20th-Century Theatre: Avant-Garde Movements and Contemporary Drama
The twentieth-century section covers the historical avant-gardes, political theatre, the absurd and Spanish postwar drama. The exam rewards precise movement labels and an ability to explain how form carries meaning, not a list of '-isms'.
Avant-garde movements
- Symbolism (Maeterlinck) replaces action with atmosphere; expressionism (Kaiser, Toller) distorts space and speech to project subjective crisis; futurism (Marinetti) celebrates speed and simultaneity; Dada and surrealism disrupt logic and bourgeois form (Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias).
- Artaud's Le Théâtre et son double (1938) proposes a theatre of cruelty: sensory assault, plague, gesture and cry over psychological dialogue.
Political and epic theatre
Brecht's epic theatre uses Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement), gestus, historification, songs, placards and half-curtain to make the audience judge, not identify. Mother Courage and Galileo are key. The effect targets social processes, not the actor's private emotion.
The absurd
Beckett's En attendant Godot (1953), Fin de partie; Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve and Rhinocéros; Genet's Les Bonnes; Pinter's The Birthday Party. Circular structure, non sequitur, reduced characterization and metaphysical uncertainty replace causal plot. Sartre's Huis clos is existentialist rather than absurdist.
Spanish theatre
Valle-Inclán's esperpento (Luces de bohemia, 1920) deforms reality through mirrors; Lorca's Bodas de sangre, Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba use myth, song and enclosed space; Buero Vallejo's Historia de una escalera (1949) and El tragaluz; Sastre's Escuadra hacia la muerte; Arrabal's Picnic en el campo de batalla.
Worked example
In Godot, the two acts mirror each other: the same tree, the same boy, Pozzo and Lucky returning diminished. The dialogue circles ('Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes') and the stage business with boots and hats repeats. The form enacts waiting and indeterminacy; it is not a failed plot but a dramatic structure built on non-arrival. Calling it 'absurd' requires this formal evidence, not just a feeling of confusion.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling every experimental play absurdist.
- Confusing Brecht's alienation effect with emotional coldness in the actor.
- Attributing the esperpento to Lorca.
- Ignoring Franco-era censorship when reading Buero or Sastre.