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  • Hey there!

  • I'm Mike Rugnetta.

  • This is Crash Course Theater, and today we're headed back to France.

  • Hang onto your culturally appropriate headwear because today there's gonna be murder.

  • There's gonna be sexy times.

  • There's gonna be tuberculosis.

  • Rebels are gonna pee in the aisles.

  • Au revoir, neoclassicism.

  • Don't let the minimal scene changes hit you on the way out.

  • We'll be taking a quick look at French Romanticism before moving on to Realism and then Naturalism,

  • which is a lot like Realism, only more realer.

  • Allons-y!

  • INTRO Let's start with Victor Hugo, who you may

  • know as the author ofLes Miserables.”

  • The novelLes Miserables.”

  • But Hugo also wrote plays.

  • And in 1827, he wroteCromwell,” which we now mostly know because of its awesome

  • preface, in which Hugo argues that if you really wanna show how grotesque, sublime,

  • and weird life is, you can't play by the neoclassical rules.

  • Let us tear down that old plasterwork that hides the façade of art,” he writes.

  • There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general

  • laws of Nature

  • Nature then!

  • Nature and truth!”

  • But maybe not too much nature?

  • Everyone knows that color and light are lost in a simple reflection,” Hugo writes.

  • The drama, therefore, must be a concentrating mirror, which, instead of weakening, concentrates

  • and condenses the colored rays, which makes of a mere gleam a light, and of a light a

  • flame.”

  • It's sort like the old documentarian nugget about wanting to tell the truth, but don't

  • get bogged down in all the facts.

  • He tried out these natural-but-not-too-natural ideas in his playHernani,” which premiered

  • in 1830.

  • Kind of likeLe Cidwith a sad ending, “Hernaniis the story of a noble outlaw

  • and his noble non-outlaw girlfriend.

  • It ends in a double suicide.

  • But remember how Corneille was toeing the Neoclassical/Academie Francaise line?

  • Hugo was not into it.

  • He mixed comedy and tragedy and flipped the bird to the unities of place and time.

  • He was cool with the unity of action though.

  • And he was like, I'mma mess with your twelve-syllable alexandrine and use words that have been considered

  • beneath the dignity of tragedy, so how do ya like me now?

  • Still going to write in verse, because

  • c'mon I'M NOT A HEATHEN.

  • Hugo!

  • So rebellious!

  • But within reason.

  • The play premiered in late February after weeks of editorials and counter-editorials

  • about what a shock it would be.

  • One paper announced there would be riots and death and a small civil war if Hernani went

  • on.

  • It went on.

  • And there was a riot—a small and slightly gross one.

  • Four hours before the performance, a large group of Hugo-supporting bohemians snuck into

  • the theater, occupying the pit and the gallery.

  • They snacked and drank and peed in the aisles.

  • And when the upper class patrons arrived for the show, they were not thrilled.

  • The two groups spent most of the performance fighting each other.

  • But then in the last act, when everything became very sad, the two groups settled down

  • and wept together, and the play was a hit.

  • Hugo hired a hundred people to come and applaud it every night though, so that probably helped.

  • Following Hugo, a few people half-heartedly attempted to make the theater a little more

  • like life.

  • Mostly they did this by moving popular theater away from grandiose, avalanche-heavy melodrama

  • ... towards intimate, sofa-heavy melodrama.

  • This form was perfected by Eugene Scribe in the piece bien fait, or the well-made play—a

  • five-act prose drama that hooks the audience with a series of discoveries, reversals, and

  • recognitions before ultimately reaffirming nice, conservative bourgeois values.

  • Scribe, who wrote nearly four hundred plays, definitely wasn't interested in making the

  • theater all that life like.

  • He wrote: “You go to theater, not for instruction or correction, but for relaxation and amusement.

  • Now what amuses you most is not truth, but fictionthe extraordinary, the romantic,

  • that is what charms you, that is what one is eager to offer you.”

  • Scribe was incredibly popular, and so were his dramaturgical roll crew, Georges Feydeau

  • and Victorien Sardou.

  • Playwright George Bernard Shaw despised Sardou so much that he coined...

  • ...the termSardoodledomto describe his plays.

  • But other writers were starting to wonder if the well-made play could be made even better

  • by being brought more in line with observable reality.

  • And this is basically where we got theatrical realism!

  • The termrealismstarted popping up in France in the 1850s.

  • And there was even a journal called Realisme.

  • Theorists called for realistic situations, realistic characters, and realistic dialogue.

  • Even grammatically incorrect dialogue!

  • A development which I am aghastabout Alexandre Dumas fils, the son of Alexandre

  • Dumas ofThree Musketeersfame, was one of the first writers to shift the well-made

  • play into an even more realistic social problem play.

  • As Dumas wrote, “invention does not exist for us.

  • We have nothing to invent.

  • We have only to look and remember, to feel, to co-ordinate and give back, under a special

  • form, that which all the spectators should immediately remember to have felt or witnessed.”

  • But that special form thing is important.

  • A true artist can't just reproduce life; “he has to discover and to reveal to us

  • that which we do not see in things we look at every day,” Dumas wrote.

  • Which all sounds great.

