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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Edward Albee, b. 1928
For a fascinating in depth interview with Edward Albee including his frank comments on both the play and the film, click here Edward Albee: "All art is useful because it tells us more about consciousness. It should engage us into thinking and re-evaluating, re-examining our values to find out whether the stuff we think we've been believing for 20 years still has any validity. Art's got to help us understand that values change. If we've stopped exploring the possibilities of our mind, then we're asleep, and why not just stay asleep? So, all art has got to be utilitarian and useful. That's one of the great things about African art. It's not made as art. It's utilitarian. It's made for religious, dance purposes. And, people who make it don't think of themselves, "Gee, I'm a great sculptor." No. They're making something useful. I think this is true with novels, plays, poems. I think basically all serious creative people feel the same way. Most of us are smart enough not to talk about it." Edward Albee burst onto the American theatrical scene in the late 1950s with a variety of plays that detailed the agonies and disillusionment of that decade and the transition from the placid Eisenhower years to the turbulent 1960s. Albee's plays, with their intensity, their grappling with modern themes, and their experiments in form, startled critics and audiences alike while changing the landscape of American drama. He was unanimously hailed as the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill.
Born in Washington, D.C., Albee was adopted as an infant by Reid Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee of the powerful Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. He was brought up in great affluence and sent to select preparatory and military schools. Almost from the beginning he clashed with the strong-minded Mrs. Albee, rebelling against her attempts to make him a success as well as a sportsman and a member of the Larchmont, New York, social set. Instead, young Albee pursued his interest in the arts, writing macabre and bitter stories and poetry, while associating with artists and intellectuals considered objectionable by Mrs. Albee.
Throughout his career, Albee has shown a fascination for a wide variety of theatrical styles and subjects. The Zoo Story conveyed the alienation and disillusionment of the existentialist drama. In 1959, Albee explored American race relations in the southern Gothic atmosphere of The Death of Bessie Smith. He gave birth to American absurdist drama with The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960). Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance are classic studies of American family life in the mode of O'Neill's Long's Day's Journey into Night. 1964's Tiny Alice is a metaphysical dream play in which Albee explores his persistent theme of reality versus illusion, this time out in mystical, abstract, and even religious terms. In 1975, Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize with Seascape, which combined theatrical experiment and social commentary in a story about a retired vacationing couple who meet a pair of sea lizards at the beach. The Lady from Dubuque (1979) is a fable in which the title character is none other than death. Death, in fact, has been a running character throughout his works. In spite of the wide range in styles and subject matter, Albee has said that all his plays "confront being alive and how to behave with the awareness of death. Every one of my plays is an act of optimism, because I make the assumption that it is possible to communicate with other people. The people who think Virginia Woolf was a love story are a lot closer to the truth than those who think it was a tragedy. At least there was communication in that marriage." And like George and Martha, whose long night's journey finally ends in day, Albee and his public have communicated with each other ever since they met — through periods love and exhilaration, anger and neglect, truce and reconciliation. Pinter's BriefsHarold Pinter, b. 1930
Born 10 October 1930 in East London, Harold Pinter is a playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. In 2005, Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honour available to any writer in the world. In announcing the award, Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter was an artist “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” In 2002, Pinter was made a Companion of Honour by the Queen for services to Literature. In 1958 Harold Pinter wrote the following:"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" Euripides' HecubaEuripides, c. 484-406 BCE
Euripides (Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety-five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias. Eighteen of Euripides' plays have survived complete. It is now widely believed that what was thought to be a nineteenth, Rhesus, was probably not by Euripides. Fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays also survive. More of his plays have survived than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because of the chance preservation of a manuscript that was probably part of a complete collection of his works in alphabetical order. Euripides is known primarily for having reshaped the formal structure of traditional Attic tragedy by showing strong women characters and intelligent slaves, and by satirizing many heroes of Greek mythology. His plays seem modern by comparison with those of his contemporaries, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown to Greek audiences. One of the more famous quotes attributed to him by recent writers, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad", does not occur in his works and probably pre-dates him. According to legend, Euripides was born in Salamís on September 23 480 BCE (before the Common Era), the day of the Persian War's greatest naval battle. Other sources estimate that he was born as early as 485 BCE. His father's name was either Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides and his mother's name Cleito. Evidence suggests that the family was wealthy and influential. It is recorded that he served as a cup-bearer for Apollo's dancers, but he grew to question the religion he grew up with, exposed as he was to thinkers such as Protagoras, Socrates, and Anaxagoras. He was married twice, to Choerile and Melito, though sources disagree as to which woman he married first. He had three sons, and it is rumored that he also had a daughter who was killed after a rabid dog attacked her (some say this was merely a joke made by Aristophanes, who often poked fun at Euripides). The record of Euripides' public life, other than his involvement in dramatic competitions, is almost