THEATER.

The European theater movement most closely associated with the First World War was expressionism, centered in Germany. The movement was already well established at the outbreak of the war, which seemed to many expressionists the natural outcome of those outmoded social values that were often attacked in their early visionary works. The horrors of the war soon changed the orientation of expressionist work from the personal concerns of earlier expressionism to more directly social ones, often specially addressing the evils of war and of the industrialization that fueled it.

Early expressionist drama had only a reading public, and indeed during the war only a handful of such plays were staged. After 1918, however, such plays became a major part of the German repertoire, and a revolutionary new style of staging was developed for them, nonrealistic, highly simplified and often highly distorted, with striking and innovative use of light. The two leading directors in developing this new style were Jürgen Fehling (1885–1968) at the Berlin Volksbühne and Leopold Jessner (1878–1945), who directed the Berlin State Theater from 1919 to 1925. Jessner's favorite scenic device was a series of neutral steps and platforms, altered by occasional set pieces, curtains, and lighting, which came to be known as the "Jessnertreppen" (Jessner stairs).

Other important experimental movements appeared in Europe during these same years, together making up a "second wave" of experimental performance (the first having been the creation of the experimental ventures at the end of the previous century). In Italy the futurists, led by Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), called for a new theater suited to the machine age in a series of manifestos and experimental performances in the years just before the First World War. The futurists' short, abstract, alogical works reached their peak around 1916, but their frequent glorification of war as a great cultural purifier began to ring hollow as the true face of war was revealed. By the war's end, the movement had little power except in Italy, where it continued as a significant force into the 1930s. However, its interest in breaking down barriers between performance and audience, in mixing media, and in rejecting traditional models and structures all made a lasting contribution to the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Both futurism and expressionism had close ties to the first new avant-garde movement of the war years, Dada, launched in Zurich in 1916. Dada rejected the futurist glorification of war and the social orientation of much expressionism but took from both an iconoclastic rejection of traditional text and logic-dominated theater. Chance became an important element in artistic creation, as in the random selection of the name of the movement from a dictionary. The major spokesman for the movement was Tristan Tzara (1896–1963). An interest in change and the surprising juxtaposition of material also marked the work of the contemporary surrealist movement, a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, but the surrealists in general were distinguished by an interest in the workings of the subconscious mind, under the growing influence of Freudian psychology. This emphasis was clearly articulated by André Breton in the manifesto that launched the movement in 1924.

BETWEEN THE WARS

One of the most vital areas for theatrical experimentation after 1917 was postrevolutionary Russia. Although the new Soviet government began to tighten control over the theaters in the late 1920s, and the proclamation of the official doctrine of "socialist realism" in 1934 effectively put an end to experimentation, the years between 1917 and 1927 saw a final flowering of the major innovative period in Russian theater that had begun with the founding of the Moscow Art Theater in 1898. Although the Art Theater, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), remained an important part of the Russian theater scene and returned to a more central position after 1934, other theaters and other directors dominated the years immediately following 1917, seeing in the new political system an opportunity to forge a significant new theater aesthetic.

The most important figure was Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), one of the original members of the Moscow Art Theater, but whose vision of a theatricalized theater could not be reconciled with the illusionistic, realist vision of Stanislavsky. Eventually these came to be regarded as polar opposites in Russian directing. In his prerevolutionary studios, Meyerhold experimented extensively with acrobatics, circus, and non-Western performance techniques, and after 1917 he added to these an interest in the body as a movement-producing machine, a study he called biomechanics. In his own theater, after 1922, he developed a type of scenic design similarly focused on simplicity and mechanical form, called constructivism. Although Meyerhold was generally considered the most important and innovative figure in the Russian theater of the 1920s, his nonrealistic approach offended those who were devoted to socialist realism, and his theater, accused of "formalism," was closed in 1938.

