10 Terrifying Playwrights Of The 20th Century

Theatre can hit you hard and fast if you're in the right mood. It is more immediate than film and television, it asks you to sympathize with the characters, no matter how cruel they can be, and it is never exactly the same each time you go. While musicals and comedies tend to do better at the box office, it takes a great artist to make the audience go home both satisfied and horrified.

This is a list of some of the best and most twisted minds that the theatre presented us with in the last century. Definitely keep your eyes peeled for these names in your local theatre's upcoming seasons.

Straddling the 19th and 20th Centuries, Maxim Gorky jump-started his career with only the second play he ever wrote, aptly titled The Lower Depths. While pursuing a style of realistic theatre, Gorky wrote The Lower Depths with a greater focus on creating fascinating characters rather than a memorable plot. It is speculated that, while developing these characters, Gorky might have made regular visits to a local homeless shelter, offering booze in exchange for stories and time. First reception of this play was extremely negative, criticizing the bleak hopelessness and amoral content of the character's lives. Despite these initial reviews, it is considered today as one of the cornerstones of Modern Theatre. Though The Lower Depths remains his most popular play; he went on to write fifteen more plays after, maintaining his taste for the ruthless examination of human struggle.

Brendan Behan makes this list for two reasons: the chilling content of his two most famous plays, and the short horrible life that he led. He was a member of the Irish Republican Army who, even after Irish home-rule, took it upon himself to visit Liverpool and blow-up strategic parts of their harbor. He was arrested, unsuccessful of his intentions. He spent three years in jail and later, not even yet twenty years of age, was arrested again for an assassination attempt.

His most famous play, The Quare Fellow, is about a group of prisoners awaiting the execution of their fellow inmate. Behan presents the situation with humor and intensity. At the end of the play, the deceased is deceased and the characters are still coping with themselves behind bars.

Behan killed himself with alcoholism. After the successes of The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and his book The Borstal Boy, he continued to write but never as brilliantly or successfully. The diminishment of his craft was clearly a result of his drinking. 'I'm a drinker with a writing problem,' he used to say, 'There's no bad publicity except an obituary.'

Even more prolific than Arthur Miller, Howard Barker invented an entire genre called 'The Theatre of Catastrophe.' He takes inspiration from the most horrific of historical events and shows them to us openly and provocatively. By often writing characters that are imperfect or antiheroic he invites his audiences to make their own judgments and fall into discourse among themselves. Philosophically Barker is noted for his rejection of Realism's goal to evoke a

1/2

common reaction from a crowd; we all take what we take from a play and the experienced truth lies across a spectrum. In terms of content, however, Barker is not shy of harrowing circumstances and exacting images: he takes advantage of his character's trust in the world, describes the smell of battlefields, makes old flesh wounds into important character traits, he even pours a wave of horse blood across a huddled group of desperate workers.

Known for some of the longest play titles in history, Peter Weiss's style and subjects of interest are pretty hard to miss at face value: The Persecution and Assassination of John-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade is one example, or how about Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and the Events Leading up to it as Illustration of the Necessity for Armed Resistance against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution as another example? His plays are clearly at once specific and sweeping in subject. Often inspired by the power abuses of military formality, Weiss uses metatheatrical conventions to push the audience emotionally in and out of his stories. His writing is capable of making an audience feel simultaneously triumphant and disgusted by the curtainfall, forcing, in turn, a deeper consideration of what we think about ourselves.

Sarah Kane only wrote six plays before her death in 1999, moving from realistic stories of intense violence to more poetic and experimental pieces nearer the end of her career. She is a pioneer of the British literary movement, 'In-Yer-Face-Theatre,' attacking her audiences with the cruel and obscene. Probably because of the grotesque pushiness of her plays, they were not well received by her own community during her lifetime. She has, however, had pieces played for large audiences in Mainland Europe and very successfully revived in the Americas. Her writing is violent in content and affect, shocking her audiences with the darkest possibilities of human action; Kane wrote about sex, pain, torture, death, racism, and rape. She was a brilliant wordsmith, building poetry with the slightest necessity of language, but certainly not a playwright for the more sensitive theatergoers.

Read more:http://listverse.com/2013/05/13/10-terrifying-playwrights-of-the-20th-century/ 10 Terrifying Playwrights Of The 20th Century

2/2 Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)