non-existent. The only reliable story of note is one by Aristotle about Euripides being involved in a dispute over a liturgy — a story which offers strong proof to Euripides being a wealthy man. It has been said that he travelled to Syracuse, Sicily; that he engaged in various public or political activities during his lifetime; that he wrote his tragedies in a sanctuary, The Cave of Euripides on Salamis Island; and that he left Athens at the invitation of king Archelaus I of Macedon and stayed with him in Macedonia after 408 BCE. According to Pausanias, Euripides was buried in Macedonia. Euripides first competed in the Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BCE, one year after the death of Aeschylus. He came in third, reportedly because he refused to cater to the fancies of the judges. It was not until 441 BCE that he won first prize, and over the course of his lifetime, Euripides claimed a mere four victories. He also won one posthumous victory. Euripides' final competition in Athens was in 408 BCE; there is a story that he left Athens embittered over his defeats. He accepted an invitation by the king of Macedon in 408 or 407 BCE, and once there he wrote Archelaus in honour of his host. He is believed to have died there in winter 407/06 BCE; ancient biographers have told many stories about his death, but the simple truth was that it was probably his first exposure to the harsh Macedonia winter which killed him. The Bacchae was performed after his death in 405 BCE and won first prize. When compared with Aeschylus, who won thirteen times, and Sophocles, with eighteen victories, Euripides was the least honoured of the three — at least in his lifetime. Later in the 4th century BC, the dramas of Euripides became the most popular, largely because of the simplicity of the language of his plays. His works influenced New Comedy and Roman drama, and were later idolized by the French classicists; his influence on drama reaches modern times. Euripides' greatest works include Alcestis, Medea, Electra, and The Bacchae. Also considered notable is Cyclops, the only complete satyr play currently in existence. The manuscript, apparently part of a multiple volume, alphabetically-arranged collection of Euripides' works, was rediscovered after lying in a monastic collection for approximately eight hundred years. Euripides has been compared to Rousseau in being too modern for his time. Euripides focused on the realism of his characters; for example, Euripides’ Medea is a realistic woman with recognizable emotions, and has a developed personality with many different facets to her character — she is not simply a villain. According to Aristotle, Euripides's contemporary Sophocles said that he portrayed men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrayed them as they were. Ibsen's Peer GyntHenrik Ibsen, 1828-1906
In the entire history of literature, there are few figures like Ibsen. Practically his whole life and energies were devoted to the theater; and his offerings, medicinal and bitter, have changed the history of the stage. The story of his life -- his birth March 20, 1828, in the little Norwegian village of Skien, the change in family circumstances from prosperity to poverty when the boy was eight years old, his studious and non-athletic boyhood, his apprenticeship to an apothecary in Grimstad, and his early attempts at dramatic composition -- all these items are well known. His spare hours were spent in preparation for entrance to Christiania University, where, at about the age of twenty, he formed a friendship with Björnson. About 1851 the violinist Ole Bull gave Ibsen the position of "theater poet" at the newly built National Theater in Bergen -- a post which he held for six years. In 1857 he became director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiania; and in 1862, with Love's Comedy, became known in his own country as a playwright of promise. Seven years later, discouraged with the reception given to his work and out of sympathy with the social and intellectual ideals of his country, he left Norway, not to return for a period of nearly thirty years. He established himself first at Rome, later in Munich. Late in life he returned to Christiania, where he died May 23, 1906. IBSEN'S PLAYS The productive life of Ibsen is conveniently divided into three periods: the first ending in 1877 with the successful appearance of The Pillars of Society; the second covering the years in which he wrote most of the dramas of protest against social conditions, such as Ghosts; and the third marked by the symbolic plays, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. The first of the prose plays, Love's Comedy (1862) made an impression in Norway, and drew the eyes of thoughtful people to the new dramatist, though its satirical, mocking tone brought upon its author the charge of being a cynic and an athiest. The three historical plays, or dramatic poems, Brand, Emperor and Galilean, and Peer Gynt, written between 1866 and 1873, form a monumental epic. These compositions cannot be considered wholly or primarily for the stage; they are the poetic record of a long intellectual and spiritual struggle. In Brand there is the picture of the man who has not found the means of adjustment between the mechanical routine of daily living and the deeper claims of the soul; in Emperor and Galilean is a portrayal of the noblest type of pagan philosophy and manhood, illustrated in the Emperor Julian, set off against the ideals of the Jewish Christ; and in Peer Gynt is a picture of the war within the soul of a man in whom are no roots of loyalty, faith, or steadfastness. When The Young Men's League was produced, the occasion, like the first appearance of Hernani, became locally historic. The play deals with political theories, ideas of liberty and social justice; and in its presentation likenesses to living people were discovered, and fierce resentments were aroused. The tumult of hissing and applauding during the performance was so great that the authorities interfered. The Pillars of Society, Ibsen's fifteenth play, was the first to have a hearing throughout Europe. It was written in Munich, where it was performed in the summer of 1877. In the autumn it was enacted in all the theaters of Scandinavia, whence within a few months it spread over the continent, appearing in London before the end of the year. The late James Huneker, one of the most acute critics of the Norwegian seer, said: "The Northern Aristophanes, who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in The Pillars of Society a varied row of white sepulchres. . . . There is no mercy in Ibsen, and his breast has never harbored the milk of human kindness. This remote, objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is too disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in convincing an audience that the poet is genuinely humain."
