ELEMENTS OF DRAMA: STYLE

                                         

     Style involves the playwright’s method of presentation. It involves the playwright’s treatment and shaping of dramatic materials, setting and costumes in a specific manner. Several factors influence the style of a dramatist like his belonging to a specific period of time, his nationality, his affinity to any ideological movement, and his personal traits.

     There is different variety of styles like the realistic, anti-realistic, naturalistic, symbolic, and expressionistic and so on.

Realistic Style: A realistic style attempts to portray a convincing replica of real life situations and tries to create an illusion of reality on the stage. The language attempts to be as possible to real life and the concern with domestic problems and social issues.

Playwrights like Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller wrote in the realistic style.

     Naturalistic Style: A naturalistic Plays attempt to present a ‘slice of life’ in all its harsh reality and maintained that their theatre approached truth more closely than the realists. With its root in social Darwinism, the naturalists hold the view that man’s fortunes and character was determined by natural forces like heredity and environment that are beyond his control. Naturalism thus becomes an extreme form of realism with emphasis on character rather than plot.

Ibsen’s plays like Ghosts and the Wild Duck, August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths are some example of naturalistic plays.

     Expressionistic Style: Expressionist dramatis perceives reality in a highly subjective manner. They attempt to capture man’s subconscious reality through innovations in language structure, and technical effects. Expressionist dramatists dislocated the time sequence, wrote stylized language, and used masked characters, distorted stage sets, and special effects in light and sound.

Playwrights like George Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, Ernest Toller’s Transfigurations, Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, were some of the practitioners of expressionism in drama.

     Symbolic Style: The symbolist movement originated in France under the influence of Mallarme, Verlaine and Richard Wagner. The symbolists were interested in the spiritual realm of man’s being, his dreams, fears and fantasies. For them drama is a ‘mysterious ceremony of moods, suggestions and evocations.’ They convey ideas by indirections. Their symbols were drawn from religious and esoteric traditions. They also developed symbols by themselves. Henric Ibsen, W.B Yeats, J.M Synge, Eugene O’Neill are some of the major symbolist playwrights.