julius Caesar, crowds wearing Roman togas acted not as a mob, but as a host of individual characters, each with his or her own unique blocking. The effect was a single, unified production, but with each element, each action, planned out to serve the play. Because the company traveled widely over the course of 16 years, theatre artists from all over Europe saw the productions, and they were invariably influenced by what they saw. A generation of new artists then sought to create a new type of theatre, one that, like Wagner's, was dominated by a single, all-controlling vision.

Ibsen

The first practitioner of what we now think of as modern drama was also one of the last of the Romantics. The Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen was living in a self-imposed exile in Italy when in 1865 he wrote a verse tragedy called Brand about an uncompromising Christian minister. Ibsen never meant for the piece to be performed, but its inherent theatricality led to its premiere two years later in Sweden and to Ibsen's gaining wide spread acclaim. The same year that Brand received its first performance, Ibsen wrote an even more ambition verse drama, Peer Gynt, about a charismatic con man who is the opposite of the protagonist in Brand. Though Peer Gynt was far too long to be performed in its entirety, from the 1870s on it became a staple of the international repertoire, aided by incidental music Edvard Grieg composed especially for the piece.

After writing the two greatest verse dramas in his native language, Ibsen abandoned writing plays in verse and composed his next two plays, The League of Youth and Emperor and Galilean, in prose. The first was a satire on the small-mindedness of modern politicians while the later was a sprawling historical drama about the conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Roman Empire. Having outgrown Romanticism, Ibsen had not yet found a new way to talk about the important issues of humanity in a way that spoke to the concerns of the modern era. Moving to Munich, Ibsen wrote The Pillars of Society, a play that feels at home in a box set and draws upon many elements of the well-made play. However, it brought together elements of comedy, melodrama, and satire into a coherent whole, presenting a unified vision of the corruption at the heart of the modern world.

More than any other author, Ibsen became associated with the new style of Realism. In Ibsen's hands, Realism did not just present the world as it appeared on the surface, it also probed deeper into the underlying issues of society in general. Ibsen portrayed characters with complex psychologies, who seemed like actual people one might meet in real life. At the same time, these characters groped with the fundamental issues of human existence--life, death, love, injustice--in a way that made them rise above the banality of everyday life. Though Ibsen's world appears as real as our own, audiences are acutely aware of the fact that there is more on stage than meets the eye.

Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll House exemplified this new aesthetic, and simultaneously caused a considerable uproar. The play portrays a middle-class woman who abandons her husband and children, slamming the door behind her. Some actresses refused to perform the ending as written, and Ibsen grudgingly wrote an alternative ending in order to forestall hack writers from coming up with their own, even more watered-down endings. Critics attacked Ibsen's next play, Ghosts, even more fiercely, calling it "a dirty act done publicly," "blasphemous," and "as foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace" the theatre. While newspapers attacked Ibsen for openly discussing venereal disease onstage, they dared not address the play's truly shocking revelation that a young man is in love with his half-sister.

While Ghosts is steeped in the imagery of disease, Ibsen was far more concerned with the ethical diseases of a society unwilling or unable to deal with the darker side of human nature. He turned to pollution as a metaphor for this same social corruption in his next play An Enemy of the People. By turns comic and tragic, the play shows a doctor hailed as a savior when he reveals that pollution is tainting the town's water. Once it becomes apparent that news of the contamination could hurt the town's reputation as a tourist destination, however, the citizens turn on him and his family, trying to drive them from their home. Many critics have taken the play as a response to criticism of Ghosts, but Ibsen's wide-ranging critique of democratic societies transcends any particular feuds over plays or pollution.

The next four plays of Ibsen, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, and Hedda Gabler, have even more complex characters. The psychological realism with which he portrays people can be painful to watch. Hedda Gabler, which Ibsen completed in 1890, pushes Realism to its limits, placing onstage not just a couple of historians, but seemingly the forces that drive history as well. The plot of the play revolves in part around a book about the future, and in Ibsen's later plays, he reached out toward the future of art, ultimately moving beyond the Realism he had helped to establish. Even the solidly realistic plays of Ibsen were too much for many professional theatres to take, and to perform them, sympathetic artist had to find a whole new way of staging plays.

