The problem play is a form of drama that emerged during the 19th century as part of the wider movement of realism in the arts, especially following the innovations of Henrik Ibsen . It deals with contentious social issues through debates between the characters on stage, who typically represent conflicting points of view within a realistic social context. Critic Chris Baldick writes that the genre emerged "from the ferment of the 1890s... for the most part inspired by the example of Ibsen's realistic stage representations of serious familial and social conflicts." He summarises it as follows:
29-449: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is a problem play by Arthur Wing Pinero . It utilises the "Woman with a past" plot, popular in nineteenth century melodrama. The play was first produced in 1893 by the actor-manager George Alexander and despite causing some shock to his audiences by its scandalous subject it was a box-office success, and was revived in London and New York in many productions during
58-444: A bond between Tanqueray's young and impeccably proper daughter Ellean and her young unhappy stepmother. This is compromised when Mrs Tanqueray learns the identity of her stepdaughter's fiancé; he is the man who ruined her, years ago. She reveals her knowledge to her husband, who prevents the marriage and alienates his daughter. This spreads and husband and wife, father and daughter, step-parent and child are all angered and alienated. When
87-400: A late night dinner between the widower Mr Tanqueray and some of his longtime professional friends. All are upper class members of British society, and the friends are disturbed when they learn of the forthcoming second marriage of Tanqueray to a Mrs Paula Jarman, a woman with a "bad reputation". As the play progresses we see the misery of the mismatched couple and their shared efforts to foster
116-520: A revival of one of her great roles, Victorien Sardou's La Tosca . Other productions included a revival of Edmond Rostand 's La Samaritaine and the premiere of his L'Aiglon in which she played Napoleon's son (the Duke of Reichstadt ). Another well known breeches part was the title role of Marcel Schwob 's adaptation of Hamlet . After her death in 1923 the theatre continued under her son Maurice for several years, until his death in 1928. The theatre kept
145-620: A vivid but responsibly accurate presentation. The critic F. S. Boas adapted the term to characterise certain plays by William Shakespeare that he considered to have characteristics similar to Ibsen's 19th-century problem plays. As a result, the term is also used more broadly and retrospectively to describe any tragicomic dramas that do not fit easily into the classical generic distinction between comedy and tragedy . While plays in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, mystery plays, and Elizabethan plays are clearly classified as tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays , there are some plays that exhibit
174-432: Is not, after all, the redemption of a betrayed maiden's tarnished honour, but the readiness of her respectable elders to determine a young woman's future for her without regard to her rights—including here her right to erotic holiday enjoyment." In America the problem play was associated with the emergence of debates over civil rights issues. Racial issues were tackled in plays such as Angelina Weld Grimké 's, Rachel . It
203-814: The West End with Eileen Herlie in the title role in 1950, and at the National Theatre in 1981, starring Felicity Kendal . The play was adapted for the cinema in 1916, with Alexander in his original role. A later film version was released in 1952, with Pamela Brown as Paula and Hugh Sinclair as Tanqueray. The BBC has broadcast several radio adaptations of the play, starring Margaret Rawlings and Nicholas Hannen (1940), Coral Browne , Malcolm Keen and Jack Buchanan (1944), Joyce Redman and André Morell (1951), Gladys Cooper and André Morell (1954), Margaret Robertson and Tony Britton (1967) and Michelle Newell and Gary Bond (1992). A BBC television adaptation
232-530: The 19th century by Baron Haussmann at Place du Châtelet , Paris , the other being the Théâtre du Châtelet . It is located at 2, place du Châtelet in the 4th arrondissement . Included among its many previous names are Théâtre Lyrique , Théâtre des Nations , and Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt . The theatre, which until the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 was officially known as the Théâtre Lyrique Impérial,
261-413: The 20th century. The English dramatist Arthur Wing Pinero had won fame as a writer of farces and other comedies, including The Magistrate (1885), Dandy Dick (1887) and The Cabinet Minister (1890). Wishing to write about serious subjects, he wrote The Profligate (1889), in which past misdeeds come to haunt a seemingly respectable man. Pinero intended the central character to kill himself at
