Philosophy of Drama Course: Ancient Greek Tragedy to Modern Film

Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence.

Join us for this ten-week philosophy of drama course, as we explore the role that dramatic theatre has played in human story. We will cover historical periods including: the Ancient Greek playwrights, particularly Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; the early to late 20th century, discussing Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; and Contemporary film with Terrence Malick as the focus writer/director.

Course themes:

• The relation between the conscious ‘story’ of the play/film and the embedded (unconscious) structures of thought and emotion, which are enacted in the drama.
• The way in which drama arises out of social/political needs and then feeds back into society, to either reinforce or transform those structures.
• How dramatic language and performance interact to make the drama in theatre and film a different aesthetic experience from other artforms such as literature.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• describe what makes ‘drama’ different to other art forms
• discuss the ideas and themes in some of the Ancient Greek plays
• better understand modern theatre and contemporary film
• apply the philosophical ideas presented in the course to other examples of contemporary plays and film.

Content

Introduction to concepts

The course will begin with the question: What is drama, and why it is different to other linguistic arts such as comedy. We will consult a number of theorists on this issue. Philosophers on language, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, will form part of the theoretical analysis of language in the course.

The Greek tragedies

The earliest surviving texts of plays are seven tragedies by Aeschylus dating from the first half of the 5th century BCE. Aeschylus laid the foundation for an aesthetic of drama that was to influence subsequent plays for well over two thousand years. We will discuss extracts from his plays and analyse them. We will also apply various theories to understand the philosophical issues embedded in the plays.

Modernist Realist movement

We will begin the Modern section of the course with the Modernist Realist movement, exemplified by Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian-Danish playwright/director of The Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gable (1891). Ibsen examined the realities that lay behind the facades of society and its moral codes. Our text of choice will be The Wild Duck (1884) considered by some to be Ibsen's finest work.

Modern theatre

Turning to the early 20th century, we will discuss the philosophical and historical conditions which give rise to modern theatre. We will link the ancient to the modern, through the philosopher/director Max Reinhart. In 1910 Reinhart staged Oedipus Rex in the Zirkus Schumann, an amphitheatre, to recapture the union of actors and audience that had existed in classical Greek theatre.

Tennessee Williams

Moving to America, we begin with Tennessee Williams. At age 33, he became famous with the success of his play The Glass Menagerie (1944). He introduced "plastic theatre" which closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences, however much of his most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema.

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.

Contemporary film – Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick's films bring together several themes throughout the course. He also uses ideas from Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger: two other philosophers we will discuss in the course. 

Malick began his career as part of the New Hollywood film-making wave with the films Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), before a lengthy hiatus. He returned to directing after twenty years with The Thin Red Line (1998), for which he was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. His subsequent films include The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011), the latter for which he received another Academy Award nomination for Best Director and the Palme d'Or at the 64th Cannes Film Festival.

Malick's films have explored themes such as transcendence, nature, and conflicts between reason and instinct. They are typically marked by broad philosophical and spiritual overtones, as well as the use of meditative voice-overs from individual characters. The stylistic elements of the director's work have inspired divided opinions among film scholars and audiences; some praised his films for their cinematography and aesthetics, while others found them lacking in plot and character development. His first five films have nonetheless ranked highly in retrospective decade-end and all-time polls.

Intended audience

Anyone with a general interest in the course themes.

Prerequisites

None

Delivery style

Lecture/seminar

Materials

Course notes are distributed electronically

Further reading

List of ancient Greek playwrights:

• Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC):
  • The Oresteia (458 BC, a trilogy comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.)
  • Prometheus Bound (authorship and date of performance is still in dispute)
• Sophocles (c. 495-406 BC):
  • Theban plays, or Oedipus cycle:
    • Antigone (c. 442 BC)
    • Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC)
    • Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC, posthumous)
• Euripides (c. 480–406 BC):
  • Medea (431 BC)
  • Electra (c. 420 BC)
  • Sisyphos (415 BC)
  • The Bacchae (405 BC, posthumous)

Reference list

Abbotson, Susan C. W. (2007) Critical Companion to Arthur Miller, Greenwood.

Bosher, Kathryn G., (2021) Greek Theatre in Ancient Greece, Cambridge University Press.

Buckham, Philip Wentworth, (1827) Theatre of the Greeks, London.

Gross, Robert F., ed., (2022) Tennessee Williams: A Casebook, Routledge. Print. 

Jacobus, Lee, (2009) The Bedford Introduction to Drama. Bedford: Boston. Print.

Maher, Paul, Jr, (2014), One Big Soul: An Oral History of Terrence Malick, Upstart Crow Publisher.

Meyer, Michael, Ibsen, History Press Ltd., Stroud, reprinted 2004.

Moi, Toril, (2006) Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy, Oxford and New York, Oxford UP.

Shaw, George Bernard, (1891) The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, The classic introduction, setting the playwright in his time and place_.

Stern, Tom, (2021) The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting.

Tucker, Thomas Deane; Kendall, Stuart, (2011) Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, Continuum.