In the third period the arena of conflict has changed to the realm of the spirit; and the action illustrates some effort at self-realization, self-conquest, or self-annihilation. The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken must explain themselves, if they are to be explained at all; for they are meaningless if they do not light, in the mind of the reader or spectator, a spark of some clairvoyant insight with which they were written. In them are characters which, like certain living men and women, challenge and mystify even their closest friends and admirers. Throughout all the plays there are symbols -- the wild duck, the mill race, the tower, or the open sea -- which are but the external tokens of something less familiar and more important; and the dialogue often has a secondary meaning, not with the witty double entendre of the French school, but with suggestions of a world in which the spirit, ill at ease in material surroundings, will find its home. It is significant that Ibsen should arrive, by his own route, at the very principles adopted by Sophocles and commended by Aristotle -- namely, the unities of time, place and action, with only the culminating events of the tragedy placed before the spectator. After the first period he wrote in prose, abolishing all such ancient and serviceable contrivances as servants discussing their masters' affairs, comic relief, asides and soliloquies. The characters in his later dramas are few, and there are no "veils of poetic imagery."
The principles of Ibsen's teaching, his moral ethic, was that honesty in facing facts is the first requisite of a decent life. Human nature has dark recesses which must be explored and illuminated; life has pitfalls which must be recognized to be avoided; and society has humbugs, hypocrisies, and obscure diseases which must be revealed before they can be cured. To recognize these facts is not pessimism; it is the moral obligation laid upon intelligent people. To face the problems thus exposed, however, requires courage, honesty, and faith in the ultimate worth of the human soul. Man must be educated until he is not only intelligent enough, but courageous enough to work out his salvation through patient endurance and nobler ideals. Democracy, as a cure-all, is just as much a failure as any other form of government; since the majority in politics, society, or religion is always torpid and content with easy measures. It is the intelligent and morally heroic minority which has always led, and always will lead, the human family on its upward march. Nevertheless, we alone can help ourselves; no help can come from without. Furthermore -- and this is a vital point in understanding Ibsen -- experience and life are a happiness in themselves, not merely a means to happiness; and in the end good must prevail. Such are some of the ideas that can be distilled from the substance of Ibsen's plays. On the plane of practical methods Ibsen preached the emancipation of the individual, especially of woman. He laid great stress upon the principle of heredity. He made many studies of disordered minds, and analyzed relentlessly the common relationships -- sister and brother, husband and wife, father and son. There is much in these relationships, he seems to say, that is based on sentimentalism, on a desire to dominate, on hypocrisy and lies. He pictured the unscrupulous financier, the artist who gives up love for the fancied demands of his art, the unmarried woman who has been the drudge and the unthanked burden-bearer -- all with a cool detachment which cloaks, but does not conceal, the passionate moralist. From the seventh decade of the last century to his last play in 1899, the storm of criticism, resentment, and denunciation scarcely ceased. On the other hand, the prophet and artist which were united in Ibsen's nature found many champions and friends. In Germany he was hailed as the leader of the new era; in England his champion, William Archer, fought many a battle for him; but in the end no one could escape his example. Young playwrights learned from him, reformers adopted his ideas, and moralists quoted from him as from a sacred book. His plays scorched, but they fascinated the rising generation, and they stuck to the boards. Psychologists discovered a depth of meaning and of human understanding in his delineation of character. He did not found a school, for every school became his debtor. He did not have followers, for every succeeding playwright was forced in a measure to learn from him. Marivaux's The Triumph of LovePierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, 1688-1763
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, commonly known as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist, born at Paris on the 4th of February 1688. His father was a financier of Norman extraction whose real name was Carlet, but who assumed the surname of Chamblain and then superadded that of Marivaux. The elder Carlet de Marivaux was a man of good reputation, and he received the appointment of director of the mint at Riom in Auvergne, where and at Limoges the young Pierre was brought up. It is said that Pierre developed literary tastes early, and wrote his first play, le Père prudent et équitable, when he was only eighteen; it was not, however, published until 1712, when he was twenty-four. His chief attention in those early days was paid to novel writing, not the drama. In the three years from 1713 to 1715 he produced three novels: Effets surprenants de la sympathie; La