Rising to the challenge of the electric opposition

We are looking into a dark cave. Through a large opening at the back we see a shimmering lake and a bright, full moon. There are huge rocks to the left, right and centre. Water, suggested by flimsy gauze, flows over the stage. We have to believe it is real because a boat comes floating across on top of it, rowed by two men. A moment later, a young woman is thrown into the water backwards off the rock in the centre. A moment after that, a young man rescues her. This scene, from Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn, is typical of theatrical performance in the 19th century. It puts a great deal of effort and imagination into creating an illusion of reality - in this case of the lakes of Killarney. But it also recognises the audience knows it is an illusion. All the genius of the playwright, the designer and the actors goes into making it seem real enough - not that the audience will be fooled, but that it will agree to suspend its disbelief.

In the 20th century, however, such effects and such conventions gradually became impossible. By 1912, if you wanted to see the lakes of Killarney presented in a theatre, you could go to see the film of The Colleen Bawn, shot on location at the actual lakes by Sidney Olcott. And as one contemporary reviewer noted: "The moving-picture-loving public will see the ideas of the great dramatist portrayed with a fidelity and a realism which neither have been, nor could possibly be, achieved on the stage." When it tried to create illusions of the real world, theatrical performance suddenly found itself beaten at its own game. The cinema, though its images were more artificial and less physical, was, even before it added sound and colour to its effects, more convincing than live performance.

Cinema, and later television, took away much of the ground theatre used to occupy. One of the basic jobs theatre used to do, the creation of an illusion of everyday reality, can be done more powerfully, more immediately and more persuasively on the screen. A play can present convincing characters in apparently authentic rooms, but if it moves on to the streets or into the landscape, it cannot match the cinema's life-like illusions. After you've watched the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, no stage production of Henry V, however spectacular, is ever going to look realistic. Even indoors, if you want to see the tiny details on the face of a crying woman - the tears, the trembling lips, the smudged mascara - a movie close-up will always be much more effective than the view from the 35th row of the stalls.

Arguably, from the time of Aeschylus, the performance arts in the West had been striving for ever-greater realism. That process had culminated in the late 19th century in the rise of Ibsen and the spread of a kind of domestic drama that seemed to mirror the look and feel of middle-class urban life. The heroic, exaggerated acting styles of the great stage stars were going out of fashion. Audiences had been taught to ask a new kind of question - is that how people really behave? - and to judge what they saw by whether the answer was "yes" or "no". This was not just a passing fashion. It reflected the influence of larger social changes. With the rise of democracy, the people in plays did not need to be kings or heroines: the new middle class liked to see its own dilemmas acted out on stage. With the rise of individualism, the focus shifted indoors, into the private arena of the family drawing-room. With the beginnings of psychology and psychoanalysis interior struggles, within the mind, were acquiring all the drama formerly reserved for big, public conflicts.

And then these same, large forces - everything that can be crudely assembled under the heading of "modernity" - created the cinema and made the long march towards theatrical realism seem like a wasted journey. The new medium was vastly more democratic. It could create images not just of drawing rooms, but of the whole texture of domestic life, moving seamlessly from scene to scene without the need for cumbersome changes of set. And if you wanted to zoom in on the internal conflicts of the individual, it had, in the close-up, a far more powerful tool than anything in the theatrical repertoire. Where could old-fashioned performance arts go?

Theatre's struggle against cinema

The history of performance in the 20th century is a history of live action struggling to cope with the consequences of the electrical image, of the physical body trying to survive in a virtual world, of the idea of presence trying to assert itself in a culture of magical absences. It is, in a sense, a history of artists trying to escape the consequences of living in the 20th century itself. The big question for anyone interested in live performance became "What can we do that cinema and television can't do better?"

A representative figure in this regard is one of the century's most important theatre directors, Peter Brook. In his autobiography Threads of Time, he writes that his childhood "idol" growing up in London in the 1930s was a film projector belonging to his father, an object he seems to have regarded with the utmost reverence: "For a long while I was never allowed to touch it, as only my father and my brothers could understand its intricacies. Then the time came when I was considered old enough to attach and thread the little reels of nine-and-a-half millimetre Pathe film, to set up a tiny cardboard screen within the proscenium of my toy theatre and to watch with ever-repeated fascination the scratched, grey images." When he was beginning his career during the second World War, he regarded the theatre, as he wrote in an essay collected in his book The Shifting Point, as merely "a dreary and dying predecessor of the cinema". He directed plays merely as a detour through an "old-fashioned province" which would eventually lead him on to the sleek superhighway of the cinema.

