Layer III — The critical conversation

Scholarly Journals

Short critical essays summarizing major lines of scholarship, plus discussion questions and a bibliography for deeper research.

Essay 1

The Riot as Manifesto: Ubu Roi and the Birth of the Avant-Garde

Scholars have long treated the 1896 premiere less as a play than as an event. Jarry’s use of masks, placards and puppet-like acting rejected the illusionism of the well-made play. The scandal itself — audience against stage — became a template the avant-garde would repeat for a century: provocation as aesthetic.

Discussion

  • Is an audience’s outrage part of the artwork?
  • How does Ubu anticipate the Absurd?

Essay 2

Dream Logic: Strindberg’s Turn from Naturalism

Strindberg’s author’s note to A Dream Play describes a structure in which “anything can happen; everything is possible and probable.” The single consciousness of the dreamer replaces plot causality. Critics read this as the hinge between nineteenth-century naturalism and modernist subjectivity.

Discussion

  • Whose dream is A Dream Play?
  • Why did a naturalist need to break realism?

Essay 3

The Scream and the State: Expressionism after 1914

German Expressionist drama dramatized the individual’s revolt against family, industry and war. Its abstraction — nameless types, distorted spaces — has been read both as spiritual renewal and as an early critique of mass society, later influencing Brecht and American playwrights like O’Neill and Rice.

Discussion

  • Why abstract characters into types?
  • Is Expressionism political or spiritual?

Essay 4

Cruelty and the Body: Artaud’s Long Afterlife

Artaud produced little completed theatre, yet The Theatre and Its Double became among the most cited texts in twentieth-century performance. Postwar practitioners — Peter Brook, the Living Theatre, Jerzy Grotowski — drew on its call for a theatre of the senses over the text.

Discussion

  • Can theatre escape language?
  • What does “cruelty” really mean for Artaud?

Further Reading

  1. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
  2. Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn & Bacon (multiple editions).
  3. Deák, František. Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
  4. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961.
  5. Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992. London: Routledge, 1993.
  6. Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France. New York: Vintage, 1968.
  7. Styan, J. L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Vol. 2 & 3: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd; Expressionism and Epic Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1981.
  8. Strindberg, August. A Dream Play (with Author’s Note), 1901.