The other most important antirealist of the 1920s, Alexander Tairov (1885–1950), at his Kamerny Theater, took a less ideological position than Meyerhold, but his expressionistic stagings also proved unacceptable to the new order, and his theater was closed in 1950. The other major experimental director of this brilliant period, Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883–1922), was said to blend the realism of Stanislavsky with the formalism of Meyerhold, but his early death saved him from sharing their fall from official favor.

Germany's major prewar director, Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), less associated than Jessner or Fehling with expressionism and less radical in his experimentation than Meyerhold or Tairov, was nevertheless a major force in introducing more stylized production into the largely realistic theater inherited from the previous century. By 1914 he was the best-known director in Europe. After the war he created a mass spectacle theater, the Grosses Schauspielhaus, in Berlin, seating thousands of spectators around a huge thrust stage. A similar attempt at mixing actors with a mass audience was carried out in Paris by Firmin Gémier, who, like Reinhardt, converted a former circus into a mass auditorium faintly reminiscent of a Greek amphitheater. Reinhardt's other major innovation of the 1920s was the establishment in 1920 of the Salzburg Festival, the model for the many theater festivals that have since become an important part of the European theater scene. Adolf Hitler's rise to power forced Reinhardt, as a Jew, to leave Germany, and his final years were spent in America.

Germany in the 1920s, like Russia in the same period, enjoyed a flourishing of artistic experimentation, which was similarly extinguished by the rise of a totalitarian government in the early 1930s. Erwin Piscator (1893–1966), drawing upon expressionism and an interest in modern technology shared with Meyerhold and the futurists, developed during the 1920s a politically oriented theater with significant use of technology, much of which would be incorporated into the practice of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), who worked with Piscator on his famous production of The Good Soldier Schweik in 1927–1928. Both men, like Reinhardt, went into exile in the early 1930s.

The dominant figure in the French theater between the wars was Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), who founded the Vieux Colombier in 1913, challenging both the realistic stage tradition and the nonrealistic but still highly visual settings of many of the early antirealists. He sought a completely bare stage, somewhat like the constructivists, although to emphasize not bodily movement but the flow of language. For him the dramatic text always remained central. Copeau left Paris in 1924, but many of his ideas were carried on by the Cartel des Quatre (Coalition of Four), a group of directors who agreed in 1927 to assist and advise each other. Two of these, Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin, actually studied with Copeau, and they remained closest to Copeau's ideals. Gaston Baty and Georges Pitoëff shared Copeau's devotion to the text and almost monastic commitment to the theater as art, but their repertoire and visual means, if simple, were generally more varied than those of their colleagues. Pitoëff and his wife, Ludmilla, introduced many important foreign dramatists to France, among them Luigi Pirandello and George Bernard Shaw.

Although Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946) attempted to introduce modern experimental staging to England in the years before the First World War, it was not until the 1930s that a serious departure from late-nineteenth-century practices took place there. An important pioneer in this was Tyrone Guthrie (1900–1971), who took over the Old Vic in 1937, assembled a company of major actors, and became known for his innovative and original productions. His work was supplemented by that of Michel Saint-Denis (1897–1971), Copeau's nephew, who brought some of Copeau's inspiration from France. Along with the work of these major directors, a new generation of actors, headed by John Gielgud (1904–2000) and Laurence Olivier (1907–1989), inaugurated a golden age of British acting.

