J. L. Styan – författare

Much of twentieth-century drama defies the traditional pigeon-holes of tragedy and comedy: the heroes are not straightforwardly heroic; the subject-matter seems at some times grimly realistic and at others nearer to pure fantasy. Professor Styan explains and illuminates the nature of this dark, paradoxical comedy. He reminds us, first, that this is not a purely modern phenomenon: many great plays of the past have similarly defied classification and have called for an equally vacillating response from their audience. But nonetheless this dramatic genre has had its clearest expression in the last sixty years: we are shown in detail how its techniques have developed from Ibsen and Chekhov to Pirandello, Brecht and contemporary playwrights such as Ionesco, Beckett, Tennessee Williams and Pinter. The author brings us to realize that the playwright, by creating complex tensions in the action of the play between the actor and the audience and within the individual spectator, is able to explore new areas of human feeling and response. In this second edition of The Dark Comedy Professor Styan has brought the book up to date in relation to recent plays and theatrical developments. He has modified some earlier judgements and added detailed analyses of scenes from Brecht's Mother Courage and from Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Anyone who takes an intelligent interest in theatre-going will find profit and stimulus in this book. It covers a wide range of subject-matter; but its underlying theme is clear, forceful and unified.

Büchner is the forerunner of expression, followed by Wedekind and Strindberg. The style is then traced from Kaiser and Toller to O'Neill, Wilder and the later O'Casey. Important producers are Reinhardt and Meyerhold. Epic theatre is studied from Piscator and Brecht to Dürrenmatt and Weiss, Arden and Bond, and is seen as flourishing in offshoots of documentary theatre. This book was first published in 1981.

How do our ways of perceiving and producing Shakespeare differ from those of the nineteenth century, and how interrelated has the work of scholars and directors become over this century? Professor Styan's purpose in this book is to discuss the 'revolution' in Shakespeare studies implied by these questions.

Restoration comedy disappeared from the stage for nearly 200 years until it was revived early this century. Without the benefit of a performance tradition has suffered from an inappropriate literary and moralistic criticism which continues to this day. Yet this brilliant court and coterie comedy of sexual and social behaviour was an extraordinary success in its own time, and enjoys a unique place in theatrical history as an example of the interplay possible between the stage and the audience. In this book John Styan persuades us that only through a performance approach to the great plays of Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Shadwell, Vanbrugh, Congreve and Farquhar can we recover a sense of their value. Restoration Comedy in Performance is liberally illustrated with contemporary drawings and modern photographs, and it draws extensively upon documentary and visual evidence of the seventeenth century in order to suggest the importance of the costume and customs, manners and behaviour of the age to an understanding of the sort of theatre and drama it produced. Professor Styan also discusses the problems encountered in the early attempts to revive the comedies in the twentieth century, and pauses frequently in order to offer a descriptive account of a moment of staging or to recreate a scene or a sequence of comic repartee or action. The book aims to bring back to life, therefore, something of a lost art form, not as a piece of conventional stage or production history, but as a true attempt to recognize the virtues of Restoration comedy as a performing art.

For a full understanding of any text, careful consideration must be given to its life in performance. In this rewarding study of four of Chekhov's major plays - Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters - J. L. Styan demonstrates the development of Chekhov's skills as a dramatist and discusses stage action, portrayal of character, differing twentieth-century productions and the audience reactions they evoked.

This 1981 volume begins with the naturalistic revolt in France against traditional styles of theatre. As realism becomes a European movement the account moves from Paris to the Meiningen company and Ibsen's work as producer and play-wright in Oslo, Chekhov's in Moscow, Shaw's in London, Synge's in Dublin. Among the producers are Antoine, Brahm, Grein, Granville-Baker, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky. The early days of the Irish Dramatic Movement and the chief realistic directors and critics in the USA after Belasco are considered; the tradition is shown to persist in the work of Williams and Miller in the USA and Osborne and Bond in England.

This book was first published in 1981. The theories of Wagner and Nietzsche provide the basic principles for this volume, disseminated by the work of Appia and Craig, and affecting the later plays of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Lugné-Poe's Théatre de Le'Oeuvre. Jarry is seen as the precursor of surrealism; later symbolist elements are found in the plays of Claudel, Giraudoux, Yeats, Eliot, Lorca and Pirandello. Artaud's theatre of cruelty is related to the work of Peter Brook. The theatre of the absurd is illustrated in Sartre, Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco. Recent avant-garde theatre in America and Britain also reveals elements of symbolism.