The Philosopher, the Playwright, and the Actor: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Modern Drama's Concept of Performance

This essay explores the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner on conceptualizations of the theatrical event during the emergence of modern drama, focusing specifically on the writings of August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Eugene O'Neill—all avowed devotees of Nietzsche's work. to these playwrights, Nietzsche offered a particular vision of theatrical creation as a coequal marriage of the representational and embodied artistries of author and actor, each manifested only through its engagement with the other in the moment of performance. Nietzsche's schematization would help to inform much of the rethinking of the actor-author relationship that would mark these dramatists' approach to the stage, variously interpreted in Strindberg's call for a semi-improvisatory actor liberated from the playwright's text, Shaw's celebration of the virtuosic actor as the author's essential partner, and O'Neill's insistence on masked actors as an antidote to time-worn stage traditions. In these conceits, author and actor become co-creators of a theatrical event that exceeds either of their arts alone, a view on theatrical creation that in both positing and resolving a fundamental bifurcation begins to presage the eventual division between textualist and theatricalist approaches to the stage that would mark much of modern drama's later development.