AFTER WORLD WAR II

The Second World War, with its widespread upheavals, devastating bombing, and occupations, created a hiatus in the theater of most European nations, and the postwar years focused upon recovery and rebuilding. A new generation of theater artists appeared, who would dominate most of the rest of the century. In Italy Giorgio Strehler founded the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in 1947 and would build it into one of the greatest European companies. In Sweden Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) assembled at Malmö during the 1950s one of Europe's greatest acting ensembles, which also appeared in his brilliant films. In France Jean Vilar (1912–1971) took over the Avignon Festival in 1947 and the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) in 1951, building them both into major cultural institutions. Vilar was the major inheritor of the Copeau tradition, while a much more eclectic approach characterized the work of the dominant new director of the period, Jean-Louis Barrault (b. 1910), who stressed not the text but the total theater experience. Germany, having lost the war, with most of its theaters destroyed and divided into two politically antagonistic states, faced particularly daunting problems, but Bertolt Brecht, returning in 1948, was invited by the authorities to East Berlin to establish a theater there, the Berliner Ensemble, which became the most well known and influential theater of the immediate postwar era. The visual style of Brecht's theater was widely imitated, perhaps most notably in England, where a visit by this theater in 1956 issued in a new era of British stage composition, headed by the work of Peter Brook (b. 1925) and Peter Hall (b. 1930) at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), organized in 1960. By the mid-1960s, the RSC was England's most honored company. Perhaps its most famous work was the 1964 production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which drew inspiration from the writings of the visionary French theorist Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and contributed strongly toward making Artaud a major influence on experimental theater work of subsequent years.

The major rival of the RSC in England was the National Theatre, dreamed of for more than a century and finally established in 1963, with Olivier becoming director the following year. Peter Hall followed Olivier as director of the National in 1973 and brought the theater into its major new home on London's South Bank three years later. The RSC also opened a major new London space, the Barbican, in 1982, although it reduced its season there to six months in 1996 and withdrew entirely in 2002, leaving the Barbican for guest international companies. The National continued its dominant position, but at the turn of the century, important younger and smaller companies appeared, led by Shared Experience, Cheek by Jowl, and Théâtre de Complicité.

The late 1960s was a period of great economic, political, and artistic turbulence. New modes of staging and directing exerted a profound influence on the theater. A reaction against traditional approaches, often seen as elitist and reactionary, inspired an interest in more democratic methodologies, such a collective creations, and more democratic spaces, outside conventional theaters. Particularly influential among the new collectives was France's Théâtre du Soleil, headed by Ariane Mnouchkine (b. 1940), and founded in 1964, which also utilized unconventional theater spaces and audience arrangements. Another major collective was the Schaubühne company in Berlin, headed by Peter Stein (b. 1937), whose productions, like those of Mnouchkine, were both visually striking and highly political. One of the most influential new figures of the 1960s was the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), whose quasi-religious emphasis upon the actor/audience relationship inspired theater practitioners around the world, and most directly Eugenio Barba (b. 1936), who carried on Grotowski's investigations in his studio in Denmark. After 1970 another Polish director, Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), gained a major international reputation with his painterly dramatic collages, most notably The Dead Class (1975), mixing live actors and effigies of their younger selves. Another important development of the 1960s was a new international interest in innovative scenic design, often drawing upon emerging technology. Czechoslovakia was an important leader in this movement, due in part to the widespread influence of Josef Svoboda (1920–2002). The Prague Quadrennial, founded in 1967, remains the most important international exhibition of stage design and theater architecture in the world.

INTERNATIONALISM

In 1970 Peter Brook left the RSC to become director of the International Center for Theater Research in Paris, drawing actors from around the world to seek an international means of theatrical expression. Internationalism became increasingly important in the European theater during the 1970s, both in the growth of international festivals and in the work of individual directors like Brook. The best-known production of Brook's center was the 1985 Mahabharata, a nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic, with actors from sixteen countries, performed first at the Avignon Festival and then toured around the world. During the 1980s Mnouchkine also stressed intercultural performance, utilizing Asian costumes, music, and performance techniques for the presentation of Shakespearian plays and, perhaps most notably, for an adaptation of material from Aeschylus and Euripides called Les Atrides, which toured internationally in the early 1990s. Collaborations among theaters in various nations became increasingly common during this period also, evidenced most clearly in the founding of the Théâtre de l'Europe in 1983, directed by Giorgio Strehler until 1990 and then by his disciple Lluis Pasqual and involving leading theaters from across the Continent.

