August Strindberg, Excerpt from "On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre" (1889)
Translated by Børge Gedsø Madsen
In this essay the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912) reflects on the evolution of the French drama. We are also given a glimpse into Strindberg's attitudes towards naturalist drama.
…There are some who wish to date the new drama from the Goncourt brothers' Henriette Maréchal, performed at the Théâtre Français as early as 1865 and booed. But the reasons for this dating are not well founded, since the Goncourts represent a Christian physiological movement of older times and in the structure of their play simply used a few bold devices which every realistic movement before them has known how to utilize.
Rather the naturalistic drama will probably continue to regard Thérèse Raquin from 1873 as its first milestone.…When Zola approaches the theatre to make a serious attempt to apply new methods, he is attracted immediately by a great and powerful motif, in this case a murder of one spouse in order that the other may gain the freedom to make another choice. But he does not proceed like Dumas or Augier, excusing the murder partly because of the prevailing legal system, which did not permit divorce; he neither excuses nor accuses, for he has canceled these concepts, but limits himself to a description of the development, indicating the motive of the act and showing its consequences. And in the pangs of conscience of the criminals he sees merely an expression of disrupted social harmony, the results of habit and inherited ideas.
Thérèse Raquin is a new departure, but since it is adapted from a novel it is still not perfect in form. The author has had the feeling, however, that through greater unity of place his audience would receive a more complete illusion, by which the action would impress its main feature more forcefully on the spectators. At every curtain rise, the spectator had to be haunted by the memories of the preceding act and thus through the impact of the recurring milieu be captivated by the action. But because of the difficulty in having a before and after the crime sequence, Zola commits the error of letting a year elapse between the first and second acts. Presumably he did not dare offend against the prevailing law about a year's widowhood, otherwise a day between the acts would have been enough, and the play would have made a more unified impression. I therefore once suggested to a director of a theatre, whom I wanted to persuade to produce Thérèse Raquin, that he remove the first act. This can be done without any harm to the play, and recently I have seen a deceased French Zolaist make the same suggestion in a work on naturalism.
With Renée, Zola seems to have returned to the form of the traditional Parisian comedy, with greater leaps in time and space than are compatible with the difficulty which a modern skeptical mind feels in allowing itself to be tricked into a belief in the conventions of the theatre. At the same time psychology is neglected in this play; the portrayal of character is superficial, and the whole thing is sketchy and melodramatic, which may be the usual result of adapting novels to the stage.
With Thérèse Raquin the great style, the deep probing of the human soul had attracted attention for a while, but no successors seem to venture forth. Still, the attempt has been made, since 1882, of regarding Henry Becque's Les Corbeaux as an epoch-making work. To me this seems to be a misunderstanding. If art is to be, as it has been said, a piece of nature seen through a temperament, then there really is a piece of nature in Becque's Crows, but the temperament is lacking.
A factory owner dies in the first act after, among many other incidents, his son has appeared in the first scene comically got up in his father's dressing gown. This completely superfluous little prank, the significance of which I fail to grasp, was probably included by the dramatist because it happened in real life from which this boring and rather unimportant episode has been taken. After the death of the factory owner, his partner, lawyers, paid and unpaid creditors appear on the scene and seize the inheritance, so that the family becomes insolvent. That is all!
Here we have the ordinary case which is so much in demand these days, the rule, the human norm, which is so banal, so insignificant, so dull that after four hours of suffering you ask yourself the old question: how does this concern me? This is the objective which is so beloved by those devoid of temperament, the soulless as they shall be called!
This is photography which includes everything, even the grain of dust on the lens of the camera. This is realism, a working method elevated to art, or the little art which does not see the forest for the trees. This is the misunderstood naturalism which holds that art merely consists of drawing a piece of nature in a natural way; it is not the great naturalism which seeks out the points where the great battles are fought, which loves to see what you do not see every day, which delights in the struggle between natural forces, whether these forces are called love and hate, rebellious or social instincts, which finds the beautiful or ugly unimportant if only it is great. It is this grandiose art which we found in Germinal and La Terre, and which we expected to see reappear in the theatre, but which did not come with Becque's Corbeaux or Zola's Renée, but which gradually was to come into existence through the opening of a new stage, which, under the name of the Théâtre Libre, is active in the heart of Paris.
