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A Doll's House By Henrik Ibsen

Decent Essays

Realism is a theatrical movement during the 19th century, illustrating a story without “artificial” and supernatural elements, in other words, a realism play would show things that happen in our everyday life, much like naturalism. We can distinguish realism from other theatrical movements by the facts that its characters are believable to be the everyday type, the costumes are authentic to the time period being illustrated, the setting is based in only one location that is as close to our everyday life as possible, and because the story happens within 24 hours and only has one story line.

There are many similarities between realism and naturalism. Some of those similarities are that both genres illustrate events that could happen in real …show more content…

Although it was not until the mid 1900 that modern realism really emerged. By the 1950s, the “box set” with three walls was introduced and popularized. The box set is a way to stage something so that it creates the illusion of an interior room on the stage.

An important name during the modern realism movement is Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen is now considered the founder of modern realism. Ibsen owes his title to his most famous play “A Doll’s House” featuring the “the taboo and deep seeded unrest in women of the time” (1). In other words, Ibsen illustrated the everyday lives of his middle-class audience.
In doing so, Ibsen was soon followed by the Russians Chekhov and Gorky. Both writers were founders of the socialist realism, which is a style with the purpose of spreading the goals of socialism and communism. Chekhov and Gorky wrote about the boredom of the uneventful lives of the middle-class, and later on they would portray the poorest classes as a suffering and working class. Gorky wrote “The Lower Depths”, which illustrated the working class and their living conditions. On the other hand, Chekhov wrote “Three Sisters” or even “The Lady With the Dog”, which portrayed the life of the middle-class. All of those plays are now considered masterpieces of the socialist realism

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