Finally, and perhaps most important, international theater festivals, headed by those in Avignon and Edinburgh, sprang up across Europe, providing an opportunity for both established experimental artists like Brook and emerging younger artists to gain an international reputation. A festival favorite and one of the most significant international theater figures of the late twentieth century was the American Robert Wilson (b. 1941), whose monumental visual spectacles were premiered in many European countries from the 1970s onward, but particularly in Germany. Sections of his most ambitious work, the CIVIL warS, premiered in Holland, Germany, Italy, and France in 1984 and 1985. The festivals also gave international exposure to major new experimental groups, such as the Fura dels Baus of Barcelona, founded in 1979, and Italy's Societas Raffaelo Sanzio, organized in 1981. Both offered oneiric yet visceral visual spectacles far removed from text-oriented traditional theater.

The European theater of the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by major directors, even though most of them worked with very distinguished actors and designers. Those already mentioned, such as Brook, Barrault, Mnouchkine, Hall, Wilson, Stein, Bergman, Strehler, and Kantor, had perhaps the greatest international reputation, but others contributed significantly to making this an era of what the Germans called "directors' theater," among them Peter Zadek, Luc Bondy, and Claus Peymann in Germany, Patrice Chéreau and Jorge Lavelli in France, Nuria Espert in Spain, Luca Ronconi in Italy, Yuri Lyubimov and Lev Dodin in Russia, and Eimuntas Nekrosius in Lithuania.

Despite the predominance of stage directors during this period, however, almost all worked closely with actors and designers who were also among the most distinguished of the century. Thus Bergman's company was headed by Max von Sydow and Bibi Anderson, and Peter Stein's Schaubühne by Bruno Ganz and Jutta Lampe. Brook's international company has included such major actors as Sotigui Kouyaté, Yoshi Oida, and Ryszard Cieslak, formerly the leading actor with Grotowski at the Polish Laboratory Theater. In Germany especially, leading designers have also worked closely with particular directors to create a highly distinctive visual style. The first major modern example of this occurred in the 1960s with Zadek's work with Wilfried Minks in Bremen, closely followed by the designs of Karl-Ernst Hermann for Peter Stein. A parallel example in France was the close collaboration between Chéreau and Richard Peduzzi.

The new generation of theater leaders that appeared during the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Germany and France, offered a more radical and subversive style, sometimes called "deconstructionist." In Germany this orientation was represented primarily by directors trained in the former East Germany and associated with the Berlin Volksbühne, such as Frank Castorf, Christoph Marthaler, and Einer Schleef. In France major new directors emerged from the suburban theaters, following the pattern established by Chéreau—first Daniel Mesguich (later director of the Conservatoire) and Stéphane Braunschweig (later director of the National Theater of Strasbourg), and following them, Stanislas Nordey and Olivier Py. The Catalan director Calixto Bieito was Spain's best-known contributor to this new style of radical reinterpretation of classic texts.

The term Eurotheater gained considerable prominence around the turn of the century, encouraged by such trans-European actions as the founding of the European Union in 1992 and the adoption of a European currency in 2002. Many organizations and individual manifestations drew the continental theater ever more closely together. Individual artists (directors, designers, actors) moved ever more freely from country to country, some without any country that dominated their work. The international festivals encouraged such activity, but collaborations between individual theaters in different countries also became increasingly common. International organizations such as the Union of European Theaters, founded in 1990, and the European School of the Art of the Actor, founded in 1992, provided further encouragement for this most important new direction in the European theater in the opening years of the new century.

See alsoAgitprop; Brecht, Bertolt; Brook, Peter; Dada; Expressionism; Futurism; Opera; Salzburg Festival; Stanislavsky, Konstantin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, John. A History of the Theatre in Europe. London, 1983.

Brockett, Oscar G., and Robert R. Findlay. Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870. 2nd ed. Boston, 1991.

Maanen, H. van, and S. E. Wilmer, eds. Theatre Worlds in Motion. Amsterdam, 1998.

Roose-Evans, James. Experimental Theatre: From Stanislavsky to Peter Brook. 2nd ed. London, 1989.

Rubin, Don, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. Vol. 1: Europe. London, 1994.

Marvin Carlson