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Difference Between Classical and Modern Drama

Classical drama focused on themes of fate, tragedy, and religious or mythical elements, exploring philosophical ideas through stories from history. Modern drama experiments with diverse themes, styles, and intellectual ideas, focusing on cultures, genders, experiences, and social issues. Whereas classical drama used simple stages and costumes, modern drama employs detailed, symbolic settings and elaborate production elements. Modern drama highlights individual choice over external forces, and characters who rebel against social constraints, in contrast to the emphasis on fate in classical drama.

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21K views2 pages

Difference Between Classical and Modern Drama

Classical drama focused on themes of fate, tragedy, and religious or mythical elements, exploring philosophical ideas through stories from history. Modern drama experiments with diverse themes, styles, and intellectual ideas, focusing on cultures, genders, experiences, and social issues. Whereas classical drama used simple stages and costumes, modern drama employs detailed, symbolic settings and elaborate production elements. Modern drama highlights individual choice over external forces, and characters who rebel against social constraints, in contrast to the emphasis on fate in classical drama.

Uploaded by

Muneeza Rafiq
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
  • Classical Drama
  • Modern Drama

Classical Drama Modern Drama

Themes involving fate, temptation, tragedy, A diversity of themes revolving around cultures,
religious content genders, experiences and issues

Exploring philosophical ideas, taking familiar Experimentation with style and presentation,
stories from history subtle and intellectual ideas explored

Female characters played by males Female actors perform countless roles

Supernatural elements and mythological realistic, with disillusionment, doubt and


creatures skepticism an important motif

Simple settings detailed, symbolic and important settings

Focus on role of fate, external factors in


individual will and freedom of choice
deciding the future of humans

elaborate stage, lighting, special effects, sound


simple stage and costume
etc.

Modernism is difficult to define because of its various strands; it is like a composition of different
threads overlapping and crisscrossing.

Modern drama explores anxiety, alienation, and a feeling of waiting for something. It is experimental;
creating distorted images. Modern dramatists were influenced by both personal and social context.
Modern dramatic characters are rebellious; they revolt against the environment other men have made.

When the actors turned inward, addressing each other onstage and establishing, once and for all, the
realistic person-to-person interchange that replaced the classical style of direct address to the audience
(even as an aside), modern drama and theatre arose.

Bert Cardullo contends that in modern drama, “the relationship between God and the individual soul has
been replaced by the adversarial relationship between a person and his or her own psychology, the will
to comprehend the self.
Modern drama highlighted disillusionment, where displacement and ennui personify modern existence.
According to Michael Goldman, “Characters in modern drama are typically haunted by a feeling of
being cut off from the joy of life, or indeed from life itself, as feeling of being dead.”

What Ibsen, Chekov, and Strindberg shared was an awareness of modernism’s shock – the psychic
transformation from old world values to a new age of bourgeois consumerism and egalitarian social
relations. Trauma and modernism are interlocking categories, and these three playwrights understood the
connection.

Realism

o characters are believable, everyday types


o costumes are authentic
o the realist movement in the theatre and subsequent performance style have greatly influenced
20th century theatre and cinema and its effects are still being felt today
o stage settings (locations) and props are often indoors and believable
o the ‘box set’ is normally used for realistic dramas on stage, consisting of three walls and an
invisible ‘fourth wall’ facing the audience
o settings for realistic plays are often bland (deliberately ordinary), dialogue is not heightened for
effect, but that of everyday speech (vernacular)
o the drama is typically psychologically driven, where the plot is secondary and primary focus is
placed on the interior lives of characters, their motives, the reactions of others etc.
o realistic plays often see the protagonist (main character) rise up against the odds to assert
him/herself against an injustice of some kind (eg. Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House)
o realistic dramas quickly gained popularity because the everyday person in the audience could
identify with the situations and characters on stage
o the demand for political power sharing, national sovereignty, women’s rights, end of slavery, and
freedom from aristocratic rule, all of which found its way into modern realistic dramas
o Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler) is considered the father of
modern realism in the theatre

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