The Social Function of Twentieth Century Theatre: Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett and Paul Chan
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Date
2013-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
How was the social function of theater changed since the Second World War?” Unlike the growing fields of other Twentieth century media innovations such as film or radio, theatre has the ability to utilize the culmination of both mediums. This makes for an amorphous and dexterous art form able to challenge relevant social issues, while still remaining conscious of it as a form of entertainment. However, this is not to say that theatre always perceived with such nuance and esteem within society. Before the turn of the Twentieth Century the role of theatre while not irrelevant, was stagnant. “In the Nineteenth Century there was relatively little difference between drama in Manchester and Moscow... the way life was represented [on stage] looked very much the same” (Innes 4). Without a definitive identity as an art form, theatre remained unconscious and unaware of its own ability to become a relevant and essential aspect of modern culture. What became the catalyst for creating a foundation for socially relevant theatre to become prevalent in England became established through the writings of Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. Utilizing the prevalent theme of naturalism and manipulating its aesthetic purpose found in the recently translated plays of Norway’s Henrik Ibsen, “Shaw reinterpreted [naturalism] to form the basis of a rational drama dealing with [archetypal] social issues, defining modernism as a way that became standard for mainstream British theatre” (Innes 5). What resulted was drama utilizing relevant social topics while remaining rooted within reality. The tonal and social shift that modernism took from naturalism became further instilled within the cultural zeitgeist during wartime in England. The effect both wars had upon the arts is astounding. Whether in its earliest forms in T.S Eliot’s hauntingly serene epic The Waste Land, to its the subjective yet mechanical photographic lens in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, or finally in
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Elizabeth Bowen’s gothic short story “Happy Autumn Fields”, literary art and its creators responded to the impact war has taken upon the artistic imagination vary in their own cathartic style. The examples with the exception of Eliot’s The Waste Land, in fact deal primarily with World War Two. Why World War Two however? The literal and figurative destruction of European Nationalism, particularly England’s in the Second World War’s culminated with the historical events and the fundamental principles of modernism served as a catalyst for the fundamental and radical theories that Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett and Jon Osborne utilized to make the foundations and the
success of both a relevant Avant-Garde and socially realistic theatre. “If stressing the unity of form and content is one characteristic of modern drama, another is the rejection of traditional genres, so that they are unconventional, they reflect the nature of the work” (Innes 8). Shaw catalyzed the modernist movement by modifying and manipulating the aesthetic principles of Ibsen to make plays more visceral, socially conscious, and relevant. In return the same evolution and rejection of the traditional norms manipulated by Shaw and his socially relevant theatre evolved again to remain relevant and continue to evolve the theatre as a medium. This with the censoring of Shaw from the stage during the First World War, helped establish newer works to be placed upon the stage, further pushing the boundaries of conscious theatre.
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Keywords
Beckett, Artaud, Chan, Theatre of Cruelty