What were those committed to live performance to do about this new, immensely powerful rival? One response was to bring technology onto the stage, to make theatre just as self-consciously modern as the cinema. This impulse was first felt in the opera and the dance - forms which were, of their nature, less wedded to realism than the drama. The great Swiss opera designer Adolphe Appia seized on the invention of incandescent light bulbs and realised that electric light could do more than illuminate the stage. It could create moods, reflect emotions, suggest settings. It could also isolate actors in their own spaces, and allow the audience to see small movements and gestures which had previously been obscure. It could help to transform performance from a large-scale spectacle to an intimate experience.

Appia wanted a theatre of atmosphere rather than a theatre of appearance. His response to the development of cinema was to suggest that whereas the screen could present an image of the real thing, live performance could evoke its essence. In staging Wagner's Siegfried, he suggested, "we need not try to represent a forest; what we must give the spectator is the man in the atmosphere of a forest". This meant, in essence, abandoning the attempt to create an illusion by means of physical scenery and instead using light to paint the picture. In the case of Siegfried, for instance, Appia created not life-like trees, but the shadows of green leaves on the bodies of the singers.

Likewise, the American dancer Loie Fuller sought to fuse movement and light by creating for herself complex costumes on to which images could be projected as she danced. One of her dances, in which she whirled over a glass floor, required the services of no fewer than 14 electricians working lights, projectors and refractors. The most extreme version of this ideal of performance driven by technology was that of Gordon Craig, an important influence on the early Abbey in Dublin. Craig dreamed of a theatre in which audiences would sit before a vast machine of revolving cubes, light and screens. Like many of his contemporaries, he developed a huge interest in puppets as a substitute for the unruly human body. If actors had to be tolerated, he felt, the least they could do was remain silent. "The actor is for me only an insuperable difficulty and an expense." Where they were to be employed at all, they "must cease to speak and must move only". In the 1920s, the Bauhaus movement actually staged such performances, experimenting with "plays" consisting only of light, colour and form.

Ironically, of course, there was already a theatre in which audiences sat and watched the machine-driven play of light and screen and in which the actors were, for the moment at least, silent. It was called cinema. Often the avant garde experimenters were merely arriving, through more complicated and abstract routes, at places the Hollywood moguls had already occupied.

Craig's ideas did, however, achieve a kind of fulfilment in the development of modern dance. Even though dance, by definition, was never a realistic form in the first place, it did nevertheless move away from narrative and towards pure form. From Balanchine and Nijinsky to Martha Graham to Merce Cunningham, dance became at once more abstract and more self-consciously theatrical, emphasising its live quality, its ability to use three dimensions rather the cinema's two. Perhaps because it was never in any real danger of being subsumed by film in the way that drama was, dance was also able to embrace technology more enthusiastically.

Even now, in the work of the veteran modernist choreographer Merce Cunningham, there is a striking sense of being completely at home in a computer-driven world, using the powers of virtual reality to suggest new movements for the human body.

Development of multi-media

In the theatre, other people were hoping to find some middle way, some new fusion of cinema and theatre into a single art form. The German director Erwin Piscator invented what later came to be called the multi-media spectacular. In 1925, he staged a show in Berlin which definitively broke the bounds of the traditional play. It was made up of 24 scenes from the period 1914-1919 in Germany, interspersed with film footage from first World War battles. From this, he developed the idea of using the back of the stage as a "living wall" of projected images. This would be "the theatre's fourth dimension" in which the film footage "conducts the story, becomes its motive force, a piece of living scenery".

Another kind of fusion, less literal but no less bold, was that developed by Piscator's German contemporary Max Reinhardt. Essentially, Reinhardt believed live performance should be as all-embracing and as overwhelming as the cinema. He created performance events that were like Cecil B. de Mille movie epics staged before the audience's eyes, full of carefully orchestrated crowd scenes, dazzling effects of light and colour and sound, with every movement conceived in advance and in even more detail than the average film's shooting script.

The work of Piscator and Reinhardt was, by all accounts, stunningly effective. Perhaps too much so, for the real culmination of this kind of total spectacle was in another genre of German live performance: the brilliantly orchestrated, boldly conceived outdoor theatre of the Nazi's Nuremberg rallies, where crowds of puppet-like people, music, light, colour and movement were fused to create an awesome, irrational and hate-filled political spectacle. If it seems fanciful to suggest such a connection, it is well to remember that the author of these performances, Josef Goebbels, had a profound interest in the avant-garde theatre and even submitted a play of his own to Piscator.

Goebbels also knew the work of Gordon Craig. When Craig was in Berlin, Goebbels actually approached him with the extraordinary suggestion that he go to Piscator, a life-long Communist then in exile in Moscow, and invite him back to run a propaganda theatre for the Nazis.

