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A Brief History Of The Theatre

Roman Theatre at Verulamium, St Albans

Theatre originated about two and a half thousand years ago, developing from the religious rites of ancient Greece. Songs and dances in honour of gods slowly evolved into theatre. For this to happen three things were needed: actors had to speak or sing independently from the chorus praising the gods; an audience needed to be emotionally involved in a performance, without being a part of it; and finally some kind of conflict was needed to create doubt. A ritual which always stayed the same, where everyone knew where they were and what to do, had to accept the uncertainty of conflict.

So the first great theatrical age in the history of mankind was that of Greece in the fifth century BC. The first plays developed out of the dithyramb, a unison song sung around the alter of Dionysus, the god of wine by a chorus of fifty men. In the earliest plays fifty men were still present, and the alter of Dionysus was still in the centre of the stage. At the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens today the base of the alter of Dionysus still remains at the centre of the semicircular stage. The crucial step away from the chorus by an independent actor was first made, it is thought, by a man called Thespis. Thespis was the first man to win a prize at the newly established dramatic festival, the City of Dionysia. He was also the first unsanctified person who dared to assume the character of a god. Thespis is remembered today in the word thespian which is sometimes applied to actors. Thespis broke away from the comforting tyranny of ritual. The chorus and the actor could have rows. Conflict now had a presence on stage. Now plays could begin.

Of the many poets who wrote for the City of Dionysia, the earliest and perhaps the best was Aeschylus (525 -456BC). In his plays the development of early theatre can be followed. Seven of his eighty to ninety plays survive, and in the earliest plays there is a chorus which numbers fifty, as in the dithyramb, and only one actor. In later plays the chorus is reduced to twelve, and a second and then a third actor was added. Plays were often performed in trilogies, and The Orestia is the only example of an ancient Greek dramatic trilogy to have survived.

The next well known dramatist after Aeschylus was Sophocles. In the plays of Sophocles the chorus is less integrated into the action, and this innovation was continued by his younger contemporary Euripides, the last great writer of Greek tragedy. Euripides used a prologue, accelerated the diminishing importance of the chorus, and was sceptical in outlook. He moved theatre further from the devout conformity of the religious rites where all this began. Euripides won a prize five times, but his contemporaries found him rather awkward, which explains his relative lack of prizes. To later generations, however, he is perhaps the most easily understood of the writers of Greek tragedy.

Meanwhile comedy was also developing. Revels which accompanied successful harvests, and the enjoyment of life that Dionysus represented, became comedy in the theatre. Aristophanes who lived between 440BC and 380BC was the best known writer of comedies. Certainly in his work the devout nature of unquestioning religious ritual has gone, replaced by satire, invective, personal criticism, buffoonery and obscenity.

Roman Theatre at Verulamium, St Albans, looking towards the stage.

Once control of the theatre passed out of the hands of the dramatists into those of the actors the great period of Greek drama was over. Comedy became paramount, and the later easy comedy of manners with stock characters was typified by Menander (342 - 292BC). This was the type of theatre that the Romans came into contact with when they extended their empire eastwards, and used as a model for their own theatre. Their two main writers were Plautus and Terence. Stock characters were typically the arrogant soldier, the miser, the parasite, the identical twins, the browbeaten but resourceful slave.

Although the Romans contributed little to the history of play writing, they did change the design of theatres in quite a revolutionary way. Instead of building theatres on hillsides, theatres were often built on flat ground with massive surrounding walls. Some of these buildings in north Africa survive in excellent condition. There is also a partial survivor of this kind of building in Britain at the Roman Theatre in St Albans. The walls of the St Albans theatre are lost but the stage area and an area of tiered seating remains. Ironically these magnificent buildings housed a dying art. In later Roman times plays were read and quoted from but were not acted. Tastes ran more to extravagant gladiatorial battles. With the invasions of the barbarian tribes which destroyed the Roman Empire, what was left of theatre was also destroyed. Theatre now returned to the rites of religious ritual, from which it had sprung in the fifth century BC.

