Literary Drama and Popular Theatre

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

This split between the "literary drama" and the "popular theatre" has become the condition of twentieth-century drama and theatre: plays of the artistic avant-garde are more readily absorbed into the canon of literature, while more conventional entertainments - television screenplays, for instance - remain outside it. The major playwrights from Ibsen to Luigi Pirandello to Samuel Beckett first wrote for small theatres and were produced by experimental companies playing to coterie audiences on the fringes of the theatrical "mainstream". This sense of modernist "art" as opposed to the values of bourgeois culture was not confined to drama and theatre. Modernist fiction and poetry, cubist and abstract painting and sculpture, modern dance, and modern music all developed a new formal complexity, thematic abstraction, and critical self-consciousness in opposition to the sentimental superficiality they found in conventional art forms. This modernist tendency has itself produced a kind of reaction, a desire to bring the devices of popular culture and mass culture into drama, as a way of altering the place of the theatre in society and changing the relationship between the spectators and the stage. Bertolt Bercht's alienation effect, Samuel beckett's importation of circus and film clowns to absurdist theatre, Heiner Muller's pastiche of Hamlet in his postmodern Hamletmachine, or Wole Soyinka's interweaving of African ritual and fourth-wall realism in Death and the King's Horseman are all examples of this reaction. For the theatre has been challenged by film and television to define its space in contemporary culture, and given the pervasive availability of other media, theatre has increasingly seemed to occupy a place akin to that of opera, among the privileged, elite forms of "high culture". As a result, innovation in today's theatre often takes place on the margins or fringes of mainstream theatre and mainstream culture : in smaller companies experimenting in many parts of the world, and in theatres working to form a new audience and a new sense of theatre by conceiving new forms of drama. And yet, as David Hare's Stuff Happens suggests, it's still possible, even for a major institutional theatre like London's Royal National Theatre, to use the space of the stage to interrogate the sphere of contemporary politics.