…There are few theatres at which dramatic works are produced in all their natural freshness, their innate directness, in their original form, in other words. First of all they have to pass through the sieve of censorships and then be subjected to the collaboration of a systematic, experienced, and, what is worse, perhaps ignorant director. At the Théâtre Libre they appear in all their pleasing naivete and completeness, without embellishments and puerile abbreviations. If the success is but small, the result is a severe but useful lesson to the writer; if on the other hand it is great, the author gets all the credit. Double gain!
And both the credit and the lesson are so much more valuable because they do not owe anything to a charming staging of the play.
Here one does not find those superb settings which dazzle the eye and make the spectators overlook the emptiness of the action; none of those widely famous virtuosities which, like a scarlet cloak, hide the poverty of the form.
Here the staging of plays is very simple, and the performers consist of a handful of young devotees who combine all the naivete of inexperience with the conviction and enthusiasm of youth.
Shakespeare was not interpreted better than this when he wrote his masterpieces.
Rapidly a repertoire had arisen so that about twenty plays were performed in a year, and naturalism which had been declared impossible on the stage by critics and other timid persons, now asserted itself triumphantly there. Already one sees indications of a search for a form which seems to take the new drama in a direction somewhat different from the first attempts in Thérèse Raquin and which breaks away completely from Zola's adaptations of both L'Assommoir and Germinal with their crowd effects and elaborate theatrical apparatus.
Hardly a full-length play is seen, and Zola himself makes his debut with a one-act play; and when three-act plays were performed, a strong predilection for the unities of time and place was noticeable. Besides, intrigue seems to have been abandoned and the main interest focused on the psychological description of character.
In old Greek the word drama seems to have meant event, not action or what we call conscious intrigue. For life does not move as regularly as a constructed drama, and conscious spinners of intrigue very seldom get a chance to carry out their plans in detail. Thus we no longer believe in these cunning plotters who, unhindered, are permitted to control people's destinies, so that the villain in his conscious falseness merely arouses our ridicule as not being true to life.
In the new naturalistic drama a striving for the significant motif was felt at once. Therefore, the action was usually centered around life's two poles, life and death, the act of birth and the act of death, the fight for the spouse, for the means of subsistence, for honor, all these struggleswith their battlefields, cries of woe, wounded and dead—during which one heard the new philosophy of life conceived as a struggle, blow its fertile winds from the south.
These were tragedies such as had not been seen before. The young authors of a generation whose school had so far been a school of suffering—the most terrible, perhaps, which exists: severe intellectual oppression, even in such cruel forms as persecution with imprisonment and starvation—these young authors themselves seemed reluctant to impose their suffering on others more than was absolutely necessary. Therefore, they made the suffering as brief as possible, let the pain pour forth in one act, sometimes in a single scene. Such a little masterpiece was, for example, Entre Frères by Guiches and Lavedan. The play is so brief that it is performed in fifteen minutes, and the genre immediately was called quart d'heure.
The action, if it can be called action, is as follows: In a bed lies an old woman dying, and beside her stand her three sons. The dying person makes a sign that she wants to speak, and then she reveals the secret of her life: one of the sons was conceived in adultery. She falls back unconscious, apparently dead, before she has had time to tell which of the sons is the illegitimate one.
The sons deliberate and on certain grounds decide that the youngest one is legitimate. The marquis, the head of the family, suggests that they keep the secret, but that the illegitimate heir leave.
At that moment the mother comes to and is able to utter only these words: "It is the marquis!" The end!
This is the drama reduced to one scene, and why not? One who has had the job of reading plays which are submitted to a theatrical director soon observes that every play seems to have been written for the sake of a single scene, and that all the author's creative joy centered around this scene which sustained him during the terrible pains which exposition, presentation, entanglement, disentanglement, peripeteia, and catastrophe caused him.