Theatre was held in a kind of suspended animation in the form of church drama for many centuries. Wandering bands of acrobats, dancers,singers, wrestlers, story tellers helped to preserve theatre skills. Often these groups were disapproved of and attacked by the Church. Christians were strictly forbidden to attend theatrical performances, or appear in them. What Christians did not realise was that their Church harboured the enemy at the very centre of its ritual. When the time came it was out of Church ritual that theatre was to be reborn. This happened in a very piecemeal fashion, but it seemed that generally speaking plays developed out of sung portions, known as tropes, of early Christian festivals. The trope for Easter consisted of short dialogue, together with some rudimentary stage directions. It was known from its opening words as Quen quaeritis - "whom seek ye." This was sung by the priest in a white robe, representing the three Marys who visited Jesus on Easter morning - "Whom seek ye in the sepulchre O children of Christ?" To which is given the reply: "Jesus of Nazareth the crucified, O child of Heaven." And the priest concludes: "He is not here. He has risen as he foretold. Go announce that he is risen from the dead." Onto this little piece of drama other speeches were added, and slowly a new drama evolved. Soon the action became too big for the church building, and it moved outside. Of course it was also probable that the new drama was becoming unpredictable, leaving behind the certainties of ritual. This meant that in many cases the new drama was forcibly ejected from the church. At first the infant theatre was performed in the open air outside churches. An Anglo Norman play called Adam from the twelfth century was clearly intended to be performed outdoors, with church doors as the backdrop. From then on, theatre practised in this way became increasingly widespread, although as I've said the progression was patchy. In Spain it wasn't until the fifteenth century that there is any reference to a play being performed outside a church.

The next step was for the new homeless outdoor theatre to find a building. Some early theatre "buildings" consisted of a kind of theatre in the round, and remains of such amphitheatres can be found in Cornwall. These were based on similar continental designs. Alternatively small covered stages arranged in a line were sometimes used, with the audience moving around them. The stage directions indicate considerable technical complexity, even if the plots were simple re-enactments of Bible stories.

Plots eventually started to move away from the Bible through the influence of comedy. Not surprisingly people liked a little light relief in their diet of Bible stories, and this was duly provided. Satan was typically a comic character, as were the shepherds. Demand for the comic moments became steadily greater, which meant more of a "show" was being staged. The serious parts of the show then began to take on a slightly less overtly biblical character, with the rise of a tradition of plays about abstract vices and virtues. These plays tended to be done in cycles, and were often known as mystery plays. Everyman is the best known.

The Globe

Then came the big moment when theatre suddenly became a great art form, and produced some of mankind's finest literature. In the first half of the sixteenth century holiday crowds were still watching re-enactments of Bible stories from pageant wagons. But then in 1552 the first English Renaissance comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, was written by a schoolmaster named Nicholas Udall for his pupils to perform. In 1562 came a Renaissance tragedy Gorbadoc written by two scholars of the Inner Temple, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. One act comedies were also becoming popular, deriving from the comic elements in Church plays. The Play of the Weather by John Heywood was a well known example. It was people in groups playing these comic interludes who became the first professional English actors. They added to their repertoire with stories from English history, using the episodic method of the old Bible histories. Performances were now often staged in galleried inns, such as the George in Southwark, with the action taking place in the central courtyard. The inns inspired the design of theatres which were then built: John Burbage built a theatre known as "The Theatre" in Finsbury Fields in 1576. It was circular in design, the central courtyard unroofed, with galleries arranged around the sides of the building. Then towards the end of the following decade a young man called William Shakespeare arrived in London from Stratford Upon Avon. As a practitioner of a young, chaotic and often violent art form, Shakespeare was to be the centre of an astounding burst of creative energy. I think of this time in terms of the popular music which burst onto the scene in the last third of the twentieth century, quickly developing in sophistication to produce the masterpieces of the Beatles. Elizabethan theatre followed a similarly sudden and spectacular trajectory. In 1576 there was only one theatre: by 1599 there were a number of busy theatres, and Shakespeare's company had built its own theatre, the Globe in Southwark, where masterpieces of world literature were being performed.

Then as suddenly as the theatre had gloriously flowered, it went into decline. By Shakespeare's death in 1616 it was really all over. Beaumont and Fletcher began a collaboration in 1608, but did not reach earlier heights. They wrote plays designed for sophisticated audiences, far removed from the boisterous crowds which had packed into the Globe. Today Shakespeare is usually presented in a very intellectual light, but in fact it was intellectualism that brought about the decline of theatre, leaching away the vitality which had made Shakespearian theatre so exciting. The only major talent to emerge before the English Civil War destroyed the theatre completely was John Webster, who wrote two lasting plays in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Then came the Civil War, and the rule of Parliament, when the Puritans, so powerfully portrayed in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, banned theatre. All the theatre buildings, including the Globe were demolished, and theatre died for eighteen years. By the time Charles the Second returned to the throne in 1660 nearly all the old actors were dead. It took a long time for theatre in England to recover.

