How old is theater

The grandest theatre at this time, which included one of the first proscenium arches, was The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Gardens. It stood by the River Thames and steps led up from the river for those patrons arriving by boat.

For the first time women were recognised as professional actresses and playwrights. The most famous playwright was Aphra Behn — 89 , who had previously been employed as a spy for Charles II and spent a brief stay in a debtors' prison. A group of women writers known as 'The Female Wits' produced many works for the stage. They included Mary Pix — , Catherine Trotter — and the prolific Susannah Centlivre about — , who wrote 19 plays, including the satirical A Bold Stroke for a Wife, first performed in The first woman to appear on the professional stage in England is generally considered to be Margaret Hughes — , who performed in a production of Othello at the Vere Street Theatre, London in Other notable actresses at this time included Elizabeth Barry — , also known as the "queen of tragedy", and Nell Gwyn — 87 , who was reputed to have been painted nude for Charles II and bore him two children.

The 18th century saw the flourishing of theatre as a popular pastime and many theatres were enlarged and new playhouses built in London and throughout the country. One of the most successful shows on the London stage in the early part of the 18th century was John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera. Gay recycled popular songs of the day and wrote new lyrics that were humorous and satirical. Shakespeare's plays became increasingly popular during the 18th century but were reworked to suit the tastes of the day.

His style was still felt to be too erratic and poets such as Alexander Pope carefully tidied up any uneven verse lines. Shakespeare's ending to King Lear was felt to be too distressing and Nahum Tate's revised version where Cordelia and the King survive was preferred to the original.

David Garrick rewrote the end of Romeo and Juliet so that the lovers speak to each other before dying in the tomb and turned the Taming of the Shrew into a farce. Garrick was one of Britain's greatest actors and the first to be called a star. From until his retirement in , he was a highly successful actor, producer and theatre manager.

He wrote more than 20 plays and adapted many more, including plays by Shakespeare. In , the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane hired him and he began a triumphant career that would last for over 30 years.

Within five years, he was also managing the theatre. Garrick changed the whole style of acting. He rejected the fashion for declamation, where actors would strike a pose and speak their lines formally, and instead preferred a more easy, natural manner of speech and movement.

The effect was a more subtle, less mannered style of acting and a move towards realism. The Licensing Act of had a huge impact on the development of theatre in Britain. It restricted the production of plays to the two patent theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London and tightened up the censorship of drama, stating that the Lord Chamberlain with his Examiners of Plays must vet any script before a performance was allowed.

The act was put in place by the then Prime Minister Robert Walpole — , who was concerned that political satire on the stage was undermining him and the authority of the government. A production of The Golden Rump, a farcical play of unknown authorship, was the chief trigger for Walpole pushing the case for banning obscene drama from the public arena.

The play scandalously suggested that the Queen administered enemas to the King. Henry Fielding, author of a number of successful satires, and others were suspicious that this play had in fact been engineered by Walpole himself. To get around the restrictions of the Licensing Act, non-patent theatres interspersed dramatic scenes with musical interludes. Melodrama and burlesque, with their short scenes and musical accompaniment, became extremely popular at this time.

Eventually, the huge growth in demand for theatrical entertainment in the early 19th century made the patent theatres' system unworkable. Theatres had sprung up across London and the boundaries between what was allowed in the patent theatres legitimate drama and what was presented in other theatres illegitimate theatre had become blurred.

In the Licensing Act was dropped, enabling other theatres to present drama, although Lord Chamberlain's censorship of plays remained in place until After the Covent Garden theatre burnt down in , the management decided to raise prices to cover the cost of rebuilding.

To increase revenue, the management reconfigured the upper gallery to squeeze in more of the one shilling seats, creating what angry patrons described as 'pigeon holes'. The price for a seat in the pit was raised from three shilling and six pence to four shillings, and the admission to the public boxes went up from six to seven shillings. A whole tier of boxes became 'private' and could only be hired for an entire season. Audiences were furious and turned their anger on the theatre's manager, the actor John Philip Kemble.

On 18 September Kemble stepped on stage in the costume of Macbeth to welcome the audience to the first production in the new theatre, and was met with a barrage of shouting, hissing and hooting which continued throughout the performance. Although magistrates were summoned, and some protesters arrested, the disturbance did not end until two in the morning.

