Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 221
in the movement known as symbolism, this counterforce
evolved and expanded into what we will call antirealistic
theatre. As its name suggests, antirealism arose in reaction
to realism—a rebellion against a rebellion.
THE SYMBOLIST REBELLION
The symbolist movement began in Paris during the 1880s
as a joint venture of artists, playwrights, essayists, critics,
sculptors, and poets. If realism was the art of depicting
reality as ordinary men and women might see it,
symbolism sought to explore—by means of images and
metaphors—the inner realities that cannot be directly
or literally perceived. “Symbolic” characters, therefore,
would not represent real human beings but instead would
symbolize philosophical ideas or warring internal forces
in the human soul.
Symbolism had another goal as well: to crush what
its adherents deemed to be a spiritually bankrupt realism
and replace it with traditional aesthetic values—poetry,
imagery, novelty, fantasy, extravagance, profundity,
audacity, charm, and superhuman magnitude. United in
their hatred for literal detail and for all they considered
mundane or ordinary, the symbolists demanded abstraction,
enlargement, and innovation. The symbolist spirit
soared in poetic speeches, outsized dramatic gestures,
fantastical visual effects, and sudden structural departures.
Purity of vision, rather than accuracy of observation,
was the symbolists’ aim, and self-conscious creative
innovation was to become their primary accomplishment.
The first symbolist theatre, founded in 1890 by Parisian
poet Paul Fort (1872–1960), was intended as a
direct attack on the naturalistic Théâtre Libre of André
Antoine, founded three years earlier. Fort’s company, the
Théâtre d’Art, was proposed as “a theatre for Symbolist
poets only, where every production would cause a
battle.” In some ways, the theatres of Antoine and Fort
had much in common: both were amateur, gained considerable
notoriety, and served as centers for “schools”
of artistic ideology that attracted as much attention and
controversy as any of their theatrical offerings.
But the two theatres were openly at war. While
Antoine presented premieres of naturalistic and realistic
dramas by August Strindberg, Émile Zola, and Henrik
Ibsen, Fort presented the staged poems and poetic plays
of both contemporary and earlier writers such as the
French Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, the Belgian
Maurice Maeterlinck, and the American Edgar Allan Poe.
Whereas Antoine would go to great lengths to create realistic
scenery for his plays (for example, he displayed real
sides of beef hung from meat hooks for his presentation of
The Butchers), Fort prevailed upon leading impressionist
painters—including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and
Odilon Redon—to dress his stylized stage. Silver angels,
translucent veils, and sheets of crumpled wrapping paper
were among the decors that backed the symbolist works
at the Théâtre d’Art.
Fort’s theatre created an immediate sensation in Paris.
With the stunning success in 1890 of The Intruder, a
mysterious and poetic fantasy by Maeterlinck, the antirealist
movement was fully engaged and, as Fort recalls
in his memoirs, “the cries and applause of the students,
poets, and artists overwhelmed the huge disapproval of
the bourgeoisie.”
The movement spread quickly as authors and designers
alike awakened to the possibilities of a theatre wholly
freed from the constraints of verisimilitude. Realism,
critics concluded, would never raise the commonplace
to the level of art; it would only drag art down into the
muck of the mundane. As such, the symbolists reasoned,
realism ran counter to all that the theatre had stood for
in the past; it throttled the potential of artistic creativity.
In fact, such naturalistic and realistic authors as Henrik
Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and
George Bernard Shaw soon came under the symbolist
influence and abandoned their social preoccupations and
environmental exactitude to seek a new dramatic vocabulary.
As an added element, at about this time Sigmund
Freud’s research was being published and discussed, and
his theories concerning dream images and the worlds of
the unconscious provided new source material for the
stage.
By the turn of the century, the counterforce of theatrical
stylization set in motion by the symbolists was established
on all fronts; indeed, the half decade on either
side of 1900 represents one of the richest periods of
experimentation in the history of dramatic writing. Out
of that period came Hauptmann’s archetypal fairytale
The Sunken Bell (Germany, 1896), Alfred Jarry’s outrageously
cartoonish and scatological Ubu Roi (France,
1898), Ibsen’s haunting ode to individualism When We
Dead Awaken (Norway, 1899), Strindberg’s imagistic
The Dream Play (Sweden, 1902), William Butler Yeats’s
evocative poetic fable Cathleen ni Houlihan (Ireland,
1903), Shaw’s philosophical allegory Don Juan in Hell
(England, 1903), and James Barrie’s whimsical, buoyant
fantasy Peter Pan (England, 1904). Almost every dramatic
innovation that has followed since that time has
been at least in part anticipated by one or more of these
seminal works for the nonrealist theatre.
The realist-versus-symbolist confrontation affected
every aspect of theatre production. Symbolist-inspired
directors and designers, side by side with the playwrights,
drastically altered the arts of staging and decor