Expressionism

Expressionism, movement that began in Germany in about 1910, and is best typified by the plays of Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller. The term was first used in 1901 by Auguste Hervé to describe some of his paintings conceived in reaction against Impressionism in art. It was later used of art, music, and literature as well as plays that displayed reality as seen by the artist looking out from within, instead of, as with Impressionism, reality as it affects the artist inwardly. The Expressionist theatre was a theatre of protest, mainly against the contemporary social order and the domination of the family. Most of its dramatists were poets who used the theatre to further their ideas, and it was partly their use of poetic language that led to the collapse of the movement. It was too personal, as was the concentration on the central figure, the author-hero whose reactions are ‘expressed’ in the play. Among the forerunners of Expressionism were Strindberg and Wedekind; the first drama of the Expressionist movement is usually considered to be Der Bettler, by Reinhard Sorge. One of the few dramatists outside Germany to be influenced by Expressionist drama was Eugene O'Neill, particularly in The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922).