Brecht and alienation

The experience of the way "total theatre" could be abused for evil ends cast a shadow over the whole notion that the future of live performance might lie in the big, orchestrated, irrational spectacle. One response - that of another German contemporary of Piscator and Reinhardt - was to seek a style of performance that encouraged the spectator to be detached and critical rather than to be overwhelmed by excitement and emotion. Bertolt Brecht imagined his ideal spectator as a man sitting in the back row at a boxing match, watching closely, chewing on his cigar, appraising the action coolly and quizzically. Brecht also drew his model of the performer from the ordinary experience of modern, urban life. He explained the basic elements of what he called epic theatre were present in "an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place". The point of this demonstration would not be to convince them he really is one of the participants in the accident. He doesn't want someone to say "What a lifelike portrayal of a chauffeur!" He doesn't want to "transport people from normality to `higher realms'." He just wants to give a vivid sense of what happened.

The point of this kind of analogy was that Brecht wanted a style of performance that was real but not realistic. He developed techniques in which the audience was continually reminded that the performance was a performance - not an illusion of a traffic accident, but a recreation of the accident in words and gestures. The style of epic theatre which he created in East Berlin after the war was arguably the most influential fusion of theory and practice in the second half of the century. It did become, in the 1960s and early 1970s, a new orthodoxy, with its own rules and conventions. But it was unarguably an alternative to the cinema. Brecht may have been deeply influenced by the Russian film-maker, Sergei Eisenstein, and by Charlie Chaplin and his ilk, but his own plays and productions could never have been adapted to the screen.

Escaping the modern

There were, though, other solutions to the problem of modernity in live performance, and many of them involved a flight from modernity itself. Twentieth century performance has often been most innovative when it has been least modern; most contemporary when it has dreamed of connecting to some ancient or timeless truth. Poetry, fiction, music, dance and the visual arts have all gone through phases of being attracted to the outlandish and the primitive. But in the theatre, the urge to escape urban, industrial life has been felt almost continuously throughout the century. Its avant garde has often been in deliberate retreat, moving backwards in time, searching for older, more apparently authentic forms.

In John Millington Synge's explorations of the west of Ireland and in Federico Garcia Lorca's of Granada, it sought inspiration on the underdeveloped fringes of Europe. But more typically, it has tried to connect with the still more exotic East. In Ireland, William Butler Yeats wrote plays modelled on the Japanese Noh style. In France, the actor and writer Antonin Artaud was deeply influenced by Balinese dance. Even Brecht, in some respects the most self-consciously modern and urban of great 20th-century playwrights, pointed to the Peking Opera, and the performances of its star, Mei Lanfang, as a touchstone for the development of contemporary drama. Peter Brook, arguably the most distinguished and influential director in today's theatre, took these impulses still further.

There is nothing mysterious about Western theatre's persistent desire to be in touch with exotic traditions. The question for anyone who thought that live performance could still be a serious art form was: what can we do besides realism? What choice is there but to go back to the roots of theatre itself, to build on those things that cinema and television do not have - an empty space, the physical, bodily presence of the actor, the feeling that performers and audience are participating together in some kind of ritual? The answers to those questions led inevitably towards those kinds of non-realistic, and for the most part non-Western, performance, in which these basic elements had remained to the fore.

From Yeats and Artaud to Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, there was a broad feeling that if theatre was to survive as an important art form, it would have to start out not with a written text, rich costumes and elaborate scenery, but with its own unique and primal qualities: a space, an audience, actors and the mysterious, even mystical relationship that can develop between them. It would have to locate its future in an imagined past, before industry, before technology, before the age of mechanical reproduction.

The most ironic aspect of this return was the complete reversal of the long-standing relationship between performers and religion in the West. Having been for centuries the reputed work of the devil and the associates of prostitutes and whore-masters, strolling players have become, in their most radical forms, oddly holy. As society has become more secular, theatrical experiment, even when conducted by political radicals, has become more religious, more tribal and more ceremonial.

Martha Graham's dances were imbued with a sense of religious ritual. Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet theatre shared home-made loaves with its audience, making a conscious use of the sacramental meaning of bread in Christian cultures. The Polish director and teacher Jerzy Grotowski imagined his actors as agnostic, ascetic cult with its own rituals of initiation and progression, eventually finding the audience an unnecessary distraction and abandoning performance altogether. In California, El Teatro Campesino tried to recreate ancient Native American religious ceremonies. Julian Beck and Judith Molina imagined their Living Theatre as a nomadic tribe bound together by love and ascetic rejection of material values - a hippie version, in other words, of the Franciscans.