Voiture embourbèe, and a book which had three titles — Pharsamon, Les Folies romanesques, and Le Don Quichotte moderne. All these books were in a curious strain, not in the least resembling the pieces which long afterwards were to make his reputation, but following partly the Spanish romances and partly the heroic novels of the preceding century, with a certain intermixture of the marvellous. Then Marivaux's literary ardor took a new phase. He fell under the influence of Antoine Hondar[d] de La Motte, and thought to serve the cause of that ingenious paradoxer by travestying Homer, an ignoble task, which he followed up (perhaps, for it is not certain) by performing the same office in regard to Fénelon. His friendship for La Motte, however, introduced him to the Mercure, the chief newspaper of France, where in 1717 he produced various articles of the "Spectator" kind, which were distinguished by much keenness of observation and not a little literary skill. It was at this time that the peculiar style called Marivaudage first made its appearance in him. The year 1720 and those immediately following were very important ones for Marivaux; not only did he produce a comedy, now lost except in small part, entitled L'Amour et la vérité, and another and far better one entitled Arlequin poli par l'amour, but he also wrote a tragedy, Annibal (printed 1737), which was and deserved to be unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Marivaux's wordly affairs underwent a sudden revolution. His father had left him a comfortable subsistence, but he was persuaded by friends to risk it in the Mississippi scheme, and after vastly increasing it for a time lost all that he had. His prosperity had enabled him to marry (perhaps in 1721) a certain Mlle. Martin, of whom much good is said, and to whom he was deeply attached, but who died very shortly. His pen now became almost his sole resource. He had a connection with both the fashionable theaters, for his Annibal had been played at the Comédie Française and his Arlequin poli at the Comédie Italienne, where at the time a company who were extremely popular, despite their imperfect command of French, were established. He endeavored too to turn his newspaper practice in the Mercure to more account by starting a weekly Spectateur Français (1722-23), to which he was the sole contributor. But his habits were the reverse of methodical; the paper appeared at the most irregular intervals; and, though it contained some excellent work, its irregularity killed it. For nearly twenty years the theater, and especially the Italian theater, was Marivaux's chief support, for his pieces, though they were not ill received by the actors at the Français, were rarely successful there. The best of a very large number of plays (Marivaux's theater numbers between thirty and forty items) were the Surprise de l'amour (1722), the Triomphe de Plutus (1728), the Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (1730), Les Fausses confidences (1737), all produced at the Italian theater, and Le Legs (1736), produced at the French. Meanwhile he had at intervals returned to both his other lines of composition. A periodical publication called L'Indigent philosophe appeared in 1727, and another called Le Cabinet du philosophe in 1734, but the same causes which had proved fatal to the Spectateur prevented these later efforts from succeeding. In 1731 Marivaux published the first two parts of his best and greatest work, Marianne, a novel of a new and remarkable kind. The eleven parts appeared in batches at intervals during a period of exactly the same number of years, and after all it was left unfinished. In 1735 another novel, Le Paysan parvenu, was begun, but this also was left unfinished. He was elected a member of the Academy in 1742. He survived for more than twenty years, and was not idle, again contributing occasionally to the Mercure, writing plays, "reflections" (which were seldom of much worth), and so forth. He died on the 12th February 1763, aged seventy-five years. The personal character of Marivaux was curious and somewhat contradictory, though not without analogies, one of the closest of which is to be found in Oliver Goldsmith. He was, however, unlike Goldsmith, at least as brilliant in conversation as with the pen. He was extremely good-natured, but fond of saying very severe things, unhesitating in his acceptance of favors (he drew a regular annuity from Helvetius), but exceedingly touchy if he thought himself in any way slighted. He was, though a great cultivator of sensibilité, on the whole decent and moral in his writings, and was unsparing in his criticism of the rising Philosophes. This last circumstance, and perhaps jealousy as well, made him a dangerous enemy in Voltaire, who lost but few opportunities of speaking disparagingly of him. He had good friends, not merely in the rich, generous and amiable Helvetius, but in Mme. de Tencin, in Fontenelle and even in Mme. de Pompadour, who gave him, it is said, a considerable pension, of the source of which he was ignorant. His extreme sensitiveness is shown by many stories. He had one daughter, who took the veil, the duke of Orleans, the regent's successor, furnishing her with her dowry. The so-called Marivaudage is the main point of importance about Marivaux's literary work, though the best of the comedies have great merits, and Marianne is an extremely important step in the legitimate development of the French novel — legitimate, that is, in opposition to the brilliant but