This is an introduction to the drama, singling out and discussing its various elements, with detailed and generous quotation from masterpieces. Styan emphasizes that plays are meant to be judged in performance, not in the study, and that the play is something created by a co-operation of author, actor, producer and audience. The actor is doing something for the author's words; he is making the play work; and so is the spectator as he responds to the art of the actor, the producer and the playwright. It is a unique relationship, and the play in performance must be judged by 'theatrical'...

For many years, critics and students of Shakespeare have tended to stress that his plays are poetic structures embodying 'themes', and these structures have been analysed in great detail. Professor Styan advocates another approach. The plays were written for acting, in a theatre of a particular type. If we ask what effects this kind of theatre encouraged and how Shakespeare exploited them, the plays are seen as a sequence of stage-effects, planned with great art so as to enrich, reinforce and modify each other. Professor Styan begins with the known facts about the Elizabethan theatre,...

Much of twentieth-century drama defies the traditional pigeon-holes of tragedy and comedy: the heroes are not straightforwardly heroic; the subject-matter seems at some times grimly realistic and at others nearer to pure fantasy. Professor Styan explains and illuminates the nature of this dark, paradoxical comedy. He reminds us, first, that this is not a purely modern phenomenon: many great plays of the past have similarly defied classification and have called for an equally vacillating response from their audience. But nonetheless this dramatic genre has had its clearest expression in the...

This book shows how a play 'works' in the theatre: how it generates life, meaning and excitement on the stage for the audience. It is self evident that a play must communicate or it is not a play at all. Professor Styan argues that, while communication in drama begins with the script, the value or power of a play must be tested upon an audience. In the theatre experience, it is not so much the elements of drama on the stage or the perceptions of the audience which are important, as the relationships between them. It follows that the study of drama is the study of how the stage compels its...

How do our ways of perceiving and producing Shakespeare differ from those of the nineteenth century, and how interrelated has the work of scholars and directors become over this century? Professor Styan's purpose in this book is to discuss the 'revolution' in Shakespeare studies implied by these questions.

Restoration comedy disappeared from the stage for nearly 200 years until it was revived early this century. Without the benefit of a performance tradition has suffered from an inappropriate literary and moralistic criticism which continues to this day. Yet this brilliant court and coterie comedy of sexual and social behaviour was an extraordinary success in its own time, and enjoys a unique place in theatrical history as an example of the interplay possible between the stage and the audience. In this book John Styan persuades us that only through a performance approach to the great plays of...

For a full understanding of any text, careful consideration must be given to its life in performance. In this rewarding study of four of Chekhov's major plays - Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters - J. L. Styan demonstrates the development of Chekhov's skills as a dramatist and discusses stage action, portrayal of character, differing twentieth-century productions and the audience reactions they evoked.

This book was first published in 1981. The theories of Wagner and Nietzsche provide the basic principles for this volume, disseminated by the work of Appia and Craig, and affecting the later plays of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Lugne-Poe's Theatre de Le'Oeuvre. Jarry is seen as the precursor of surrealism; later symbolist elements are found in the plays of Claudel, Giraudoux, Yeats, Eliot, Lorca and Pirandello. Artaud's theatre of cruelty is related to the work of Peter Brook. The theatre of the absurd is illustrated in Sartre, Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco. Recent avant-garde theatre in America...

Buchner is the forerunner of expression, followed by Wedekind and Strindberg. The style is then traced from Kaiser and Toller to O'Neill, Wilder and the later O'Casey. Important producers are Reinhardt and Meyerhold. Epic theatre is studied from Piscator and Brecht to Durrenmatt and Weiss, Arden and Bond, and is seen as flourishing in offshoots of documentary theatre. This book was first published in 1981."

The English Stage tells the story of English drama through its many changes in style and convention from medieval times to the present day. John Styan analyzes the key features of staging, including early street theater and public performance, the evolution of the playhouse and the private space, and the pairing of theory and stagecraft in the works of modern dramatists. Giving a critical performance analysis, the author closely examines a few key plays from each age to demonstrate how they succeed on stage. He also focuses on several major playwrights--Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and...