Department of English

Assignment of Modern Drama

Topic:

Modern Theatre and its Types

Theatre

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers,

usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live
audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to
the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art,
such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality,
presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named
by the word "theatre" which means "a place for viewing" itself from "to see", "to watch", "to
observe".

Modern Theatre

Theatre took on many alternative forms in the West between the 15th and 19th centuries,
including comedies and melodrama. The general trend was away from the poetic drama of the
Greeks and the Renaissance and toward a more naturalistic prose style of dialogue, especially
following the Industrial Revolution. Theatre took a big pause during 1642 and 1660 in England
because of the Puritan Interregnum.  The first West End theatre is known as Theatre Royal
in Covent Garden. One of the big changes was the new theatre house. Instead of the type of the
Elizabethan era, such as the Globe Theatre, round with no place for the actors to really prep for
the next act and with no "theatre manners", the theatre house became transformed into a place of
refinement, with a stage in front and stadium seating facing it. 

Modern theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it
borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock
characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical
language, stage writing and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that
differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature and the arts in general.

Modern theatre includes performances of plays and musical theatre. The art forms

of ballet and opera are also theatre and use many conventions such as acting, costumes and
staging. They were influential to the development of musical theatre; see those articles for more
information. One of theatre’s greatest periods continues today. The modern period and its drama
were shaped by world-changing forces, such as industrial-technological revolution, democratic
revolutions, and an intellectual revolution that would disrupt earlier conceptions of time, space,
the divine, human psychology, and social order. As a result, a theatre of challenge and
experimentation emerged.

Types of Theatres

Applied Theatre

Applied theatre is generally accepted as an umbrella term, embracing a wide range of theatre
practices that share an intentionality to provoke or shape social change, including: theatre in
education, theatre for development, youth theatre, disability theatre, museum theatre,
reminiscence theatre and prison theatre. Applied theatre has developed alongside progressive
radical people’s movements in various places around the world. In many cases, the left-leaning
politics of these antecedent movements has shaped both the aesthetic and pedagogic intents of
applied theatre practice.
Central to the theatrical movements has been the development of new sets of relationships
between actors and the audience. The onus of a participatory theatre is on creating actors not for
the stage but actors for, on and with the world. Much applied theatre continues to derive its
aesthetic from forms of theatre and performance that challenge or subvert political and social
hegemonies.

Musical Theatre

Modern musical theatre is a form of theatre that also combines music, spoken dialogue, and
dance. It emerged from comic opera , variety, vaudeville, and music hall genres of the
late 19th and early 20th century. After the Edwardian musical comedy that began in the 1890s,
the Princess Theatre musicals of the early 20th century, and comedies in the 1920s and 1930s,
musicals moved in a more dramatic direction. Musical theatre may be produced on an intimate
scale Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and elsewhere, but it often includes spectacle.

Theatre of the Absurd

Dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early ’60s who
agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, that the human situation is
essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. The Theatre of the Absurd has its origins in Dadaism,
non-sense poetry, and avant-garde art of the first and the second decades of the
twentieth century. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of
those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists
as diverse as Samuel Beckett,  Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a few others
shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate.
Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious. The ideas that inform
the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist playwrights, therefore, did away with most of the
logical structures of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic action as conventionally
understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves to underscore the
fact that nothing happens to change their existence. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), plot
is eliminated, and a timeless, circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as
tramps, spend their days waiting—but without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of
whether he, or it, will ever come.
Language in an Absurdist play is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions, and non
sequiturs. The characters in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950) sit and talk, repeating the
obvious until it sounds like nonsense, thus revealing the inadequacies of verbal communication.
The ridiculous, purposeless behaviour and talk give the plays a sometimes dazzling comic
surface, but there is an underlying serious message of metaphysical distress. This reflects the
influence of comic at the same time, the impact of ideas as expressed by
the Surrealist, Existentialist, and Expressionist schools and the writings.
Characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd

 Investigation of the relativity of truth

 Futility
 Humanity's vain struggle against fate
 Inadequacy of communication
 Use of small talk and understatement
 Non-sequiturs
 Instability of characters / lack of definite characterization 
 Lack of definite plot structure 
 World bent on destruction 
 The absurdity of attempting to control one's fate

Existentialist Theatre

Existentialism in theatre is a movement that emphasizes the existence of the individual self and
the subjective experience of life. It is a philosophical and psychological approach that
emphasizes the individual’s freedom to choose and responsibility for his or her own actions.
Existentialism in theatre often explores the human condition, focusing on topics such as death,
freedom, and the meaning of life.
Theatre that is labeled as “existential” typically relies on Absurdist or existentialist philosophies.
These philosophies often explore the inherent meaninglessness of life, and the human experience
of angst or anxiety in the face of this meaninglessness. Existentialist theatre often uses special
effects or other devices to create an atmosphere of unease or even terror.
The ‘existentialist theatre’ differs from the Theatre of the Absurd in the sense that the
existentialist theatre expresses the incomprehensibility and the irrationality of the human
condition in the form of a comprehensible and logically constructed reasoning, whereas the
Theatre of the Absurd abandons the old dramatic conventions and goes on to invent a new form
to express the new content. In the Absurdist plays, incomprehensibility and irrationality are
reflected even in the form. Sartre’s No Exit establishes the philosophy of existentialism as he
perceived it. But Martin Esslin notes that many Absurdist playwrights demonstrate the existential
philosophy better than Sartre and Camus did in their own plays.

Epic Theatre

Epic theatre German episches Theater, form of didactic drama presenting a series of loosely

connected scenes that avoid illusion and often interrupt the story line to address the audience
directly with analysis, argument, or documentation. Epic theatre is now most often associated
with the dramatic theory and practice evolved by the playwright-director Bertolt Brecht in
Germany from the 1920s onward. Its dramatic antecedents include the episodic structure and
didactic nature of the pre-Expressionist drama of the German playwright Frank Wedekind and
the Expressionist theatre of the German directors Erwin Piscator (with whom
Brecht collaborated in 1927) and Leopold Jessner, both of whom made exuberant use of the
technical effects that came to characterize epic theatre.

Brecht’s perspective was Marxian, and his intention was to appeal to his audience’s intellect in
presenting moral problems and reflecting contemporary social realities on the stage. He wished
to block their emotional responses and to hinder their tendency to empathize with the characters
and become caught up in the action.

Theatre of Cruelty

The Theatre of Cruelty, developed by Antonin Artaud, aimed to shock audiences through
gesture, image, sound and lighting. Natasha Tripney describes how Artaud's ideas took shape,
and traces their influence on directors and writers such as Peter Brook, Samuel Beckett and Jean
Genet.
One of the most influential theatre theorists of the 20th century and a key figure of the European
avant garde, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) developed the ideas behind the Theatre of Cruelty.

The Theatre of Cruelty is both a philosophy and a discipline. Artaud wanted to disrupt the
relationship between audience and performer. The ‘cruelty’ in Artaud’s thesis was sensory, it
exists in the work’s capacity to shock and confront the audience, to go beyond words and
connect with the emotions: to wake up the nerves and the heart. He believed gesture and
movement to be more powerful than text. Sound and lighting could also be used as tools of
sensory disruption. The audience, he argued, should be placed at the centre of a piece of
performance. Theatre should be an act of ‘organised anarchy'.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre

https://www.britannica.com/art/epic-theatre

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/existentialism-and-the-theatre-of-the-absurd-
english-literature

https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/education/research/research-centres-and-units/critical-research-
unit-in-applied-theatre/what-is-applied-theatre.

https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/antonin-artaud-and-the-theatre-of-cruelty