In theatre, naturalism and realism refer specifically to artistic movements that represent real life on stage, using believable characters, narrative action and plot. Some theorists usefully suggest that naturalism pays more attention than realism to social environment as an influence on character, and that realism tends to proffer a more critical and less imitative or illusionistic aesthetic, but it is difficult to achieve consensus on definition.
Realism and naturalism are both founded on the premise that art should hold up a mirror to nature, using a mimetic mode of representation, drawing in part on Aristotle’s Poetics. These genres originally challenged the aesthetic status quo. Emile Zola was one of the key early proponents of naturalism, although whilst his play Thérèse Raquin (1873), has naturalist elements, it leans frequently towards melodrama, one of the forms naturalism was questioning. Naturalism in the theatre took hold more firmly in the late 1880s and 1890s and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system for actors and his detailed directorial vision are almost considered templates for the creation of naturalist theatre, with their agenda to expose on stage the minutiae of social, domestic and familial life.
Naturalism and realism heralded modern drama and all the artistic, social, cultural and scientific innovations that followed in the twentieth century. As genres they were informed by scientific advances, and growing interest in classification. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), inspired naturalism’s constructions of socially determined beings located in and reacting to specific environments. Naturalism’s move to a mainstream positioning has fuelled many counteractive revolts and experiments, from Dada through Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre to performance art. It has been argued that representation through naturalist aesthetics reinforces rather than challenges the status quo, and is therefore considered politically, artistically and ideologically conservative. However, the realist work of playwrights with explicit or implicit political or social messages contests such a view and naturalism and realism still remain the dominant theatre forms in the West today. From the RCTP
Image: Photograph © Kristine Slipson