11 - Varieties of performance at the turn of the century

Summary

Like many other forms of artistic expression at the fin de siècle the drama faced in several directions at once, its distinction being that because drama is inherently dialogic it is relatively easy to express conflicting tendencies within the same work. Thus we find plays that actually incorporate the complexities of change within their formal structure. And this phenomenon goes back to preceding decades when a series of assaults on the status quo had produced strange hybrids.

The theatre of the mid-nineteenth century, though by no means to be dismissed, had tended towards the comforting and the established: plays that celebrated the culture socially and domestically, together with productions of Shakespeare that were coloured with patriotic motifs and settings that consolidated the figure of Shakespeare, the national bard, as if he could have seen the British Empire coming. As elsewhere in Europe, the conventions of the 'well-made play', usually based on French models with their fixed structures, predictable climaxes and established themes, were pervasive.

Change, when it came, was belated and partial, with Ibsen largely responsible. In his middle and later periods Ibsen inaugurated a theatrical debate into the great issues of the day: the claims of women, the call for leadership, the function of religion, the nature of creativity and, above all, the need to engage with the future. The story of the fight to get his plays staged in England has been told many times. Between 1889 and 1891 the following plays were staged: A Doll's House (1889, with an earlier private reading in 1886 organised by Eleanor Marx), Ghosts (1891), Hedda Gabler (1891) and The Lady from the Sea (1891). The response to these productions was extraordinary, ranging from outright disgust (such as Clement Scott's likening 'the auditorium [to] a hospital-ward or dissecting room' in the Daily Telegraph and so on) to immediate conversion to a new if sometimes puzzling aesthetic.