290-576: The Place du Châtelet, it was under the direction of Léon Carvalho and gave the premieres of Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles (1863), Berlioz's Les Troyens à Carthage (1863), Gounod's Mireille (1864), Bizet's La jolie fille de Perth (1867), and Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (1867). Carvalho also presented the first performance of Verdi's revised and expanded version of Macbeth (in French) in 1865. Jules Pasdeloup took over as director in 1868 and gave
319-805: The St James's, 1901 at the Royalty Theatre , 1903 at the New Theatre , 1913 at the St James's and 1922 at the Playhouse Theatre . Eleonora Duse appeared in an Italian adaptation in 1905, and the play was given in English in Paris in 1907 at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt . The Internet Broadway Database records New York revivals in 1900, 1902, 1907, 1908, 1913 and 1924. More recently, the play has been revived in
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#1732869601804348-726: The Théâtre Lyrique-Dramatique, but was soon renamed to Théâtre Historique, which it retained until 1879, when it became Théâtre des Nations. Victor Maurel produced a season of Italian opera at the Théâtre des Nations in 1884. It included on 1 February 1884 the first Paris performance of Massenet's Hérodiade , in the Italian version entitled Erodiade . The cast included Fidès Devriès as Salomé, Guglielmina Tremelli as Hérodiade, Jean de Reszke as Jean, Maurel as Hérode, Édouard de Reszke as Phanuel, and Giuseppe Villani as Vitellius. In
377-454: The characteristics of problem plays, such as Euripides' Alcestis . Boas used the term to refer to a group of Shakespeare's plays which seem to contain both comic and tragic elements: Measure for Measure , All's Well That Ends Well , and Troilus and Cressida . He wrote that "throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for
406-588: The climax of the play, but the actor-manager John Hare persuaded him to tone down the ending to avoid alienating his respectable society audience. When his next such drama – The Second Mrs Tanqueray – came to be produced, Pinero remained firm: the play would, and did, end in tragedy. While he was planning it, several plays of Henrik Ibsen were presented in London for the first time, regarded by much of polite society as avant garde , blunt and shocking. Seeing Ghosts led Pinero to reconsider his approach to playwriting, which now seemed old-fashioned by comparison. He
435-447: The company's sojourn on the Place du Châtelet, it presented several operas by Massenet, including the premieres of Esclarmonde (1889) and Sapho (1897), as well as the first Paris performances of Werther (6 January 1893) and La Navarraise (3 October 1895). In 1899 the theatre was renamed Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt after the renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt , who produced there from 1899 for nearly two decades. She opened with
464-482: The daughter learns the reasons behind her disappointment she is struck with pity and makes a speech about trying again with her stepmother, only to go to her and find her dead, evidently by suicide. Madge Kendal and her husband W. H. Kendal took the play on tour in Britain, and then to Broadway where self-appointed guardians of morality condemned it, and audiences flocked to see it. There were London revivals in 1895 at
493-514: The dramatic conventions of the day: "No play written in the problem form was significant beyond the value of the idea that was its underlying motive for existence. No problem play had achieved absolute beauty, or a living contribution to truth." The most important exponent of the problem play, however, was the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen , whose work combined penetrating characterisation with emphasis on topical social issues, usually concentrated on
522-521: The first Paris performances of Wagner's Rienzi in 1869. The Théâtre Lyrique on the Place du Châtelet was nearly completely destroyed by fire on 21 May 1871 during the recapturing of Paris by the forces of the Adolphe Thiers at the end of Paris Commune , and the Théâtre Lyrique opera company went bankrupt not long after. The theatre was rebuilt in 1874 on the same plans and was at first called
551-427: The issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome." Later critics have used the term for other plays, including Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice . While social debates in drama were nothing new, the problem play of the 19th century was distinguished by its intent to confront the spectator with the dilemmas experienced by the characters. The earliest forms of the problem play are to be found in