This was the start of what were known as the Old Price or O. For the next ten weeks every performance at Covent Garden was disrupted. The principal objective of the protesters was to force the management to restore the old system of pricing. By December the cost of legal fees, wages for bouncers, and free passes for allies who were paid to chant "N. Kemble accepted the demands of the rioters and made a public apology from the stage.

At the turn of the 19th century the Kemble family dominated the London stage. Actor John Philip Kemble — was said to be the finest actor in England and his sister, Sarah Siddons — , was regarded as one of the greatest ever tragedians. In her first season, she performed 80 times in seven different roles, inducing faintings and hysterics amongst her audiences. John Philip Kemble made his debut on the London stage in as Hamlet.

His acting style was static and declamatory, with long sweeping lines and a detached grandeur. Kean was one of the few actors who could fill the vast Drury Lane theatre to its capacity of 3, His natural passion and fiery spirit suited a melodramatic style of acting. He was said to be at his best in death scenes and those that required intensity of feeling or violent transitions from one mood to another.

Melodrama became popular from the s and lasted until the early 20th century. Melodrama consisted of short scenes interspersed with musical accompaniment and was characterised by simple moral stories with stereotypical characters — there was always a villain, a wronged maiden and a hero acting in an overblown style.

From the middle of the 19th century theatre began to take on a new respectability and draw in more middle-class audiences. They were enthralled by the historical accuracy and attention to detail that was becoming increasingly influential in stage design.

Pictorial drama placed great emphasis on costume and reflected a fashionable interest in archaeology and history. The inevitable long and complex scene changes meant that plays, especially those by Shakespeare had to be cut.

One of the main exponents of pictorial drama was Charles Kean — 68 , son of Edmund Kean. Charles Kean was known for his painstaking research into historic dress and settings for his productions at the Princess's Theatre in London's Oxford Street during the s.

Henry Irving — , Charles Kean and Beerbohm Tree — all created productions in which they were the star. Henry Irving dominated the London stage for over 25 years and was hero-worshipped by his audiences. Shakespeare was the most popular writer for these actor-managers. It became fashionable to give Shakespeare's plays detailed and historically realistic sets and costumes.

The stage spectacle was often more important than the play itself and texts were cut to allow time to change the massive sets and give maximum exposure to the leading role. The first woman actor-manager in London was Eliza Vestris — , a singer and dancer who also managed the Olympic Theatre from There she presented a programme of Burlesques, many starring herself.

Other women managers in the 19th century included Madge Kendal — and Sarah Lane about — 99 at the Brittania Theatre, Hoxton. The greatest English actress of the late 19th and early 20th century was Ellen Terry — She joined the legendary actor-manager Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre from to as his leading lady, and for more than the next two decades she was considered the leading Shakespearean and comic actress in Britain.

However financial failure meant she returned to acting there years later. The sophisticated technology and machinery of the late 19th century stage produced a succession of 'sensation' dramas in which special effects became the principal attraction.

Scene painters, working with expert technicians, produced realistic reproductions of the natural world. Using ropes, flats, bridges, treadmills and revolves, they could produce anything from a chariot race in Ben Hur to a rail crash in The Whip. He worked at Drury Lane Theatre, which became the acknowledged home of such drama following the introduction of hydraulic stage machinery at the theatre in The playwright Tom William Robertson — 71 introduced a new kind of play onto the 19th century theatre scene.

His pioneering 'problem plays' dealt with serious and sensitive issues of the day. Robertson's work was considered so revolutionary in style and subject that no established management would produce his plays. Caste was about marriage across the class barrier and explored prejudices towards social mobility. People talked in normal language and dealt with 'ordinary' situations and the performers didn't 'act' but 'behaved' like their audience — they spoke, they didn't declaim. The turn of the 20th century saw the emergence of two dominate trends in theatre: the dramatisation of contemporary, moral and social issues, and an interest in a simpler and more abstract staging of plays.

Innovative work from abroad, particularly playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, was also influential in the shaping of this new drama. Harley Granville-Barker's management of the Royal Court between and saw the popularisation of the work of George Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw was one of the most successful writers of the early 20th century and an outspoken member of the Fabian Society , an organisation committed to social reform and considered by many at the time to be subversive.