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

The centre of gravity in the world of theatre now shifted to France, where the seventeenth century saw a golden age led by Corneille, Jean Racine, and then Moliere. From 1658 when Moliere's troop performed for Louis the Fourteenth's court at the Louvre, Paris became the greatest theatrical city in the world. Meanwhile in Britain Charles the Second had given the job of rebuilding the English theatre to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, who had both been playwrights before 1642. Davenant was Shakespeare's godson, and if rumours are to be believed, the great man's illegitimate son. A link to the past was required, and Davenant provided this. The rumour that he was Shakespeare biological son had basis less in reality, and more in a psychological need to link to a lost past. There seems no evidence that Shakespeare was his real father.

The most obvious memorial to this time of rebirth is the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Thomas Killigrew formed the Kings Company and built the first Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which is, therefore, an important symbol of Britain's reinvigoration following the barren years of Puritan rule. The present Theatre Royal is the third since the original opened in 1663. A backstage tour can be taken which tells the story of the theatre.

Changes, as well as a return to the past, were also a feature of theatre's rebirth in the 1660s. Theatres were now roofed, and women played women's roles for the first time. Samuel Pepys in his Diary for 1661 talks of going to see a play called Beggar's Bush. "It was very well done" apparently, and Pepys recalls that this was "the first time I ever saw women come upon the stage." (Jan 1st 1661) Talented actresses with no training, and no background in the theatre, seemed to come out of nowhere. Nell Gwynne, a member of Killigrew's company was the best known of these first actresses. She retired to become a mistress of Charles the Second. Amongst the male actors David Garrick was the most famous, and he developed a new, more natural style of acting. New playwrights started work, and a bawdy comedy of manners, known as Restoration Comedy, reached its peak in the writing of Congreve, Vanburgh, and Farquhar. Congreve's Way Of The World, was probably the best play of the period. The Theatres Royal of Bristol, Margate and Richmond all survive from the seventeenth century, and of course still carry a memorial of Charles the Second in their name.

Smallhythe Place, home of Ellen Terry

Following the excitement of the Restoration the work of Sheridan and Goldsmith in the late 1700s represented something of a high point. Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer, and Sheridan's The School For Scandal are still performed today, and are considered classics. But then in 1808 the theatre at Covent Garden burned to the ground, followed by the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. This was a symbolic and actual end of an era. Theatre in Britain went into another decline. Two huge theatres replaced the original Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and in a desperate bid to fill them, producers relied on clever sets and spectacle, rather than on writing. In Britain this was a time when actors, rather than writers, were the main influence. Ellen Terry, born into a theatrical family in 1847, became, with Henry Irving, the first major star of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century English stage. Ellen Terry's house, Smallhythe Place survives in Kent, and is very evocative of the theatre of the time. it is full of shoes, clothes, jewellery and showy stuff. Perhaps though it was music hall which really filled the long gap between Sheridan in the eighteenth century and Oscar Wilde at the beginning of the twentieth. Music hall artistes such as Marie Lloyd maintained the vital energy of the stage, and were appreciated by T.S. Eliot amongst others. As for serious theatre it was necessary to look abroad during this period, to Denmark with Ibsen, Sweden with Strindberg, and Russia with Chekov. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ibsen's most ardent disciple in Britain, George Bernard Shaw started his career, his first play Windowers' Houses staged in 1892. Then at the turn of the century Oscar Wilde brought real excitement back to London theatre with his unclassifiable and brilliant comedies.

 

The George Inn, Southwark

The long history of theatre has seen many contradictory developments, and into recent times this has been no different. Since the proscenium-arch stage was first used at the Teatro Farnese in Parma in 1628, this style of playhouse came to dominate. Plays became "realistic" in the sense that the proscenium arch was a window through which an audience would watch what Zola called "a slice of life." In place of a play like Henry The Fifth where the Prologue would transport an audience across the English Channel, writers were more limited in range. Now plays were restricted to interior scenes, played by a handful of actors. The audience meanwhile was placed in darkness. Over the two thousand five hundred years since theatre had first emerged from religious ritual, the separation of players from audience had been a constant theme. In the early years of the twentieth century the divorce between stage and audience was almost formalised in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of of the Moscow Art Theatre. He believed that the actor should completely forget about the audience on the other end of that "terrible black hole of the stage." The actor's job was to search inside himself for the feelings that would make his portrayal of a character sincere and real. Thoughts about the audience only got in the way of this process. Not surprisingly Stanislavsky's ideas became very influential in the training of film and TV actors and actresses, where the audience as a physical entity does not exist at all to the performers. Stanislavsky's disciple Lee Strasberg became director at the famous Actors Studio in New York in 1952, and he trained many famous famous performers. A brief list would include Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Sidney Poitier, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, Julia Roberts and Joanne Woodward.