episodic productions of Alain René Lesage. Its connection, and that of Le Paysan parvenu, with the work not only of Samuel Richardson but of Henry Fielding is also an interesting though a difficult subject. The subject matter of Marivaux's peculiar style has been generally and with tolerable exactness described as the metaphysic of love-making. His characters, in a happy phrase of Claude Prosper Jolyot Crébillon's, not only tell each other and the reader everything they have thought, but everything that they would like to persuade themselves that they have thought. The style chosen for this is justly regarded as derived mainly from Fontenelle, and through him from the Précieuses, though there are traces of it even in La Bruyère. It abuses metaphor somewhat, and delights to turn off a metaphor itself in some unexpected and bizarre fashion. Now it is a familiar phrase which is used where dignified language would be expected; now the reverse. In the criticism of Crébillon's already quoted occurs another happy description of Marivaux's style as being "an introduction to each other of words which have never made acquaintance, and which think that they will not get on together", a phrase as happy in its imitation as in its satire of the style itself. This kind of writing, of course, recurs at several periods of literature, and did so remarkably at the end of the 19th century in more countries than one. Yet this fantastic embroidery of language has a certain charm, and suits perhaps better than any other style the somewhat unreal gallantry and sensibilité which it describes and exhibits. The author possessed, moreover, both thought and observation, besides considerable command of pathos. Pinter's The Birthday PartyHarold Pinter, b. 1930This article appears in The Guardian newspaper, May 3 2008 Harold Pinter's career was nearly strangled at birth. On Monday May 19 1958, The Birthday Party opened at the Lyric Hammersmith. After a devastating set of overnight reviews, it was hastily withdrawn by its producers, Michael Codron and David Hall, on the Saturday night. Yet, almost 50 years to the day, Pinter's play is to be revived by David Farr at the same theatre. But why were the initial reviews so antagonistic? And what is it about Pinter's play that has enabled it to endure? If one could only answer those questions, one might discover something about the vexed relationship of critic and artist and the volatility of modern society. What is clear is that Pinter himself was almost destroyed by the reviews. Buoyed by the initial success of The Room at Bristol University in May 1957, he sat down to write The Birthday Party that summer while touring in Doctor in the House. "I remember," says Pinter, "writing the big interrogation scene in a dressing room in Leicester." The omens for The Birthday Party also looked good. It attracted a first-rate director in Peter Wood, who had just done a dazzling revival of The Iceman Cometh. On a brief pre-London tour that took in Cambridge and Oxford, the play was rapturously received by undergraduate audiences and perceptive critics. The Oxford Mail invoked Hemingway and Eliot, and the Oxford Times described it as "brilliant, baffling and bizarre - Kafka, almost, spiced with humour". Then came Hammersmith. "The morning after the first night," Pinter told me recently, "I went to a cafe in Chiswick High Road, ordered a coffee, and sat down and read all the papers. I was shattered. I thought there and then that I'd give up writing plays and concentrate on novels and poetry. I came back to our flat and said to my wife, Vivien, 'I'm giving up the whole bloody business. What's the point?' Vivien, to her credit, replied, 'Don't be ridiculous. Just go on.' Then, as soon as the play closed on the Saturday, we went to stay at a guesthouse in a Cotswold village called Painswick, near Cheltenham. We went out to buy the Sunday papers and, although Kenneth Tynan in the Observer was lukewarm, I read this extraordinarily appreciative review by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times that bowled me over. Around the same time, an actor friend, Patrick Magee, contacted a BBC radio producer, and said, 'You've got to give this man a job, since he's about to give the whole thing up.' As a result, I got a commission and wrote A Slight Ache - which, by a neat piece of timing, is going to be revived by the National this autumn." Pinter's career was saved by a loyal wife, a visionary critic, a sympathetic friend and the BBC Third Programme. But why did The Birthday Party provoke such hostility from the daily critics? Today, there seems nothing strange about its plot, in which a truculent loner, Stanley, is terrorised by two visitors to a seaside boarding-house, Goldberg and McCann, and ultimately carted off. At the time, however, the reaction was one of bewildered hysteria. The cryptically initialled MWW in the Manchester Guardian wrote of characters who "speak in non sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings." The anonymous Times critic was equally bemused: "after a while we tend to give the puzzle up in despair." Derek Granger in the Financial Times claimed the play belonged to "the school of random dottiness deriving from Beckett and Ionesco." And WA Darlington in the Daily Telegraph sympathised with the character of a depressed deckchair attendant. "Oh well," wrote Darlington, "I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this." What shines through all the reviews is a baffled anger at Pinter's failure to