He challenged the morality of his bourgeois audiences with his satirical and often humorous writing that included uncomfortable topics such as religion and prostitution. Many of his plays were censored by the Lord Chamberlain, including Mrs Warren's Profession , first public performance in England , which centred on a former prostitute and her attempt to come to terms with her disapproving daughter.

At a more grass roots level, theatre groups aimed at promoting the socialist cause and the Labour Party sprang up across the country. Between and the Workers' Theatre Movement WTM , which was allied with the Communists, used theatre to agitate for social change. WTM developed an 'agit-prop' style that took songs and sketches onto the streets in an attempt to incite change. Unity Theatre grew out of the WTM.

It's aim was 'to foster and further the art of drama in accordance with the principle that true art, by effectively presenting and truthfully interpreting life as experienced by the majority of people, can move the people to work for the betterment of society'. Unity pioneered new forms of theatre, presenting factual information on current events to audiences, as well as satirical pantomimes that challenged the Lord Chamberlain's censorship.

Committed to removing the bourgeois trappings of theatre, they wanted to create a more physical theatre that reflected the machine age. Founded in , the Actresses' Franchise League supported the suffrage movement by staging events and readings. The main feature of the stage is a circular space on which the chorus dance and sing.

Behind it a temporary wooden structure makes possible a suggestion of scenery. At the end of the festival a winner is chosen. The Greek tragedians: 5th century BC. Only a small number of tragedies survive as full texts from the annual competitions in Athens, but they include work by three dramatists of genius.

The earliest is the heavyweight of the trio, Aeschylus. Aeschylus adds a second actor, increasing the potential for drama. He first wins the prize for tragedy in BC. He is known to have written about eighty plays, of which only seven survive. One of his innovations is to write the day's three tragedies on a single theme, as a trilogy. By good fortune three of his seven plays are one such trilogy, which remains one of the theatre's great masterpieces - the Oresteia , celebrating the achievement of Athens in replacing the chaos of earlier times with the rule of law.

Sophocles gains his first victory in BC, defeating Aeschylus. He is credited with adding a third actor, further extending the dramatic possibilities of a scene. Whereas Aeschylus tends to deal with great public themes, the tragic dilemmas in Sophocles are worked out at a more personal level. Plots become more complex, characterization more subtle, and the personal interaction between characters more central to the drama.

Although Sophocles in a very long life writes more plays than Aeschylus perhaps about , again only seven survive intact.

Of these Oedipus the King is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The youngest of the three great Greek tragedians is Euripides. More of his plays survive 19 as opposed to 7 for each of the others , but he has fewer victories than his rivals in the City Dionysia - in which he first competes in BC.

Euripides introduces a more unconventional view of Greek myth, seeing it from new angles or viewing mythological characters in terms of their human frailties.

His vision is extremely influential in later schools of tragic drama. The beginning of Greek comedy: 5th century BC. From BC there is an annual competitition for comedies at Athens - held as part of the Lenaea, a three-day festival in January. Only one comic author's work has survived from the 5th century. Like the first three tragedians, he launches the genre with great brilliance. He is Aristophanes, a frequent winner of the first prize in the Lenaea on the first occasion, in BC, with the Acharnians.

Eleven of his plays survive, out of a total of perhaps forty spanning approximately the period BC. They rely mainly on a device which becomes central to the tradition of comedy.

They satirize contemporary foibles by placing them in an unexpected context, whether by means of a fantastic plot or through the antics of ridiculous characters. A good example is The Frogs , a literary satire at the expense of Euripides. After the death of the great man, Dionysus goes down to Hades to bring back his favourite tragedian. A competition held down there enables Aristophanes to parody the style of Euripides. As a result Dionysus comes back to earth with Aeschylus instead.

In The Wasps the Athenian love of litigation is ridiculed in the form of an old man who sets up a law court in his home, to try his dog for stealing cheese. In Lysistrata the horrors of war are discussed in a circumstance of extreme social crisis; the women of Greece refuse to make love until their men agree to make peace. An exclusively Greek contribution to architectural history is the raked auditorium for watching theatrical performances appropriately, since the Greeks are also the inventors of theatre as a literary form.

The masterpieces of Greek drama date from the 5th century BC. At that time, in Athens, the audience sit on the bare hillside to watch performances on a temporary wooden stage. In the 4th century a stone auditorium is built on the site, and there is still a theatre there today - the theatre of Dionysus.