Dramaturgic Concepts of the English Group Theatre: The Totality of Artistic Involvement

Dramaturgic Concepts of the English Group Theatre: The Totality of Artistic Involvement MIRKO JURAK AMONG THE LITTLE EXPERIMENTAL THEATERS which existed in England in the 1930s the Group Theatre occupies an important position not only because it first produced a number of new English politico-poetic plays, but also because the Theatre wanted to realize an avant-garde idea of the total theater, joining different arts into a synthetic whole. It attempted to diminish the alienation between actors and spectators, or rather, to annihilate the barrier preventing an active participation of the public in theatrical art. The director Rupert Doone and authors such as W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice mainly rejected the established principles of dramaturgy and attempted to redefine the function of drama with the main purpose of giving their creativity the highest possible communication. These members of the Group Theatre wrote several articles and proclamations which were usually published in the Group Theatre programs, and they discussed and defined new dramatic criteria which they hoped to apply in the Theatre. Some of the points mentioned in these articles are closely related to a very acute sphere of problems, namely, the relationship between arts and politics, which was very vividly discussed in England in the 1930s. In addition, they are also closely related to the realization of the program of this theater. These are, however, such extensive topics that they cannot be dealt with in the present article. The Group Theatre leaders realized the primary need for a well trained company of actors who would not just take one role in one theater then another role in another theater or film. We can observe how much they appreciated the ideas of the English theatrical theoretician and director Edward Gordon Craig from the inclusion of his thoughts in the Westminster Theatre program at the production of Besier's play Lady Patricia on October 15, 1935, as well as from other parallels which may be drawn between Craig's theatrical concepts and their own.! 81 82 MIRKO JURAK Among the most revolutionary views expounded by the Group Theatre members on drama and the art of the theater were W. H. Auden's theses printed in the first Group Theatre program issued by the Westminster Theatre for the production of his one-act play The Dance of Death on October 1, 1935.2 As these thoughts are not well known, sometimes cited from secondary sources only in part, let me quote them here in full: Drama began as the cult of a whole community. Ideally there would be no spectators. In practice every member of the audience should feel like an understudy. Drama is essentially an art of the body. The basis of acting is acrobatics, dancing and all forms of physical skill. The music hall, the Christmas pantomime, and the country house charade are the most living drama of today. The development of the film has deprived drama of an excuse for being documentary. It is not in its nature to provide an ignorant and passive spectator with exciting news. The subject of drama on the other hand, is the commonly known, the universally familiar stories of the society or generation in which it is written. The audience, like the child listening to the fairy tale, ought to know what is going to happen next. Similarly the drama is not suited to the analysis of character which is the province of the novel. Dramatic characters are simplified, easily· recognisable and over life-size. Dramatic speech should have the same confessed, significant, and undocumentary character, as dramatic movement. Drama in fact deals with the general and the universal, not with the particular and local, but it is probable that drama can only deal, at any rate directly, with the relations of human beings with each other not with the relation of man to the rest of nature. W. H. Auden himself kept to many of the stated norms in his satire The Dog beneath the Skin (Jan. 12, 1936) as e.g., he included "spectators" in the play, made songs its essential part, and simplified characters. He observed some of these principles in the later plays...