Particular style and cultural context of the theatre Essay

Taking a range of dallys female genitaliavass on the course show how the play texts atomic number 18 affected by the particular drift and heathenish context of the arena from which they are drawn. For this strain I will be looking at The Menaechmi by genus Plautus, erstwhile upon Four Robbers by Femi Osofisan, Therese Raquin by Emile Zola, Hernani by Victor Hugo, Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge, Aoi no Uye by Zenchiku Jinobu and tocopherol Lynne by Mrs Wood, altered by T. A. Palmer. I let chosen this selection of plays as I feel it gives an consummate cross section of the plays which have made up the course this year.From delving into the stopping superman surrounding these different plays I will be examining the heathenish and semi g everyplacenmental scenerys which have affected their creation, and how these plays may reflect or affect reality. Plautus having been born in Italy became a Roman soldier, This is probably when he was undefendable to the delights of the Greek lay disclose. After the Macedonian conquest, Greek comedy go away from The daring personal and semi governmental satire of Aristophanes.The Three ages of Greek Comedy are categorised as Old, ticker and New, and the development of comedy is said to be mainly due to the political and social conditions of Athens, it finally held up a mirror to all that was singularity of Athenian manner. Plautus made adaptations of Plays by the Popular Greek dramatist Menander. still the refined work of Menander would hold little interest for a rowdy Roman crowd. So Plautus plays are, as the Romans would have love to watch, full of debauchery and brashness. This support certainly be seen in The Menaechmi, from the genuinely beginning of the play.The Prologue in its integrality encourages the audience to pay attention, with the rhyming spoken communication appealing to all classes and qualification the play really easy to mind to and understand. The part Menaechmus 1 is the epitome of infidelity and licentiousness he says to his bawd Desiree now can you guess what I require to do? Desiree, your regular subservient sex object, replies Yes, I know and whats to a great extent, Ill do what you want. The language Plautus uses throughout is loaded with sexual suggestion twist in it, wont you? and Your Tight pants. Plautus seemed to baby to the wants of his Roman audiences, with great success.another(prenominal) dramatist of the time who took ideas from Menanders comedies was Terence. However Terence, unlike Plautus cared little about public taste, instead he devoted himself to capturing the spirit of the Greek originals which he adapted. East Lynne, adapted by T. A. Palmer, is another play which is a pure product of the prevalent culture of its time. One source of information I used in my research on East Lynne said The storys intense emotionalism made it popular in its time, especially in the U. S. straightaway it is seen as the epitome of melo dramatic excess. This quotation, I believe, really does sum up the feel of the play.The Victorian Era, from which the play is drawn, was filled with similar performances. The behavior was cognize as Pictorial Theatre as it conveyed absolutely no gumption of realism, and simple pictures were used to train scenery. Looking at the play itself you can see the stock characters very understandably, the insipid female roles, the strong oer-bearing and exacting males, and the almost sickening displays of emotion that signify this romanticism. Particular lines that hellionstrate this clearly within the text are this from Isabel Love and contentment can make the humblest home happy. And When he leaves me it seems as though the sunshine had faded from my life. The playwright makes little attempt to influence the actors exposition of characters, with highly brief stage directions that literally just indicate each(prenominal) characters entrances and exits. Costumes at this time were con temporary clothing, and like every other aspect of this style, suggestively un-realistic well at least it was consistent Though this style was very popular at the time, interesting things were happening in IrelandThe hundred long time between 1840 and 1940 saw Ireland struggle for, achieve, and deal with the consequences of political liberty and impudently nationhood. The realism of force field created by the likes of Synge, Yates, and Wilde eventually carried over to Britain and is commonly cognise as the Irish Renaissance. Personally I feel that this resurgence was brought on by the political liberty of Ireland and the desire to find a cultural identity. J. M. Synge wrote plays about Irish peasant life and considering the popularity of melodrama in Britain the differences between East Lynne and Riders to the sea is enormous.The most striking thing you notice when looking at Riders to the Sea is the constant interruptions by the playwright, directing the actor and production towards a realistic style. At the beginning of the play there is a stage direction, setting the scene in so a good deal detail as to include that Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, finishes kneading cake, and puts it down in the hoi polloi oven by the fire then wipes her hands, and begins to spin The majority of the cast are female, with the head of the household being Maurya an old woman.This quotation from the plays sums up her argument and character Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be animate for ever, and we must be satisfied. For sure, J. M. Synge was one(a) of the people who contributed to the naturalism we see in theatre today. In legion(predicate) countries, political theatre can be seen in one form or another. Modern African looseness is a general category of performances that in practise and principle purport to stand in opposition to the dominant trends of cultura l presentations and representations, productions and social transaction.Femi Osofisans play, Once upon Four Robbers, is a hard loaded political tool. The prologue is highly motivational, with quotations like this Slogans about returning to the land, sermons of bourgeois morality, are waste to a man who is born condemned to poverty. And I hope this play shocks us into a new awareness I hope it helps to change our emplacement from passive acceptance or sterile indignation into a more dynamic more enraged determination to confront ourselves and our lives. Within the play itself you can see elements which are almost Brechtian at times, the use of the margin call of the storyteller for pattern. Regarding a section of the text in which three characters register off a list of scandals there are footnotes relating to this list which require In production, the list should be made to include the most fresh public scandals effectively highlighting