IN 1888, AUGUST STRINDBERG declared that both religion and theater were on the verge of extinction in an increasingly rationalistic world. “Nowadays,” he wrote, “the primary process of intuition is giving way to reflection, investigation and analysis, and I feel that the theater, like religion, is on the way to being discarded as a dying form which we lack the necessary conditions to enjoy.” Yet Strindberg himself became one of the many modern dramatists and theater-practitioners whose work was heavily influenced by religion. Ironically, proponents of one “dying form” began looking for inspiration to another cultural form that no longer plays the pivotal role in Western society that it used to.

This chapter is not intended to provide an exhaustive synoptic survey of religion in modern theater. Instead, I want to explore some of the key ways and characteristic forms in which religion informed European theater and drama from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, focusing on the following: first, the aestheticized religiosity of early antirealist theater, in particular symbolist theater; second, the quest for spiritual regeneration portrayed in the dramas of Strindberg and the expressionists; third, the ritualistic “holy” theater of Artaud and Grotowski; and fourth, the dramatization of the absence of religious meaning in the work of Samuel Beckett. As indicated in the introduction to this book, I do not examine dramas that interrogate the political and economic aspects of religion.