Varieties of theatrical realism after Ibsen

The major theorist of realist theatre after Henrik Ibsen was Bernard Shaw, whose critical writings constitute the most important case for theatrical realism since Émile Zola, and whose own plays are an idiosyncratic blend of fourth-wall realism, drawing-room comedy, and opera. The plays of Shaw’s contemporary Anton Chekhov – Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard – are widely recognized as the zenith of the fourth-wall, illusionist stage. Chekhov’s director Konstantin Stanislavski’s realist Moscow Art Theatre became the most important theatre of the twentieth century. Reactions to fourth-wall realism are found in the poetic realism of the two great playwrights of the Irish Renaissance – J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey – and the sui generis Luigi Pirandello, whose realist theatre serves to argue the complexities of depicting reality. The declared post-realist Bertolt Brecht criticized realism as inherently conservative, but his theories contain historical and logical fallacies, and his own antidote to realism – his ‘epic theatre’ – depends heavily on realism itself. In contrast, the German ‘Documentary Drama’ of the 1960s aimed to present the ‘truth’ of history through realist enactments of it. Lastly, the essay discusses the dominance of realism in the American theatre, where it characterizes the best work of Eugene O’Neill and the drama of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and their descendants.