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Realism was a general movement in the late nineteenth century that steered theatrical texts and performances toward greater fidelity to real life. The realist movement began with Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major Nineteenth-century theatre Norway playwright of realism drama and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre....
 and was largely developed by Constantin Stanislavsky and his Moscow Arts Theatre. Together with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Georgia n born Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, and playwright, who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his more famous colleague, Constantin Stanislavski, in 1898....
 the two pioneered a break away from the highly stylised and unrealistic theatre styles (e.g. Melodrama
Melodrama

The theatrical genre of Melodrama utilizes theme-music to manipulate the spectator's emotional response and to denote character types. The term combines "melody" and "drama"....
) prevailing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Realism began earlier in the 19th century in Russia
Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
 than elsewhere in Europe and took a more uncompromising form.






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Realism was a general movement in the late nineteenth century that steered theatrical texts and performances toward greater fidelity to real life. The realist movement began with Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major Nineteenth-century theatre Norway playwright of realism drama and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre....
 and was largely developed by Constantin Stanislavsky and his Moscow Arts Theatre. Together with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Georgia n born Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, and playwright, who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his more famous colleague, Constantin Stanislavski, in 1898....
 the two pioneered a break away from the highly stylised and unrealistic theatre styles (e.g. Melodrama
Melodrama

The theatrical genre of Melodrama utilizes theme-music to manipulate the spectator's emotional response and to denote character types. The term combines "melody" and "drama"....
) prevailing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Realism began earlier in the 19th century in Russia
Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
 than elsewhere in Europe and took a more uncompromising form. Beginning with the plays of Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev

'Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction....
, who used "domestic detail to reveal inner turmoil", Alexandr Ostrovsky
Alexandr Ostrovsky

Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was a Russian playwright....
, who was Russia's first professional playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky
Aleksey Pisemsky

Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky was a Russian novelist and dramatist who was regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky during his lifetime, but whose reputation suffered a spectacular decline in the 20th century....
, whose A Bitter Fate (1859) anticipated Naturalism
Naturalism (theatre)

Naturalism is a Literary movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the Nineteenth-century theatre and Twentieth-century theatre centuries....
, and Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Tolstoy's further talents as essayist, dramatist and Education reform made him the most influential member of the aristocracy Tolstoy....
, whose The Power of Darkness
The Power of Darkness

The Power of Darkness also known as The Dominion of Darkness is a five-act dramatic Play by Leo Tolstoy, written in 1886. The play was long-banned in Russia....
 (1886) is "one of the most effective of naturalistic plays", a tradition of psychological realism in Russia culminated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre
Moscow Art Theatre

Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow, Russia, founded in 1897 by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was conceived as a venue for Naturalism theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time....
 by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Georgia n born Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, and playwright, who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his more famous colleague, Constantin Stanislavski, in 1898....
. Their ground-breaking productions of the plays of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian Short story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in world literature....
 in turn influenced Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky

Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov , better known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian/Soviet Union author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist....
 and Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian novelist and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century....
.

The realist dramatist Thomas William Robertson
Thomas William Robertson

Thomas William Robertson , usually known professionally as T. W. Robertson, was an English people-Irish dramatist and innovative stage director best known for a series of realism or naturalism plays produced in London in the 1860s that broke new ground and inspired playwrights such as W.S....
 in Britain, August Strindberg in Scandinavia
Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a historical and geographical subregion in northern Europe that includes the Scandinavian Peninsula. It consists of the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; some authorities also include Finland and some might even include Iceland....
, and Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Nobel Prize in Literature. His plays are among the first to introduce into American drama the techniques of Realism , associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg....
 in the United States of America, among others, rejected the complex and artificial plotting of the well-made play
Well-made play

The well-made play is a genre of drama from the Nineteenth-century theatre that Eug?ne Scribe first codified and that Victorien Sardou developed....
 and instead present a theatrical verisimilitude that would more objectively portray life as recognizable to the audience.

This is accomplished through realistic settings and natural speech which give form to the general philosophy of naturalism (roughly, the view that man's life is shaped entirely by his social and physical environment). However, the style of realism soon came to distinguish itself from Naturalism
Naturalism (theatre)

Naturalism is a Literary movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the Nineteenth-century theatre and Twentieth-century theatre centuries....
 as a style that was heightened reality. Realism maintained the strength of such elements of drama as tension and focus, while maintaining an audiences direct connection and relation to the situation and characters. They were a reflection of themselves. Realism is the art of drawing from one's own personal memories and feelings to show and present an emotion. It is the art that has helped and led into method acting
Method acting

Method acting is a technique in which actors aim to engender in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to create a lifelike performance....
. Realism takes human morals and emotional inner thoughts and beliefs to bring about most of the conflict it presents. Naturalism
Naturalism (theatre)

Naturalism is a Literary movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the Nineteenth-century theatre and Twentieth-century theatre centuries....
 is a break off of realism that uses physical dangers for its conflict instead of moral
Moral

A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim....
 and inner character conflict such as realism. Realism was first crafted into the works of Shakespeare and other early 16th century writers.

Sources

  • Benedetti, Jean. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413525201.
  • ---. 2005. The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting, From Classical Times to the Present Day. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413773361.
  • Brockett, Oscar G. and Franklin J. Hildy. 2003. History of the Theatre. Ninth edition, International edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0205410502.