Ibsen and his contemporaries, Strindberg and Chekhov, irrevocably altered the nature of drama by the use of ordinary colloquial language rather than the hieratic language of verse. They domesticated drama by situating it within recognisably ordinary homes and dressed the personages in the same attire as the audience, thereby eradicating the emotional distance between audience and actors. Ibsen in particular developed, explored and enriched the psychological dimension of drama. In Ghosts, Little Eyolf, The Master Builder, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, and other plays he created strong, deep characters with intense and interesting inner lives.

Strindberg's contribution was to expand the setting from the sitting room to a kitchen in Miss Julie (first published in 1888). The journey from public space in classical Greek tragedy to parlour in Ibsen had finally led, perhaps inexorably, to the kitchen, an unglamorous, hidden but important place within all households. In Miss Julie, Strindberg by his own account gave his characters a ‘multiplicity of motives’ (1964: p. 94) and did not fix them into an inflexible mould but rather rendered them vacillating and unpredictable, as was suitable for modern characters. This was Strindberg's not-so-covert attack on his rival, Ibsen's approach to dramatic characters. Furthermore, drawing from real people, Strindberg demonstrated in The Ghost Sonata the potential of creating characters who were so out of the ordinary as to make Ibsen's realism something of the past and to point forward to a different kind of theatre – ‘The Mummy’ in The Ghost Sonata lived locked away in a cupboard and was regarded as mad. Finally, in Strindberg, realism was starting to give way to a different method of ensuring that audiences remained attentive and alive to the possibilities of drama.

It was this heritage that the American dramatists Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill inherited. Between them they submitted their own individual personal histories to scrutiny and made of their own anguished, troubled early life experiences art that remains a masterly example of psychological examination and exposition.