explain himself. Who is Stanley? What do Goldberg and McCann signify? And what is the mysterious "organisation" they represent? The persistence of these questions tells us a lot about the culture of the late 1950s, in which works of art were still expected to provide rational answers to clearly defined questions. Examine the popular novels of the period - such as John Braine's Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence - and you find they are working within an essentially realistic framework: one in which there are solutions to social and professional issues. And even though drama had supposedly been "revolutionised" by Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger, this turns out to be a comforting myth. Theatre had, in many ways, been beneficially liberated by Beckett and Osborne; but, as I've argued in my book State of the Nation, many of the old forms and customs remained intact. For proof, you need only look at the context in which The Birthday Party appeared in May 1958. In the previous month, critics had been confronted by drawing-room comedies and thrillers with titles like Breath of Spring, Not in the Book, Something to Hide and Any Other Business. Two weeks before Pinter's play opened, Rattigan's Variations on a Theme had also offered a conventional update of Dumas's La Dame aux Caméllias. Significantly, the most formally daring and thematically adventurous play of the preceding weeks, Ann Jellicoe's The Sport of My Mad Mother at the Royal Court, had been greeted with an uncomprehending hostility that matched that of The Birthday Party. In short, there was no "revolution" in the late 1950s, merely a process of gradual change. The reaction to The Birthday Party also proves something else: that the visionary artist is always ahead of the critics and, to some extent, the public. There is a consistent pattern in postwar theatre in which ground-breaking works are greeted with initial incomprehension. It happened with John Whiting's Saint's Day in 1954, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1955, The Birthday Party in 1958, John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance in 1959 and Edward Bond's Saved in 1965. What is surprising about The Birthday Party is that, even if it leaves much unexplained, it still boasts familiar landmarks. It has a traditional three-act structure. It is also full of mystery and suspense. David T. Thompson, in his invaluable book Pinter: The Players' Playwright, traces the influence of Pinter's acting career on his later work: in the case of The Birthday Party, he cites the example of Mary Hayley Bell's The Uninvited Guest, in which Pinter played, at Colchester in 1955, a refugee from an asylum who undergoes sustained interrogation. This residual memory is transformed by Pinter's dark imagination. But I am reminded of a remark made by the German director Peter Zadek that what he enjoys in Pinter is "the mix of Agatha Christie and Kafka." And The Birthday Party's current director, David Farr, makes a similar point when he says that Pinter "blends existential modernism with British realism and pragmatism." In that lies the real key to The Birthday Party's survival capacity: it is set in a seaside boarding-house and opens the door to European history. Pinter is notoriously reluctant to analyse his own work. But, when I ask him why The Birthday Party has endured, he offers both a political and personal explanation. "It's possible to say," he tentatively admits, "that two people knocking at the door of someone's residence and terrorising them and taking them away has become more and more actual in our lives. It happens all the time. It's happening more today than it did yesterday, and that may be a reason for the play's long life. It's not fantasy. It just becomes more and more real. "Thinking back to my own life, I also hadn't forgotten my own experiences as a conscientious objector 10 years earlier. I had two tribunals and trials and expected to go to prison. I was saved only by my father paying the fine. But I remember being defiant at the time. No one wanted me to be a conscientious objector. My parents certainly didn't want it. My teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley, didn't want it. My friends didn't want it. I was alone. That was the point. Whatever his vices and failings, Stanley represents that spirit of defiance. He's not a passive victim waiting to be destroyed, but someone who puts up a fight. In that sense, the play derives from my own experience." In the end, that is what makes The Birthday Party so unsettling: it combines the structure of a rep thriller with the guilt mechanisms of Kafka's The Trial and a deeply felt rebellion against what Pinter, in a much-quoted letter to Peter Wood, called "the shit-stained strictures of centuries of tradition." The identity of the oppressors is also crucial to the play's political meaning. I put it to Pinter, and he readily agreed, that if it were Smith and Jones, rather than Goldberg and McCann, who came through the door, the play would not work. Having forsaken religion at the age of 13, Pinter represents through Goldberg the patriarchal aspects of Jewish orthodoxy; and, having worked extensively in Ireland as an actor in the 1950s, he makes McCann an example of an oppressive Catholicism. But, in Pinter's richly ambivalent world, the oppressors are themselves victims of larger forces. The ultimate paradox of The Birthday Party is that the same words will be spoken on the stage of the Lyric Hammersmith