Bernard Shaw is the creator of English drama. The play "Pygmalion" B


The play is a form of literary work written by a playwright that typically consists of dialogue between characters and is intended to be read or theatrical performance; small piece of music.

Use of the term

The term "play" refers to both the written texts of playwrights and their theatrical performance. A few playwrights, such as George Bernard Shaw, showed no preference for having their plays read or performed on the stage. A play is a form of drama based on a serious and complex conflict.. The term "play" is used in a broad sense - regarding the dramatic genre (drama, tragedy, comedy, etc.).

A piece in music

A piece in music (in this case, the word comes from the Italian language pezzo, literally “piece”) is an instrumental work, often small in volume, which is written in the form of a period, a simple or complex 2-3 partial form, or in the form of a rondo. The title of a musical play often defines its genre basis - a dance (waltzes, polonaises, mazurkas by F. Chopin), a march (“March of the Tin Soldiers” from the “Children's Album” by P. I. Tchaikovsky), a song (“Song Without Words” by F. Mendelssohn").

Origin

The term "play" is of French origin. In this language, the word piece includes several lexical meanings: part, piece, work, passage. The literary form of the play has come a long way from ancient times to the present. Already in the theater of ancient Greece, two classical genres of dramatic performances were formed - tragedy and comedy. The later development of theatrical art enriched the genres and varieties of drama, and, accordingly, the typology of plays.

genres of the play. Examples

A play is a form of literary work of dramatic genres, including:

Development of the play in literature

In literature, the play was initially considered as a formal, generalized concept that indicated that a work of art belongs to the dramatic genre. Aristotle (“Poetics”, sections V and XVIII), N. Boileau (“Message VII to Racine”), G. E. Lessing (“Laocoön” and “Hamburg Dramaturgy”), J. W. Goethe (“Weimar Court Theater” ) used the term "play" as a universal concept that applies to any genre of drama.

In the XVIII century. dramatic works appeared, in the titles of which the word “play” appeared (“A play about the accession of Cyrus”). In the 19th century the name "play" was used to refer to a lyric poem. Playwrights of the 20th century sought to expand the genre limits of drama by using not only different dramatic genres, but also other types of art (music, vocals, choreography, including ballet, cinema).

The compositional structure of the play

The compositional construction of the text of the play includes a number of traditional formal elements:

  • title;
  • list of actors;
  • character text - dramatic dialogues, monologues;
  • remarks (author's notes in the form of an indication of the place of action, the characteristics of the character of the characters or a specific situation);

The text content of the play is divided into separate complete semantic parts - actions or acts that may consist of episodes, phenomena or pictures. Some playwrights gave their works an author's subtitle, which denoted the genre specificity and stylistic orientation of the play. For example: "play-discussion" by B. Shaw "Marriage", "play-parabola" by B. Brecht "A kind man from Sichuan".

Functions of the play in art

The play had a strong influence on the development of art forms. World-famous artistic (theatrical, musical, cinematographic, television) works are based on the plots of the plays:

  • operas, operettas, musicals, for example: W. A. ​​Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni, or the Punished Libertine" is based on the play by A. de Zamora; the source of the plot of the operetta "Truffaldino from Bergamo" is the play by C. Goldoni "The Servant of Two Masters"; the musical "West Side Story" - an adaptation of W. Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet";
  • ballet performances, for example: the ballet Peer Gynt, based on the play of the same name by G. Ibsen;
  • cinematographic works, for example: the English film "Pygmalion" (1938) - an adaptation of the play of the same name by B. Shaw; The feature film Dog in the Manger (1977) is based on the plot of the play of the same name by Lope de Vega.

Modern meaning

Until our time, the interpretation of the concept of a play as a universal definition of belonging to dramatic genres, which is widely used in modern literary criticism and literary practice, has been preserved. The concept of "play" is also applied to mixed dramatic works that combine the features of different genres (for example: the comedy-ballet introduced by Molière).

The word play comes from French piece, which means piece, part.

The writing

G. Ibsen's play "Nora" ("A Doll's House") caused heated controversy in society, in some places in the living rooms they even posted an announcement: "Please do not talk about\\"Doll's House\\"". Actually, the new drama began with the words of the main character Ibsen, said to her husband Gelmer: "We have something to talk about." Ibsen created a kind of play-discussion genre, where the main thing for the characters is not to achieve success in life, but to search for true evidence of truth in dialogue. The play-debate caused discussions in life as well.

The fact is that even with today's emancipation of a woman, Nora's behavior - her departure from children - cannot be considered the norm, and in Ibsen's time it offended public morality.

The role of Nora is a big test for any actress. Of the famous actresses, Nora was played by the Italian Eleonora Duse and the Russian Vera Komissarzhevskaya. The first shortened the text of the play, while the second completely played according to Ibsen.

It was assumed that in a work of art, including drama, there is a logic of character development that determines the actions of the characters, that is, according to this concept, there can be nothing unexpected in the life of a character. Nora is a loving mother, and, according to the logic of normal reasoning, a quarrel with her husband cannot be the reason for her leaving her children. How could this “bird”, “squirrel” decide on such an act and so stubbornly defend its point of view?

Ibsen did not follow the path of standard event resolution. He was an innovator in the field of drama, so the psychological inadequacy of the characters became his symbol of the inadequacy of social relations. Ibsen created an analytical, not a psychologically everyday play, and this was new. Ibsen showed how a person, in spite of everything, in spite of psychological certainty, dares to be himself.

“I need to find out for myself who is right - society or me,” Nora announces to her husband. - I can no longer be satisfied with what the majority says and what they write in books. I myself need to think about all these things and try to understand them.”