The Independent Theatre Movement

Theatre was particularly stultified in France during the latter half of nineteenth century. The official state theatre, the Comédie Française, kept its stranglehold on serious drama, while the popular houses, known as boulevard theatres, stuck to maudlin melodramas and light-weight farces. These included the works of Georges Feydeau, who in 1882 had his first big hit with the farce Through the Window, and would later pen such classic comedies as A Flea in Her Ear. Paris had a number of small amateur theatre groups, however, some of which did quite fine work. In 1887, an obscure clerk named André Antoine quit his amateur theatre troupe because it wouldn't produce a play he wanted it to do. French theatre would never be the same.

Antoine founded his own theatre, known as the Théâtre Libre, which was open only to audiences who signed up for a special subscription. By organizing his theatre as a private club, Antoine avoided censorship laws. He immediately began staging important new plays, including The Power of Darkness by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. After seeing the Meiningen Ensemble, he made his productions increasingly realistic. In 1890, he put on Ibsen's Ghosts, and the following year The Wild Duck. Critics flocked to see his productions, and word quickly spread about the bold new style Antoine championed.

In addition to performing Realist works, the Théâtre Libre became known for championing an even more extreme style known as Naturalism. The novelist Émile Zola considered Naturalism to be a scientific approach to literature that focused on heredity, environment, and the most basic impulses of human beings. Zola adapted his own novel Therese Raquin as a play in 1873, and Antoine later staged numerous adaptations of Zola's work at the Théâtre Libre. More gifted as a playwright than Zola was the Swedish writer August Strindberg. After writing his first great Naturalist play, The Father, Strindberg set to work on a new play with Antoine's theatre specifically in mind. Antoine did in fact later stage that play, Miss Julie, which became a classic due to its fierce and uncompromising portrayal of two people caught up in a ferocious downward spiral of sex and violence.

Companies all over Europe tried to reproduce the success of Antoine's Théâtre Libre. Strindberg himself founded the short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, together with his first wife, the actress Siri von Essen. In 1889, the theatre put on Miss Julie with von Essen in the title role. With this new theatre in mind, Strindberg wrote the short play The Stronger, which was intended to be a vehicle for his wife. Unfortunately, neither the theatre nor the marriage lasted long thereafter.

The same year Strindberg premiered Miss Julie, another independent theatre was founded in Berlin. German theatre artists who worked all over the city came together on Sundays, when they had the day off from more official theatres, so they could put on the types of plays they really wanted to perform. The theatre was known as the Freie Bühne--German for "Free Stage"--and operated as a democratic collective, though its first president, Otto Brahm, helped to guide it for years. The company performed the plays of Ibsen, as well as those of the German Naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. Hauptmann is best known for The Weavers, which told the true story of a labor uprising that had happened during the Industrial Revolution.

Britain took more time to open up to this new way of staging plays, but in 1891 the drama critic Jacob Grein founded the Independent Theatre Society, which brought Antoine's subscription model to London. Free of censorship laws, the new society opened with a production of Ghosts. Grein asked his fellow critic George Bernard Shaw, who was famous for mocking the popular plays of the London stage, to provide one of his own works for the society. Shaw obliged him with Widowers Houses, a play that examines the issue of slum landlords in a way that implicates nearly everyone as part of the problem. As if that weren't enough, Shaw followed the play up with Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play about both prostitution and feminism, and Arms and the Man, which attacked romanticized notions of war.

Over his long career, Shaw would go on to write clever comedies (You Never Can Tell, Major Barbara, Pygmalion), historical dramas (The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan), and highly philosophical plays (Man and Superman, Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah). His immense popularity showed that the new theatre that had begun on small, independent stages had now become mainstream. Realism became the style of the establishment, and new rebels would rise up against it, demanding new forms. Even as these new revolts were stirring, two men on the other side of Europe were creating what would become the single most influential theatre for the next hundred years. The men were Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the company they founded in 1898 was The Moscow Art Theatre.

Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko were both committed to an unprecedented devotion to Realism down to the smallest detail. Their first big hit at the Moscow Art Theatre was The Seagull, a play by Anton Chekhov that had previously flopped. Under the direction of Stanislavski, however, the play was a triumph. Stanislavski continued to both direct and act in Chekhov's future works, including Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Though Chekhov saw all of these plays as comedies, Stanislavski directed them with an intense earnestness.

After the Russian Revolution, Stanislavski published many of his thoughts on acting and traveled widely, sharing his technique with actors and directors around the world. His teachings, particularly as recorded in the book An Actor Prepares, became a new standard for acting all over the world. Stanislavski's Realist method became known simply as "the method." Realism, seemingly, had triumphed.