ABSTRACT
In spite of the incompatibility of verse and contemporary dramatic situations, themes and characters, and the fact that verse was no longer at the centre of communication, poets naturally sought to restore their art to its central position in the theatre regardless of prose or producers. The revolt against realism in the theatre was two-fold and the literary attack, in such ways as verse drama, was one, less flamboyant than the anti-literary revolt of Wagner, Cocteau or Artaud. Hostility to the realistic play can be seen in Wagner’s combination of music and poetry (though the poetry was strictly subordinated to the music) while Cocteau’s brilliant all-round theatre refused to see drama as a literary form but as performance (though it is typical of Cocteau’s perversity that when tragedy was dead he decided to revive it and wrote Renaud et Armide in 1943 in classical alexandrines); in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty the emphasis was on spectacle: theatricalities of all kinds, costumes, music, colour, lights, masks, effigies – in short everything but words though these will not be suppressed but merely given the importance they have in dreams (see The Theatre and Its Double, 1938).