580-587: The moral dilemmas of a central character. In a series of plays Ibsen addressed a range of problems, most notably the restriction of women's lives in A Doll's House (1879), sexually-transmitted disease in Ghosts (1882) and provincial greed in An Enemy of the People (1882). Ibsen's dramas proved immensely influential, spawning variants of the problem play in works by George Bernard Shaw and other later dramatists. The genre
609-803: The name Sarah Bernhardt until the Occupation of France by the Germans in World War II, when the name was changed to Théâtre de la Cité because of Bernhardt's Jewish ancestry, until 1947, when it reverted to Sarah-Bernhardt. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes presented several premieres at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, including Stravinsky's Apollon musagète (12 June 1928) and the revised Renard (21 May 1929; with choreography by Serge Lifar ), and two ballets by Prokoviev , Le pas d'acier (27 May 1927) and Le Fils prodigue (21 May 1929). The theatre
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#1732869601804638-544: The tenth and final performance of Erodiade on 13 March three De Reszkes could be heard, as Josephine de Reszke sang Salomé. In 1887 the Opéra-Comique moved into the theatre after its previous home, the second Salle Favart, had been destroyed by fire. The name Théâtre Lyrique was restored, and the Opéra-Comique continued to perform in the theatre until 1898, when it returned to the newly built, third Salle Favart. During
667-515: The work of French writers such as Alexandre Dumas, fils , who dealt with the subject of prostitution in The Lady of the Camellias (1852). Other French playwrights followed suit with dramas about a range of social issues, sometimes approaching the subject in a moralistic, sometimes in a sentimental manner. Critic Thomas H. Dickinson, writing in 1927, argued that these early problem plays were hampered by
696-512: Was a tool of the socialist theatre in the 1920s and 30s, and overlapped with forms of documentary theatre in works such as Carl Crede's Paragraph 218 (1930), which concerns the issue of abortion , and which was directed by Erwin Piscator . Th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre de la Ville#Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt The Théâtre de la Ville (meaning the City Theatre) is one of the two theatres built in
725-426: Was broadcast in 1962, starring Elizabeth Sellars and Peter Williams . Problem play Rejecting the frivolity of intricately plotted romantic intrigues in the nineteenth-century French tradition of the ' well-made play ', it favoured instead the form of the 'problem play', which would bring to life some contemporary controversy of public importance—women's rights, unemployment, penal reform, class privilege—in
754-570: Was designed by the architect Gabriel Davioud for Baron Haussmann between 1860 and 1862 for the opera company more commonly known simply as the Théâtre Lyrique . That company's earlier theatre, the Théâtre Historique on the Boulevard du Temple , where it had performed since 1851, was slated for demolition as part of Haussmann's renovation of Paris . During the company's initial period on
783-421: Was especially influential in the early 20th century. In Britain plays such as Houghton's Hindle Wakes (1912), developed the genre to shift the nature of the 'problem'. This "resolutely realistic problem play set in domestic interiors of the mill town Hindle" starts with the 'problem' of an apparently seduced woman, but ends with the woman herself rejected due to her status as a victim of seduction: "the 'problem'
812-530: Was far from uncritical of Ibsen's plays, but recognised that if he was to be a serious dramatist he must treat social problems and human misconduct frankly. The Second Mrs Tanqueray centred on "a woman with a past". Hare thought it too shocking for his audience and declined to present it. George Alexander , the actor-manager running the St James's Theatre , to whom Pinero then offered the play, said, "Sorry, I daren't do it". He had second thoughts, and accepted it. It
841-844: Was presented at the St James's on 27 May 1893. The cast was: The piece was a box-office success and was still playing to full houses when Alexander, who disliked acting in long runs, closed the production in April 1894. The play is referenced in Hilaire Belloc 's poem, Matilda , in Cautionary Tales for Children . It happened that a few Weeks later Her Aunt was off to the Theatre To see that Interesting Play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. She had refused to take her Niece To hear this Entertaining Piece: A Deprivation Just and Wise To Punish her for Telling Lies. The play opens with
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