Having created a play that was new in mood (analytical), Ibsen "did not unload" it from everyday details. Thus, the play begins with a Christmas tree that Nora bought and brought home on Holy Evening. Christmas for Catholics and Protestants is the main holiday of the year, it is the personification of family comfort and warmth. In addition to the Christmas tree, the playwright gives many other everyday details. This is Nora's Neapolitan costume, in which she will dance at a neighbor's party, then in the same costume she will start a decisive conversation with Gelmer. This is the mailbox, where there is a revealing letter from the usurer, Rank's business card with a sign of his imminent death. Leaving Gelmer, Nora wants to take with her only those things that she brought from her home when she got married. She is “freed” from the things of the “doll house”, from everything that seems to her insincere, alien. In many details, Ibsen sought to show the "littering" of life in the house of Helmer. At the same time, these details of the subtext help the reader and the viewer to understand the essence of what happened. In his speech at his celebration in the Norwegian Women's Union in 1898, the writer said: “Thank you for the toast, but I must reject the honor of consciously contributing to the women's movement. I didn't even get the gist of it. And the cause for which women are fighting seems to me to be universal ... "

The most daring in Ibsen's time were considered Nora's statements and actions at the end of the play, when Gelmer, frightened that his wife might leave the family, reminds her of her duties to her husband and children. Nora retorts: “I have other duties and the same saints. Duties to myself." Gelmer resorts to the last argument: “First of all, you are a woman and a mother. That's the most important thing." Nora replies (at this point there was applause): “I don’t believe in it anymore. I think that first of all I am a human being just like you... or at least I should take care to become human.”

Having become the flag of feminism at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, Ibsen's play a hundred years later does not arouse interest where it once met with thunderous applause, that is, in Norway, in Russia and, obviously, in other countries. Natural question: why? Have all the problems that made Nora act the way she did gone away? Perhaps this is because the Nora deals with a special case of the struggle for the liberation of the individual? However, "A Doll's House" is a play that shows the discrepancy between an outwardly prosperous life and its inner trouble. Maybe the problem of human liberation at the beginning of the 21st century, in the aspect in which it is posed in Ibsen's play, seems far-fetched, they say, "a lady is raging with fat", in our difficult life there is no time for that.

There is another important issue in the play, besides attention to the fate of the main character. According to F. M. Dostoevsky, the transformation of humanity into thoughtless and serene puppets, obeying puppeteers (as it was in the play: Gelmer - Nora), is a terrible danger. On the scale of civilization, "playing with dolls" leads to the creation of totalitarian regimes and the death of entire nations. But Ibsen, of course, cannot have these conclusions. For him, the family is society, its imprint. And one cannot but agree with this.

Ibsen's dramas, which went around all the theaters of the world, had a strong influence on world drama. The artist's interest in the spiritual life of the characters and his criticism of social reality became the laws of progressive drama at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is a pity that today there are almost no plays by G. Ibsen in the repertoire of our theaters. Only occasionally can one hear the music of Edvard Grieg for another work by Ibsen - the drama "Peer Gynt", which is connected with folk art, with the world of fairy tales. The charming image of Solveig, the deep philosophical meaning of the drama attracted the attention of all lovers of beauty to Peer Gynt.

The creator of the drama-discussion (together with Ibsen), in the center of which is the clash of hostile ideologies, social and ethical problems. it is necessary to carry out a reform of drama, to make the main element of dramaturgy a discussion, a clash of different ideas and opinions. Shaw is convinced that the drama of a modern play should be based not on external intrigue, but on sharp ideological conflicts of reality itself. Rhetoric, irony, argument, paradox and other elements of the "drama of ideas" are designed to awaken the viewer from an "emotional sleep", make him empathize, turn him into a "participant" in the discussion that has arisen - in a word, do not give him "salvation in sensitivity, sentimentality ", but "to teach to think."

Modern dramaturgy was supposed to evoke a direct response from the audience, recognizing situations in it from their own life experience, and provoke a discussion that would go far beyond the private case shown from the stage. The collisions of this dramaturgy, in contrast to Shakespeare's, which Bernard Shaw considered outdated, should be of an intellectual or socially accusatory nature, distinguished by emphasized topicality, and the characters are important not so much for their psychological complexity as for their type traits, manifested fully and clearly.

Widower's Houses (1892) and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893, staged 1902), the plays that became the Shaw playwright's debut, consistently implement this creative program. Both of them, like a number of others, were created for the London Independent Theatre, which existed as a semi-closed club and therefore relatively free from the pressure of censorship that prevented the production of plays that were distinguished by their bold depiction of hitherto taboo sides of life and unconventional artistic decision.

The cycle, which received the author's title "Unpleasant Plays" (it also includes "Heartbreaker", 1893), touches on topics that have never before appeared in English drama: the dishonorable machinations on which respectable landlords profit; love that does not take into account petty-bourgeois norms and prohibitions; prostitution, shown as a painful social plague of Victorian England. All of them are written in the genre of tragicomedy or tragifarce, the most organic for Shaw's talent. Shaw's irony, in which satirical pathos is combined with skepticism, which calls into question the rationality of the social order and the reality of progress, is the main distinguishing feature of his dramaturgy, which is increasingly marked by a tendency to philosophical collisions. The show has created a special type of "drama-discussion", the characters of which, often eccentric characters, act as carriers of certain theses, ideological positions. The main focus of the show is not on the clash of characters, but on the confrontation of points of view, on the disputes of the characters concerning philosophical, political, moral, and family problems. The show makes extensive use of satirical poignancy, grotesque, and sometimes buffoonery. But Shaw's most reliable weapon is his brilliant paradoxes, with the help of which he exposes the inner falsity of the prevailing dogmas and generally accepted truths. The subject of his ridicule is the hypocrisy so characteristic of English high society. colonial policy of England, his attention is always riveted to the most burning problems of our time.

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