in 2008 as in 1958, yet they will have acquired new meaning. Our response to the play now is, in fact, informed by multiple factors: our knowledge of Pinter's politics; our love of drama that avoids narrative resolution; our awareness of intimidation techniques that continue up to, but certainly won't end, with Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Virginia Woolf saw a shift in human sensibility in the early years of the 20th century. I would argue that an equally profound one has taken place in the past 50 years, and that we respond more readily to art that is finally unresolved, inexplicable and mysterious. Not the least part of that shift lies in our willing embrace of popular culture; and David Farr makes a shrewd point when he suggests that The Birthday Party both unconsciously absorbed and has directly influenced that culture. "Pinter," says Farr, "reminds me of early Truffaut in his ability to lend a popular plot existential meaning: you see it in a work like Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist which, given Stanley's own background, might be an apt title for Pinter's play. "Yet, when John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson turn up at the start of Pulp Fiction there are direct echoes of The Birthday Party, and there's a Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report, which shows, like Pinter's play, that punishment may precede the crime and that you are accused before you've actually done anything." Farr's point is well made. It also confirms that Pinter's enduring, ultimately undefinable play, which left the critics floundering in 1958, has the power of all first-rate art to acknowledge the past and reflect the future while existing in the tangible present. Schiller's Mary StuartFriedrich von Schiller, 1759-1805
Friedrich Schiller was born in Marbach, Württemberg, of Lutheran parents. His father, Johannes Kaspar Schiller, was an officer and surgeon. Elisabeth Dorothea, Schiller's mother, was a pious, serious-minded woman. The Duke Karl Eugen (Charles II), who had control over his subjects' children, ordered Schiller attend the military academy instead of studying theology. In 1773 he left home and spent miserable years under strict discipline, which only strengthened his longing for freedom. Schiller studied first law and entered then the newly created medical department. In 1780 he was dismissed from the academy after writing a controversial essay on religion, On Relation Between Man's Animal and Spiritual Nature. At the age of 21 he was forced to join his father's regiment. Despite his father's efforts, Schiller continued to write. His first drama, Die Räuber, was published in 1781 and performed next year in Mannheim. The play about a noble outlaw, Karl Moor, who has rejected the values of his father, gained with its revolutionary appeal immediate success among students. Romantic writers in England, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, admired The Robbers and greeted with enthusiasm its theme of liberty. The theme of the conflict between a father and son continued in Don Carlos (1787), in which the eldest son of Philip II of Spain is torn between love and court intrigues. This time the forces of reaction win, although the movement of history is on the side of the representatives of the new way of thinking. Verdi's famous opera from 1867 drew on the play. Schiller's writings inspired also Brahms, d'Indy, Lalo, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Richard Strauss and Tchaikovsky. When the Duke pressured Schiller for his 'Sturm und Drang' writings, he fled to Württemberg. In 1783 he was given a post of theater-poet at the Mannheim theater, but he lost it in 1784. During this period Charlotte von Kalb, a married woman, inspired his work; she was portrayed in Don Carlos as Elizabeth of Valois. Schiller's wandering years ended in 1789. Between the years 1787 and 1792 Schiller lived in Weimar and Jena. He wrote almost exclusively on historical subjects, among others about the Thirty Years' War (1791-93). In Weimar he assisted Goethe in the direction of the Court Theater by adapting many plays for the stage, including Goethe's Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, Jean Racine's Phaedra, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. The first part of a History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands from Spanish Rule (1788) not only secured Schiller a Chair of History at the University of Jena, but also stimulated the German historiography. In 1793 Schiller met Friedrich Hölderlin and helped the younger poet to obtain his first post as a tutor. Schiller also published some of Hölderlin's poems and fragments of his novel Hyperion (1797-99). In 1790 Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeldt - a deep blow to Charlotte von Kalb, from which she never recovered. With Charlotte he had four children. Because of pneumonia and pleurisy, Schiller was forced to give up in 1791 his professional duties - he remained an invalid until his death. In the 1790s Schiller wrote philosophical poems and studies about philosophy and aesthetics under the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgement. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the wave of terror, Schiller emphasized the humanistic, preserving forces of art. He also rejected a homage offered to him by the Jacobines. Schiller died in Weimar on May 9, 1805, at the age of 46. His last drama, Demetrius (1815), was left unfinished.
