Modern drama resembles a child half wise, in both knowing and not knowing its own father. By familiar usage, consecrated in the textbooks, Ibsen is “the father of modern drama”; the phrase instantly evokes the companion term “naturalism,” followed perhaps by a dim after-image of A Doll House, the consensual firstborn of our present theatrical age. This familiar view of the father has its partial truth, yielding certain academic rewards. It invites the editing of anthologies laid out on a taut straight line from Ibsen to Arthur Miller, with occasional detours into the essential non-realistic styles; or, if the anthologist is less sympathetic to Naturalism, it allows a backward glance at Hedda Gabler before one takes off for the real beginnings of modern drama somewhere in the volcanic foothills of Strindberg, finally to disappear in the farthest out thickets of the Grove Press.

All the dead voices…
They speak all at once
Each one to itself …
To have lived is not enough for them
They have to talk about it
To be dead is not enough for them …
Waiting for Godot

We are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles…
Finnegans Wake

Contrary to usual assumptions, Ibsen's cycle of 12 naturalistic plays, from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, is extremely learned work, closer to the writings of James Joyce or T. S. Eliot than to the typical drama of modern realism. The cycle is filled with the sense of history, the accumulations of the spirit of man. Its learning is deeply ingrained in its art, dictating form as well as content: it is unlike the learning of, say, Man and Superman, which is more or less on the surface for the audience's immediate comprehension and enjoyment.

Nothing tastes staler than the revolutions of the day before yesterday; the bitter flavor of great expectations disappointed clings to them; they make us feel superior for having seen through their ridiculous pretensions and sorry for our. fathers and grandfathers for having been taken in by them. That Naturalism in the novel and in the theatre still leaves such an aftertaste on our own palates is, in a way, a tribute to the intensity of emotion it aroused in its day and the length of time during which it acquired and held a dominant position. After all: it was in the 1870's that Zola shocked the world with his new concept of Naturalism; Ibsen's Ghosts was first published in 1881; Strindberg's Father in 1887, Miss Julie in 1888; Hauptmann's Before Sunrise had its first performance in 1889; Chekhov's Seagull in 1896.

Jean-Luc Godard, that paragon of paradox, takes time out in La Chinoise to rewrite film history by challenging traditional notions of what is real and what is not real. Lumière, Godard argues through a mouthpiece character, was no more a pioneering realist than Méliès was a mere magician. Lumière did photograph the reality of trains steaming into a station or of workers filing out of a factory, but these were painterly subjects fashionable with the Impressionists of the late 19th century. By contrast, Méliès may have staged the state visit of a Balkan monarch to France with actors and fake sets, but nonetheless he transformed the cinema into a kind of Brechtian newsreel. Hence, Méliès came closer to reality and modernity through artifice than Lumière did through literal reproduction.

How much of a Naturalist was Strindberg? It is true that he first made international reputation as one, but a few years later he turned to symbolism and created the proto-expressionistic works that won him another and perhaps greater reputation. And though The Father and Miss Julie are generally regarded as masterpieces of Naturalism, Zola, the chief apostle of the movement, found fault with The Father; and Miss Julie is less naturalistic than the preface Strindberg affixed to it would indicate. Miss Julie is the play that most nearly satisfies the requirements of Zola's naturalism. Strindberg labelled The Father simply “a tragedy,” but he gave Miss Julie the subtitle “a naturalistic tragedy.” This subtitle and the play's greater attention to physical detail are probably due to Zola's criticism of The Father.

Naturalism wasn't a label any of the early new-wave British dramatists would have chosen deliberately, but a shape for which they reached instinctively: it happened to meet many of the demands which they were beginning to make on the English theatre. It served as a convenient vehicle for direct social comment, as opposed—very much opposed—to that poeticism in symbolic drawing-rooms which delighted the cultural establishment, and which was being vaunted abroad by the British Council as a renaissance of verse drama. Eliot's high toryism was as much out-of-tune politically with the new dramatists as his sugar-coated cadences were stylistically ill-adapted to their themes. Conversely, naturalism was a time-honored form for the problem play, and well suited to the semi-autobiographical idiom in which the new-wavers tended to play with their problems.

Naturalism has its roots in a scientific approach which melds man inextricably to his environment, studying him as a complex amalgam of audible rhythms and spectacular mutations for survival. Chekhov, the passionate doctor, applied this discipline to the ailing conventional drama of his time.

A classic tends to age, disappear from active repertory, and then revive to meet the spiritual needs of a new audience, no less—and sometimes more—than do contemporary plays.

In recent years, Soviet theatre has increasingly produced the classics. Plays which not long ago saw little more than a dustrag have become the subject of violent debate, making new names for actors and directors.

Venerable academicians, learned literary scholars and theatre historians who have devoted their lives to the study of Russian classics react with divided feelings. They are pleased that their beloved plays once more meet the needs of the day, but are infuriated by what they see as the disrespect of the directors. Some of the older theatre-goers are also unsatisfied with contemporary interpretations of the classics.

Looking over the lush material landscape and the thin spiritual atmosphere of contemporary America, Reinhold Niebuhr called this “the age of sophisticated vulgarity.” That was several years ago, when the first crackles of what was later fanfared into a cultural explosion made his phrase seem an excess of gloom. Now, however, after we have seen so many of the knowledgeable enmeshed by patterns in which they neglect, adulterate, or destroy the best they are or know, Niebuhr's estimate does not appear so extreme. Various kinds and degrees of extremes are my concern here—specifically one strand in the pattern: the extremes that occur toward the end of an artistic movement, when it disintegrates, yet sweeps on in splinters to disable its adherents and opponents alike.