For the satisfaction of having written a full-length play, he bores his audience by arousing its curiosity about matters it already knows, harasses the director by making him maintain a large personnel, makes life miserable for those unfortunate actors who play the secondary parts, as well as the critics, the confidants, the raisonneurs, without whom no intrigue or, full-length play can materialize, and to whom he must go to the trouble of giving a character.
Therefore carefully constructed five-act plays are very rare; and one has to put up with a lot of superfluous nonsense to get to the gist of the matter. Since I have recently read about twenty-five plays, among them one of four hundred pages with seventeen characters, I have been confirmed in certain suspicions about the reason for the lack of good drama. Every beginner seems to me to be able to write one good act; in that one he is true to life, every word is straightforward, and the action is honest. As soon as he embarks on the writing of long plays, every thing becomes labored, contrived, affected, and false. The two-act plays form a genre by themselves, but not a very happy one. It is the head and the tail, with the body missing; it is before and after the catastrophe, usually with a year between. Ordinarily the second act contains the moral lesson: this is how it goes if you do this and that in the first act. Most beautiful in construction are the three-act plays observing the unities of time and place, when the subject is a big one. For example, Ibsen's Ghosts should be compared with Rosmersholm which was found to be far too long. The taste of the period, this headlong, hectic period, seems to move toward the brief and expressive. Tolstoy's painful Power of Darkness at the Théâtre Libre proved incapable of keeping interest alive and even had to fall back on Franco-Russian politics for effect.
A scene, a quart d'heure, seems to be the type of play preferred by modern theatregoers, and it has an old history. For it can name as its origin (yes, why not?) the Greek tragedy which contains a concentrated event in a single act, if we regard the trilogy as three separate plays. But if we do not want to go way back to Paradise, we have in the eighteenth century a gentleman called Carmontelle, who was the first to cultivate on a large scale the genre he named Proverbes Dramatiques, of which he published ten volumes and is supposed to have left a hundred more in manuscript. The genre was later developed by Leclerq, attained its highest perfection in Musset's and Feuillet's well-known masterpieces—and more recently in Henry Becque's La Navette to form the transition to the fully executed one-act play, which may become the formula for the drama to come.
In the proverb one got the gist of the matter, the whole denouement, the battle of the souls, sometimes approaching tragedy in Musset, without having to be bothered by the clanging of arms or processions of supernumeraries. By means of a table and two chairs one could present the most powerful conflicts life has to offer; and in this type of art all the discoveries of modern psychology could, for the first time, be applied in popularized form.
As is well known, in our day the proverb developed rapidly, was used and misused; it became easily available, and the result was a surfeit of it. The proverb proved, however, to be the seed of a prospective form—when the author and the public favored the same thing—\but it declined, was buried and ridiculed, because no one dared use it for greater efforts, as Musset had done, although not always successfully.
By this I do not mean to say that this is the only possible approach. The Théâtre Libre did not start its activity by proclaiming any program; it has never developed an aesthetic, never wanted to form a school. Writers have therefore taken advantage of this freedom, and the theatre's poster has shown the most varied forms, new and old together, even as old as the tragic parade, the mystery, and the pantomine. And from the laws of modern aesthetics has also been eliminated the decree that it is not permissible to place an action in the historical past. All prohibitive laws have been canceled, and only the demands of taste and of the modern spirit are allowed to determine the artistic form.
Is this not possibly an emancipation of art, a renaissance, a liberation from a terrible aesthetics which was beginning to make people unhappy, which wanted to change the theatre into a political arena, into a Sunday school, a chapel? Perhaps!
May we too get such a theatre where one can shudder at the most horrible, laugh at the ridiculous, play with toys; where one can get to see everything and not be offended if one gets to see what has so far been hidden behind theological and aesthetic veils, even though the old laws of convention be broken; may we get a free theatre where one has freedom for everything, except the freedom to lack talent and be a hypocrite or a fool!
And if we should not get any such theatre, we shall probably manage to survive anyway!