Peter Brook represents in many respects the culmination of all of these tendencies. Though he has not been a follower of any one of the great avant garde figures, he has borrowed from all of them. He has vindicated, for a wide international audience, the flight from technological modernity. He has led his actors to Iran, to Africa and to India in search of ancient wisdom, and he has collaborated with practitioners of traditional, non-Western forms of drama. Through his own productions and through the influence on others of his brilliant 1968 polemic The Empty Space, he restored a sense of physical presence to the centre of theatrical creation, reminding both actors and audiences of the essential truth that the performance, not the play in its abstract, written form, is the thing.

He embodied the tendency of late-20th-century performance to make a nonsense of the old distinction between the creative and interpretative arts by showing that a living interpretation, even of a Shakespeare classic such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, must be an act of creation.

Bring on the clowns

Related to this search for ways of escaping the technological society of the 20th century is yet another response to the challenge of the cinema, the rediscovery of that whole layer of popular performance which has always been present, beneath the surface of the more respectable performance arts. In the early years of the century, it seemed likely the cinema would absorb not just the theatre but also the music-hall and burlesque traditions. The silent cinema, especially in America, was dominated by great music-hall clowns such as Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy. Even after the development of the talkies, great vaudevillians such as Mae West, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers were an integral aspect of Hollywood's output. But as the cinema became more realistic and more domestic, that clowning tradition began to connect again to the live theatre.

The critic Eric Bentley recalled being with Bertolt Brecht and watching a street performer balance a pile of cups on his head. Bentley was taken aback by Brecht's childlike delight in the man's act. "You see," Brecht explained later, "more is more. If you can add something to life, anything, that's good! Who cares if it's just a small addition? That man added." Brecht was reflecting a growing sense on the part of those concerned with the future of live performance that there was more to it than high art, social purpose and moral seriousness. There was also pure delight, the feeling that something was being added to the sum of human experience.

Early in the century, the great Russian director Vsevelod Meyerhold became increasingly attracted to the circus, the fairground, and the music hall. What drew him to these forms was the feeling that they could be the way for live performance to escape from literature, to go beyond words and develop a language of movement, physicality and playfulness. Realism, he felt, concentrated on the typical aspects of life and in doing so impoverished the world by reducing everything to an idea of what was normal. Older, less respectable, forms such as circus and music hall did the opposite. They added to reality by exaggerating or distorting it.

Meyerhold experimented with different ways of breaking down the artificial barriers between the audience and stage. He built ramps and gangways and had his performers running up and down the aisles. He left the lights on in the auditorium. He took the seats out and rearranged the hall like a big tavern, with the audience sitting drinking at tables while the action went on around them. He employed jugglers and acrobats. And he developed a startlingly direct physical language in which complex actions could be represented by simple visual analogies. One play he mounted called for an astrologer to see a falling star. Meyerhold achieved it with an actor whirling a bamboo pole with a flame on top and a stage hand plunging it into a bucket of water.

Meyerhold himself was extinguished in Stalin's gulags, punished for his rejection of the realism that became an article of faith in the Soviet Union. But his ideas became, after the second World War, almost commonplace. And the interest in music hall and clowning became common too. Samuel Beckett created, in the Laurel and Hardyesque tramps of Waiting for Godot, a classic music-hall two-hander. The whole "theatre of the absurd" movement of the 1950s and 1960s drew heavily on the atmosphere and techniques of vaudeville.

The medieval notion of carnival made a return to the culture of the West in the late 20th century. Large-scale, semi-anarchic spectacles such as those mounted by the Catalan company, Els Comedients, invaded European cities using the streets as the stage and the population at large as the audience (and inspired Macnas to do the same for Galway). Old forms such as clowning, juggling and mime were increasingly fused with text-based theatre, as, for example, in Peter Brook's famous production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Travelling players such as the multinational touring company Footsbarn took to the roads again, living in trucks and trailers but pitching their tents on the green spaces of the cities. Companies such as Cirque du Soleil, Zingaro and Circus Oz brought a new kind of artistry to the old arts of the circus. The distinction between high art and low art began to crumble in performance, as in most other cultural forms.

The shock of the old

And most oddly of all, some of the things that seemed most orthodox and conventional at the beginning of the century had come to seem, by the end of the century, radical and angular. The experimentalists of the early 1900s were fed up with the slow pace and dense wordiness of the theatre and wanted to create something that would startle audiences by its speed, strangeness and fragmentation. But by the 1990s speed, strangeness and fragmentation had become the norm in ordinary life. The everyday culture of television and advertising was saturated with surreal juxtapositions, with fantastic imagery and with dizzying jump-cuts. Now, there was nothing quite so strange as the dense language, the gradual unfolding and the formal concentration of a great piece of theatre. By surviving the challenge of cinema, live performance has stayed around long enough to find itself at an odd and interesting angle to the mainstream of 20th century culture.