Naturalism

Naturalism is a type of drama and theatre that was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to performances that attempt to create an illusion of reality by using a range of dramatic and theatrical skills.

The three primary principles of naturalism are called “faire vrai, faire grand and faire simple”.

Faire vrai: The play should be realistic, and the result of a careful study of human behaviour and psychology.

Faire grand: The characters should be flesh and blood; their motivations and actions should be grounded in their heredity and environment.

Faire simple: The presentation of a naturalistic play, in terms of the setting and performances, should be realistic and not flamboyant or theatrical.

Darwinian understandings pervade naturalistic plays, especially in the determining role of the environment on character, and as motivation for behaviour. Naturalism emphasizes everyday speech forms, plausibility in the writing, (no ghosts, spirits or gods intervening in the human action).

A choice of subjects that is contemporary and reasonable. (No exotic, otherworldly locales, fantastic locales, nor historical or mythic time-periods).

Influences:

Naturalistic writers were influenced by the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin. They believed that a person’s heredity and social environment determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works are opposed to romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic or idealistic treatment. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. As a result, Naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for being too blunt.

Our performance:

For our performance we were put into a group of 6 and created our own piece of drama around Naturalism. As a group we decided that we wanted to focus around a dark theme like most Naturalism plays are based around. We agreed that we wanted to set ours around death and have the setting at the funeral of someone who has died. The idea for our piece came from the idea of when someone dies everyone becomes there best friend. We explored this idea and each created a character for this by planning out how they each knew her and could make it seem like they were friends, for example my character was the boss of the person who died, who makes it sounds like he is a good boss who tried to push the person who died to tried harder with work but in reality was giving the person way too much work and harassed this person in the work place. Our piece was based around this theme as we created characters like an old school bully and a family member who was never there for them. We had one good character which was the husband of the dead woman. We had all these characters talk about how they cared for the dead woman more than the rest until we had the husband shout at them all which reveals to the audience what all of our characters really are, which were bad people who only cared about the woman when it was too late.