A NEW FREEDOM OF FORM

The twentieth-century theatre has offered the dramatist a dizzy variety of forms and conventions within which to work, with infinite opportunities to break the continuity of one mode to startle us with another. The historian of modern drama will remark on the one hand the movement towards overt theatrical symbolism at the end of the last century, with its concomitant adventures into surrealism and the ‘dream’ play, into expressionism, ‘epic’ drama and verse fantasy; and, on the other, surviving elements of the high comedy of manners, melodrama and grotesque farce. Woven through all these is an irrepressible interest in the naturalistic experiment, as we have seen. Moreover, the playwright has had at his disposal all manner of media through which to speak, from the expert sorcery of the theatre of illusions, whether behind a proscenium arch or on a cinema screen, to the theatre of free imagination, the bare stage, the open stage, theatre-in-the-round or theatre on the air. It is small wonder that today's serious audience at times seems to be a tormented creature with masochistic tendencies.