Famous Plays and Dramatists: Exam Notes and Lists

A play is written to be performed, not merely read, and for that reason drama has its own line of great names, separate from the novelists and poets who fill most of the books and authors syllabus. Examiners like this section because the questions can be set as a clean pair: a title on one side, an author on the other. The safest way to prepare it is to learn the pairs in groups, by language and by period, so that a half-remembered name can still be placed. Three groups cover almost every question asked: the Sanskrit classics, the European and American theatre, and the modern Indian dramatists writing in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada and English.

Sanskrit drama and its theory

Indian drama rests on the Natyashastra, a treatise on dramaturgy ascribed to Bharata, which sets out the theory of rasa, the aesthetic moods a performance should create, and is the oldest work of its kind in India. The plays themselves belong to the classical age.

Kalidasa is often called the Shakespeare of India, a comparison students should know because it is asked directly. Remember too that he wrote poetry as well: Meghaduta, Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava are poems, not plays, and questions mix the two lists on purpose.

Greek and European theatre

Western drama begins with the Greeks. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were the three great writers of tragedy, and Sophocles gave the world Oedipus Rex and Antigone, while Euripides wrote Medea; Aristophanes is the name to remember for Greek comedy. In England, Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus and Ben Jonson wrote Volpone, but William Shakespeare towers over them with the tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, the comedies A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, and the late romance The Tempest; his company performed at the Globe Theatre in London. In France, Moliere wrote Tartuffe and The Misanthrope.

Modern world drama

The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen is called the father of modern drama for turning the stage towards ordinary domestic life and social criticism in A Doll's House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. Anton Chekhov of Russia wrote The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull. George Bernard Shaw, an Irish writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, wrote Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, Man and Superman and Saint Joan; the musical adaptation of Pygmalion is the reason that play is the best known of them. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is the classic comedy of manners. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is the defining work of the Theatre of the Absurd, and Bertolt Brecht of Germany, who wrote Mother Courage and Her Children and The Threepenny Opera, gave drama the idea of epic theatre. From America come Arthur Miller, with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and Tennessee Williams, with A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie.

Indian dramatists in modern languages

Modern Indian theatre starts with Bharatendu Harishchandra, called the father of modern Hindi literature, whose Andher Nagari and Bharat Durdasha used the stage for social and political comment. Rabindranath Tagore wrote plays as well as poetry, among them Chitrangada, Chandalika, Raktakarabi, which is Red Oleanders in English, and Dak Ghar, the Post Office. Jaishankar Prasad drew on history for Skandagupta, Chandragupta and Dhruvaswamini. Mohan Rakesh brought Hindi drama into the modern idiom with Ashadh ka Ek Din, Aadhe Adhure and Lahron ke Rajhans, and Dharamvir Bharati wrote the verse play Andha Yug on the aftermath of the Mahabharata war. In Marathi, Vijay Tendulkar wrote Ghashiram Kotwal, Sakharam Binder and Shantata Court Chalu Aahe. In Kannada, Girish Karnad wrote Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Nagamandala and Yayati, and he received the Jnanpith Award. In Bengali, Badal Sircar wrote Evam Indrajit and founded the movement called Third Theatre, which took plays out of auditoriums into open spaces. Habib Tanvir's Charandas Chor drew on the folk theatre of Chhattisgarh, and Mahesh Dattani, writing in English, is known for Final Solutions and Tara. The National School of Drama in New Delhi, under the Ministry of Culture, is the country's chief training institution for theatre, and the Sangeet Natak Akademi is the national academy for music, dance and drama.