Meeting with Goethe in July 1794 led to renewal of Schiller's creative talents. Schiller encouraged Goëthe to return to his Faust and Goëthe contributed his journal Die Horen from 1795 to 1797. Schiller's study Breife Über die Äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man) was written in the aftermath of the French regicide and Reign of Terror. Schiller states that aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual. In the society, where people are just parts in a larger machine, individuals are unable to develop fully. Freedom can occur only through education. The key to education is the experience of beauty. In another major theoretical essay, Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung (1795, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry), Schiller explorers the contrasts between the 'naïve' and 'sentimental' modes, enlarging his study into analysis of nature and culture, feeling and thought, the finite and the infinite. Modern poets will never regain the immediate and unconscious - the naïve - relationship to nature. Schiller considered himself a 'sentimental' or reflective writer, when his friend Goëthe was an archetype of the 'naïve' genius. On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry was highly influential and its ideas have been developed by such thinkers as Hegel, C.G. Jung, Herbert Read, and Herbert Marcuse. Selected works:
Robert David Macdonald, Translator for Schiller’s Mary StuartRobert David Macdonald was born in Elgin in 1929 (d. May, 2004). He originally trained as a musician. He spent some years as a translator for UNESCO before becoming Assistant Director at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden opera houses. In 1971 Macdonald joined Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse as a Co-Director of the Citizens' Company until his retirement in May 2003. During that time he wrote fourteen plays for the company including The De Sade Show (1975); Chinchilla (1977); Summit Conference (1978); A Waste of Time (1980); Don Juan (1980); Webster (1983); In Quest of Conscience (1994); Britannicus (2002) and Cheri (2003). He directed fifty productions for the Citizens', including British and world premieres. MacDonald was also responsible for the adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a hugely successful production that has been performed in Britain, Europe and the USA. During his theatrical career MacDonald translated over sixty plays and operas from ten languages and his adaptation of War and Peace by his former teacher Erwin Piscator ran for two seasons on Broadway and received an Emmy award when shown on U.S television. Macdonald was fluent in several languages, and his translations and adaptations of European classics, always done meticulously but with enormous wit and humour, ensured that the Citizens' was able to make accessible many neglected gems of European drama. |
BACKGROUND ON Pinter's Briefs
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Albee's 25 plays form a body of work that is recognized as unique, uncompromising, controversial, elliptical, and provocative. A canon that is, as Albee himself describes it, "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen." No wonder, then, that this forty-year career has seen as many commercial failures as successes. The '80s, in fact did not yield a single Albee play that could be considered a commercial hit. "There is not always a great relationship between popularity and excellence," he says. "You just have to make the assumption you're doing good work and go on doing it." Perseverance ultimately triumphed; his most recent drama reclaimed Albee's position as America's leading dramatist. Three Tall Women enjoyed a stunning, sold-out success in New York and has been staged across the country and around the world. It received Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle and earned Albee his third Pulitzer Prize, an honor that is bested only by Eugene O'Neill's four awards.
Albee left home when he was 20 and moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he took to the era's counterculture and avant-garde movements. After using up his paternal grandmother's modest legacy, he took a variety of menial jobs until 1959 when The Zoo Story made him a famous playwright, first in Europe, where it premiered in Berlin, and then in New York. This short work, in which a bum entices an executive to commit murder, together with 1962's full-length Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a brutal portrait of a hard-drinking academic couple, and 1966's A Delicate Balance, his first Pulitzer Prize-winner, created the mold for American drama for the rest of our century.
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The Pillars of Society proved, once and for all, Ibsen's emancipation, first, from the thrall of romanticism, which he had pushed aside as of no more worth than a toy; and, secondly, from the domination of French technique, which he had mastered and surpassed. In the plays of the second period there are evident Ibsen's most mature gifts as a craftsman as well as that peculiar philosophy which made him the Jeremiah of the modern social world. In An Enemy of the People the struggle is between hypocrisy and greed on one side, and the ideal of personal honor on the other; in Ghosts there is an exposition of a fate-tragedy darker and more searching even than in Oedipus; and in each of the social dramas there is exposed, as under the pitiless lens of the microscope, some moral cancer. Ibsen forced his characters to scrutinize their past, the conditions of the society to which they belonged, and the methods by which they had gained their own petty ambitions, in order that they might pronounce judgment upon themselves. The action is still for the most part concerned with men's deeds and outward lives, in connection with society and the world; and his themes have largely to do with the moral and ethical relations of man with man.
IBSEN'S MORAL IDEALS
Leading German 18th-century dramatist, poet, and literary theorist. Schiller's mature plays examine the inward freedom of the soul; his first play The Robbers (1781) was a landmark in German theatrical history and spoke of the ideas of liberty. According to Schiller, a play is not a means to enjoyment; it is the very thing enjoyed. Aesthetic education is necessary, he argued, not only for the proper balance of the individual soul, but for the harmonious development of society. 
Among Schiller's best-known works is An Die Freude (Ode to Joy), later set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven in his Choral Symphony. The dramatic trilogy Wallenstein depicted the tumultuous period of the Thirty Years' War. Maria Stuart (1800) was about Queen Elizabeth I of England and the last days of Mary Queen of Scots, when she was held captive in the Castle of Fotheringay. Wilhelm Tell (1803), based on chronicles of the Swiss liberation movement, was dedicated as a New Year's Gift to the World. It tells about the famous hero, a mountain man who fought for freedom and become the embodiment of courage. "The mountain cannot frighten one who was born on it,"Tell says to his countrymen. 