Alienation plays also aimed to stimulate, tease, puzzle, and disturb the audience, much like the absurdist play, in order to get the audience to adopt opinions of society. However, alienation plot differed greatly from absurdist plot due to the emphasis on telling a story rather than its characters. Brecht, playwright and creator of the epic theatre(theatre of alienation), did this through setting the plot in foreign places or times(called historicisation), jumping around in the timeline, or creating a montage to keep the
The Aristotelian element of drama known as spectacle, or what is seen onstage, is important to the development of any play or musical. Spectacle plays an influential and essential role in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The specific things and actions the audience sees in this play provides them with necessary information to understand the characters, storyline, and many other aspects of the play. There are numerous examples of specific things Ibsen intended for the patrons to observe throughout the course of this show. These are so significant to understanding the work, that a reader of this script can recognize them, even if he or she has never seen a production of A Doll’s House.
Later came Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; How I Won the War .The comic critics of militarism often take on its inherent sexism, too, as in Lysistrata, the first feminist play. While men dominate in tragedy and epic, comedy features women in leading roles, and female characters are more varied and interesting. Comedies also mock hierarchies and elitism. Tragedy concentrates on upper-class heroes of noble birth like Oedipus and Hamlet; comedy celebrates what we now call diversity, where each person counts for one. Since ancient Greek and Roman comedy, for example, servants have bested their masters.
He was very much influenced by musicals and fairground performers. He also used comedy to distant his audience from the depicted situations. Stanislavski theatre is called dramatic theatre which has plot, involve the spectator in a stage situation and one scene after another whereas in epic theatre it is called narrative theatre, turn the spectator into an observer and each scene for itself. Brecht encouraged his audience to discuss things during a performance and they could enter and leave during a performance at their will. Sometimes he even masked actors face to draw the attention away from the actor’s faces, in comparison Stanislavski says that audience must involve in the performance and audience can’t enter between the play.
Studying plays as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet is a vital part of studying literature since they are timeless works that teach many lessons. Moreover, they still have some concepts to be unmasked by critics of literature. According to Aristotle tragedy is ''a form of drama based on human misery that arouses in its audience feelings of pity and fear'' and each tragedy must have a tragic hero. Tragedy began in the ancient Greek theatre where tragedies were performed in late March to early April at an annual religious festival in honour of Dionysus. () One of the most famous tragedies in that period is Oedipus Rex which was written by Sophocles.
Nevertheless, these presentations provided me a general idea of what to search for and include in my close reading notes for Twelfth Night. My knowledge of the play started with act three. This group presented did not only specific themes and ideas of the act; they also showed how these tie into the play as whole, which gave me a vague idea of what the whole play is about, not only act three. In their discussion of characterization, there was an emphasis on the change in the characters, specifically Othello, and this turning point of the character coincides with the turning point of the whole play. I also learned that jealousy, pride, and gender relations are recurring themes of the whole play, and the group turns this to a reason why Othello is a great work of literature; the twenty-first century audience can relate to it
Avant-garde theatre arose in France in the late 1800s and lasted into the early 1900s, partly as a retaliation to neo-classicism. Avant-garde was wild. A lot of playwrights and designers tried to push the limits on what was acceptable and what could be done in theatre. Absurdism blossomed shortly after, and it was playwrights like Antonin Artaud and Pirandello that really shaped both movements. Absurdism is similar to avant-garde in that the playwrights were not as concerned with plot and characters and logical continuity as they were with eliciting reactions.
The characteristics of the anger movement appeared in the 20th century modern drama. It is characterized by social class conflict and witnessed many of the revolutionary movements against society. The theme of the plays in this movement concerned with social critic against middle-class values, and they shared a disrespect and contempt for the class system and the post welfare state. The theme of struggle against the establishment, values, conventions and authority prevailed in modern drama. There are also many themes which dominated modern plays such as: violence, frustration, damage, loneliness and revenge.
Engaging the audience is an incredibly vital factor for the success of any play. Without an audience, there simply is no play. In order to become successful, the people watching need to be engaged in what’s happening on the stage and in the stories that are unfolding. The best way of achieving this is by having elements of personability, humour, and themes throughout the play that which the audience is familiar with. In the case of The Second Shepherd’s Pageant and Joseph’s Trouble about Mary, the two plays discussed in this essay, all of these elements are found in abundance.
He further asserts that epic poetry is a formal narrative unlike epic tragedy where actions happen in the past. However, Erwin Piscator, a friend of Brecht has in turn a complete concept on the meaning of Epic. He develops a different type of theatre that uses the same name as epic poetry but the actual theatre he created branches away from Aristotle theatre. Piscator used motion pictures, slides, graphics, in short, all the mechanisms or resources that can help to explain the reality present in the text of a work. The freedom of form was named by Piscator as epic form.