Meanwhile back in theatres a real audience still existed in the shadows. A separation between audience and actors had been essential to create theatre, and the separation had never been so complete. People were often watching a stage play as if they were watching action on a film screen, which of course was the same shape as a proscenium arch. The fact is theatre had not always been like this. At the Globe audience and players had shared the same light, and to an extent shared the same action. I once saw A Winter's Tale at the Birmingham Rep, on a proscenium stage, and The Taming Of The Shrew at the Swan, designed on the lines of the old galleried inns where Shakespeare was first performed. I watched A Winter's Tale in an uninvolved kind of way, but The Taming Of The Shrew at the Swan was the most exciting experience I've ever had in the theatre. The actors would turn quite frequently to the audience, talking to us with the many asides that Shakespeare used, and a few others besides. I was almost part of the action, as would have been the case at the Globe. It was inevitable, perhaps, that the tide should turn and theatre should want to bring audiences out of the darkness. Playwrights began to react against realism, which lets face it is done so much better on film. The later work of Strindberg, and the plays of Sean O'Casey and Eugene O'Neill can be seen as part of this reaction. New ways of staging became fashionable. Elizabethan playhouses were recreated, at the Swan, and at the recreated Globe. Community theatre groups would perform anywhere, as long as it wasn't on a proscenium arch stage. When I was at university in the 1980s studying drama it was almost as though the poor old proscenium arch was a symbol of decadent oppression. The proscenium arch was up there with fox hunting and Margaret Thatcher. I toured the country extensively watching the work of community groups, and always there was a desire to get the audience more involved. I saw a David Edgar play in Dorchester written with members of the local community which required us to wander round a large church as part of the action. Being in a church emphasised the echoes with theatre's past. This play was actually rather boring, but it was an interesting return. And of course the ultimate irony was that if this play had been a total success, and we had all been assimilated into it, then the theatre of it would have disappeared. We'd be back at the beginning, taking part in religious ritual.

Perhaps the most significant reaction against naturalistic performing came from German playwright Bertolt Brecht, in the years before and after World War Two. Ironically Brecht didn't want to bring the audience in from the darkness. He wished to "alienate" them, to make it clear that they were watching a play on stage, and that actors were playing characters. Naturalistic styles of performing had left the audience in the dark, but ironically from Brecht's point of view rather than being excluded, people were actually being dragged too close to the action on stage. Audiences were feeling that the action they were seeing was real, and were becoming emotionally involved, as they would in witnessing any drama in life. Characters in TV or film drama do take on precisely this kind of independent life for viewers. Brecht felt that this intense emotional involvement meant that audiences were less likely to think about what they were seeing. It was an interesting point of view, and in many ways recalled the acting of Shakespeare's time, where actors would sometimes break out of their dramatic world to address the audience. This just goes to show that theatre's relationship with its audience can be strange and contradictory. Sometimes the ways in which the audience is brought closer also serve to distance it. Theatre began when audiences became separated from actors, but that separation can cancel itself out in unexpected ways. Perhaps in a deeper sense the long lost comforting rituals are still playing themselves out in the unpredictable conflict that theatre introduced. A play like Romeo and Juliet itself becomes ritual, played out from one generation to the next. Then the challenge is to reignite the excitement, bring the uncertainly of conflict back into the well known ritual. As Brecht said in 1953 of classic plays: "The genuine respect demanded by these works entails that we expose any respect of a false, hypocritical, lip-serving nature." (From Classical Status as an Inhibiting Factor) A famous play will stir the passions of its time, and then become a classic, playing like a ritual. It spends its time as an enemy of the people, and suffers in the widerness, before being accepted as a pillar of civilsation. So many great works have gone through this transformation. To a certain extent I don't think it can be avoided. The drama of today that stirs things up, will in its turn become the ritual of tomorrow.