Abstrakt: | The present dissertation is an attempt to handle the remarkably variegated and interesting
material. As its title itself suggests, the dissertation is built around two focal points.
The issues discussed here include, on one hand, the selected works of Russian and Western
dramatists, which arise no objections, and, on the other hand, the reformatory
conceptions of the theatre which were contemporary with the aforementioned plays. We
are particularly concerned here with those reformatory conceptions which relate to the
Great Reform of the Theatre and which provide a context for our analysis of the construction
of the literary works. Such orientation of the scientific research denotes in practice
an examination of the relationship between drama, which is conceived here as, first of
all, a theatrical work of art and a selected theory of the theatre.
On the pages of the present dissertation the structure of the selected dramatic
works which were created between 1880 and 1916 is being traced. The aforementioned
period of 1880 que 1916 is recognised as the first stage of the Great Reform of the
theatre, it being time of the creative activity of its eminent legislators - Edward Gordon
Craig, Adolphe Appia and Georg Fuchs. This very fact played and important role
in the considerations concerning the relationship between dramaturgy and the art of
theatre.
The study includes an in-depth analysis of the plays of Alexander Blok, whose almost
entire literary output is presented on the pages of the present dissertation. Besides, the
plays which became the subject of our consideration are the selected works of other
Russian writers-symbolists - Konstanty Balmont’s Three Mornings, Walery Briusows The
Earth, Fiodor Sologub’s Victory of Death, Leonid Andriejew’s Ocean, Die Life of Man.
Moreover, the discussion extends over the following works of the Western European
writers: August Strindberg’s Play of Dreams and To Damaskias, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
Every, The Fool and the Death, Ariadna atNyxsos and Stanislaw Wyspianski’s The
Wedding Party and The Legion.
The most extensive part of the current study, the chapter titled THE NEW SCENE THE
NEW SPACE is devoted to the spacial architectonics of the drama and its relationship with
the respective theories of the theatre.
The analysis of the scenic space made it possible to classify the presented dramatic
works into two groups. The first of the groups includes the plays whose space is divided
into two plans: the traditional plan, which is possible to be presented by means of the
devices accessible to the box-stage and which exists side by side as parallel to or as remaining
in a relation of dependance with the innovatory plan. Another type of the construction of the innovatory spacial architectonics can be
observes also in the second group of the analysed plays which we call here the dramas of
the monumental space. It is about such unlimited and absolutely fabricated world of the
theater that the Reformers were dreaming.
The interests of thé Great Reformers concerning the acting are reviewed in the third
part of the thesis titled THE LIVING DOLL. The assumption of the study was finding
relationship between the theory of the reformers and the composition of the plays. As a
result of the analysis which was carried out in this chapter we came to a conclusion that
the characters in the discussed type of dramaturgy, in order to be fully transposed into a
scenic figure, need the participation of an actor who is formed under the influence of the
theory of the New Reform
The analysis carried out in this part of the dissertation proved that it is this kind of
actor that the is needed both by the traditional characers (i.e. the characters whose archetypes
already functioned in the literary tradition) and by the innovatory ones.
The most outstanding testimony of the presence of the ideas postulated by the great
Reformers in the dramaturgy of the turn of centuries is the role which was attributed to
the elements of the dramatic material other than a word (a word was rejected by Craig,
Appia and Fuchs on the basis that a word on its own is incapable of creating vision).
These (non-verbal) elements include: light, colur, sound. The question of the non-verbal
elements is taken up and discussed in the fourth part of the work titled INSTEAD OF A
WORD. It is impossible to over-appreciate the importance of these very components of
performance in the productions created by the Great Reformers where they became the
elements of Craig’s desired „vision that appeals to the spectator without words”.
Careful examination of the construction of the selected dramatic works from the perspective
of their similarity to the chosen theatrical theories of the turn of the 19th and the
20th centuries authorised us to claim that it is in the scenic works that the most visible
traces of these theories are left. As it is known, the Reform of Theatre ended in 1941, only
sixty years after it was born. Many of its demands fell in oblivion in the course of history,
many were verified and, although one cannot of course question its influence on the
direction which the development of theatrical art followed, one can assert that it is
exactly in the drama where the most conspicuous traces of the phenomenon were left.
The current dissertation is an attempt to prove this assertion. |