that the story of the play really is one that transcends eras of time so long as the political references are unplowed up to date.This also shows the flexibility of the writer the flexibility of African theatre as a whole. The ending of the play depends on the settlement of the audiences opinions. twain separate endings are written. One sees the Robbers set free, and the other sees them put to death. This emphasises get ahead Osofisans desire for the audience and for the African people as a whole to start passing judgement on their lives, on their governments and on their burdensomeness. Africa as a continent is one which has always suffered through oppression this play like many others seems to be trying to counteract this.In the words of Paulo Freire What could be a more effective way of making people actors in their own development than to raise their awareness and lecture their energies through cultural activities. The beginning of the amorous Movement was supposedly foretell by the French play, Hernani, w ritten by Victor Hugo. In France some 1660 1830 there were certain rules attached to the writing of a play. These were known as the Unities. The three Unities were that a play must take place in one day the duration of the play could not span weeks or months.The second was that there could only be one setting for the entirety of the play. The third unity was that the action could only be on one plot or story line. Hernani breaks all of these rules as it involved characters from gallant history, had lots of scenery changes and does not hold one plot solely. The Romantic features of Hernani include the character Dona Sol, the emotional, bland female and the character of the Duke who barges into the play at the beginning and assumes control. There is also a sense of spiritualization in the play with the ghostly Mask character.In fact, when the play was first performed in 1830, Hugo announced that he would employ no claque or hired applauders, a customary practise in French Theatres. It seems that Hernani was certainly affected by the style of theatre in France when it was written it went against all the conventions that existed at the time. Another French playwright, Emile Zola, produced Therese Raquin in 1873, another play which certainly went against convention Emile Zolas novels were attacked and even banned for their frankness and sordid detail. In fact when he published the open letter JAccuse in demurral of Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer who had been convicted of treason. Zola was sentenced to prison for libel. Zola was said to have been the Leader of the natural scientist movement in 19th Century Literature. His early writing borrowed heavily from the Romantic Movement but as his style developed he was more influenced by science than art, and was said to have been inspired by Claude Bernhards introduction to experimental medicine (1865).The play itself is very realistic, the setting is in one room which complies with one of the unities but takes plac e over a long stretch of time. The characters Zola creates in Therese Raquin include Camille, an irritating, immature and conventional Man who is seriously cossetted by his mother. His character is epitomised by lines such as She hasnt much brain, poor girl, but she looks after me marvellously when Im ill. Mama has taught her to make my camomile tea. Another Character of great importance is the mother Madame Raquin whose typical lines include Now, now, Therese, Laurent is not very happy.He lives in a garret and they feed him very poorly at that little cafi of his. Madame Raquin is a middle class, self righteous, snob who oppresses and patronises Therese. Camille is just as bad as his mother but is just a result of her conceited values. The subject is clearly an attack at the bourgeois, but many people seemed to have been more concerned with attacking Zolas scientific methods of conveying relationships. Wilde Quipped that Zola was determined to show that if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. The spirit cosmos and the real world are highly linked in Japanese society and so it would be incredibly strange not to see some reality of this in Japanese Noh Theatre. The play Aoi no Uye by Zenchiku Ujinobu is certainly an example of this, with the witch character reciting a mystic formula which invokes The living hallucination of Rokujo. One of the most important features of the Noh play is the use of the Theatre as a means of enforcing religious morals, in particular the Buddhist doctrine that human salvation is achieved through prayer and penance. Aoi No Uye is an example of a Demon play, one of five of the categories given to all plays in the style of Noh. This particular category usually has a demon or preternatural figure as the protagonist, there is a battle between the demon and hero in which the demon is usually subdued and this is very much the pattern of events in Aoi no Uye. The high status Saint character comes along and drives out the de mon Rokujo, who in his final speech exclaims The interpretive program of the Hannya Book I am afraid. Never again will I come as an angry ghost. Then, in baffle to drive the point forward even further the Ghost ends the play saying When she comprehend the sound of Scripture the demons raging heart was stilled shapes of pity and sufferance, the bodhisats v descend. Her soul casts off its bonds, she walks in Buddhas way. This theatre form seems to be incredibly moralistic and it is clear that religion exerts a dogmatic hold over the people who view such performances. The play text itself is a pinnacle example of the Noh genre, it complies in every aspect.Out of all the plays I have chosen to cover in this essay it is interesting that despite whether the playwright has chosen to write his or her play in the cultural style of the time or to go against the grain entirely in order to produce a new style of theatre, whether the play itself adheres to the politics of a particular soci ety or if it attempts to evoke a political stead in the audience, all are affected by their cultural, social and political circumstances. All these plays have affected the cultures from which they are drawn to a greater or lesser extent.The degree to which they have reflected their theatrical, political or cultural situation is variable and especially remarkable. Bibliography Alice, B, 1935, Minute history of the drama, Grosset and Dunlap. Bates, Alfred, 1906, The Drama Its history, writings and influence on civilisation, London Historical Publishing Company. Crowe, Stanley, 2003, Furman University site. Didaskalia, 1999, Ancient theatre today, UC Berkeley Freire, Paulo, 1972, pedagogy of the oppressed, Penguin. Guardian Unlimited, 2003, Guardian Newspapers LTD. The New Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre, 2001, The Penguin Group.