  • But if you read Dumas's most famous play, “La Dame Aux Camilles,” with its courtesan

  • -with-a-heart-of-gold-reforms-her-life-and-then-dies-of- culosis-because-it's-easier-to-forgive-a-fallen-women-when-they're-dead

  • plot, you'll see that there is definitely some invention and some tear-jerking going

  • on.

  • I mean, I guess you can rip only so much from the headlines, y'know?

  • And even though realism was supposed to be a move away from the sensationalism and moralism

  • of melodramawell, there's still a lot of sensation.

  • As we'll see in upcoming episodes, the problem with a lot of new artistic movements is that

  • it's hard to be faithful to your theories and write plays people wanna see.

  • The realistic movement coincides with a whole bunch of scientific discoveries and publications,

  • notably Charles Darwin's “Origin of Species.”

  • Artists were fascinated by this text and by what Darwin suggests about how heredity and

  • environment come together to create character.

  • In theater, the big-time early adopter of evolution was Emile Zola, who was described

  • as a fat, pot-bellied whiner by one of his colleagues.

  • Instead of the well-made play formula, Zola said that theater should use other formulas:

  • scientific formulas!

  • This was naturalism.

  • Theater, Zola thought, should be a laboratory of human life, with its experiments based

  • not on the demands of plot, but on the inner conflicts of a group of characters.

  • Each play should test a hypothesis, investigating what happens if you put these characters,

  • with these hereditary traits, into this environment.

  • Spoiler alert: Nothing good!

  • Naturalism doesn't include a lot of happy endings.

  • Zola's plays were so intense that they were considered too radical for some former radicals.

  • Victor Hugo's supporters came to boo them.

  • You know how those earlier realists were like, We want the theater to be like life but maybe

  • not too much?

  • Zola was all, Make it all the way like life.

  • More life!

  • LIFE TO THE MAX In his preface toTherese Raquin,” the

  • 1873 study of an adulterous couple that he adapted from his own novel, Zola wrote...

  • “I am waiting for the time to come when they will tell us no more incredible stories,

  • when they will no longer spoil the effects of just observations by romantic incidents

  • I am waiting for them to abandon the cut and dried rules, the worked-out formulas, the

  • tears and cheap laughs

  • I am waiting, finallyuntil they return to the source of science and modern arts,

  • to the study of nature, to the anatomy of man, to the painting of life, in an exact

  • reproduction, more original and powerful than anyone has so far.”

  • Let's test some of these ideas out withTherese Raquin.”

  • Hope you brought your life jacket, ThoughtBubble: Therese is a poor girl who lives with her

  • aunt and her aunt's hypochondriac son, Camille.

  • Therese is semi-forced to marry Camille, and the family moves to Paris.

  • Then one day, Camille brings home a work friend, and artist Laurent.

  • And before you can say heredity and environment, Laurent and Therese start a torrid affair

  • Butsneaking around is tough.

  • So eventually they're like, Hey, Camille, let's all go for a boat ride.

  • Their plan is to drown Camille and then live happily ever after.

  • But the drowning doesn't go so well: Camille bites Laurent, and no one can find the body.

  • And then the happily-ever-after doesn't go so well, because after they get married,

  • Laurent and Therese are tortured by guilt.

  • They keep hallucinating that zombie-Camille is actually in their bedroom, which really

  • interferes with sexy time.

  • Therese can't sleep.

  • Laurent can't paint.

  • They both go a little crazy.

  • Therese's aunt finds out about the murder, but she's had a couple of strokes and can

  • only communicate with her eyes and one finger.

  • So she does a lot of ominous staring.

  • She tries to expose them, but fails.

  • The pressure is so great that Therese decides to kill Laurent, and Laurent decides to kill

  • Therese.

  • Then they figure out that each is trying to kill the other, so they hug and cry and drink

  • poison while the aunt watches, and probably some pointing?

  • TOO REAL, ThoughtBubble.

  • Or I guess, not REAL butNATURAL?

  • In some waysTherese Raquinproves Zola's ideas pretty well.

  • The murder occurs because of the kind of temperaments each character has and the opportunities that

  • their environment provides.

  • And there aren't a lot of cut and dried rules or cheap laughs.

  • But ok - how real or natural is this play?

  • Eh.

  • Even Zola acknowledged that it had problems.

  • It's an incredible story.

  • It's full of romantic incidents.

  • It doesn't feel like an exact reproduction of my life or probably your lifehopefully.

  • Unless you have thrown yourself into a passionate affair and then drowned your husband.

  • If this is a slice of life, it's a very lurid slice, and it actually looks a lot like

  • a sad version of bourgeois melodrama.

  • Realism, like melodrama, is one of those genres that's still very much with us today.

  • In plays, in movies, on TV shows.

  • Realism and naturalism promise us art that looks a lot like life, but it turns out that

  • life isn't always so easy to stage.

  • It's long; a lot of it is boring; and people normally get really miffed when you call INTERMISSION

  • in the middle of it.

  • Also don't get me started on the costumes.

  • K actually, that's pretty good.

  • This means that realistic art adopts its own less-than-exactingly-realistic conventions.

  • Maybe they're not as strict as neoclassicism, but they're definitely there.

  • Like the way that opening scenes have to establish who all the characters are, or the way that

  • a crisis has to be instigated and then resolved.

  • And speaking of resolution: we'll be staying in France for one more episode, to take a

  • look at a sea change in acting and the rise

  • of the director.

  • Until thencurtain!

Hey there!

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