Thoughts on Theatre Roles

A Flower on the Stage

Before the age of film people had the theatre, and of course they still do today. At this point my first brief glance at some classical plays (sorry, no Chaucer, no Shakespeare). Classical plays are extremely men dominated, which is of course caused by the political and social circumstances of those days, and maybe can also be the result of women not being allowed to act on stage. Their parts were played by actors. Women were extremely disadvantaged in those days. Nonetheless there are of course a number of plays with a heroine or more than one. Let’s look at two German and one Russian play. (Under the links given you can find the plays in German, should you want to brush up on that).

Friedrich Schiller: Die Jungfrau von Orleans / The Maid of Orleans (premiered 1801)
Heinrich von Kleist: Das Käthchen von Heilbronn / Käthchen of Heilbronn (premiered 1810)
Anton Tschechow: Drei Schwestern / Three Sisters (premiered 1901)

THE MAID OF ORLEANS. The title role Joan (Joan of Arc , resp. Jeanne d’Arc) first appears in Act I, scene 1. In the cast of characters she is named as number 20. In the play we find 6 female and 20 male characters along with parts such as councilmen, soldiers and folk, servants, bishops, monks etc.

KÄTHCHEN OF HEILBRONN. The title role Käthchen (or Katharina Friedborn, what would probably be her full name) first appears in the 2nd scene of Act 1. She is named 13th in the cast. This play dons a total of 7 female parts and 18 males. Those are the ones with names. In addition to them we have characters like a herold, two coal miners, servants, messagers, pursuers, farm hands, people and “Kunigunde’s old aunts”. Actually, von Kleist (the author) called this drama “a great historical knightly play“, so that of course would also explain the overwhelming male majority.

THREE SISTERS. The title roles – Olga, Mascha and Irina Prozorowa – appear right away in Act 1, Scene 1, and in the cast they directly follow after their brother on position 2 to 4. In this play there are 5 female parts and 9 male parts, in addition to that we find servants and soldiers.

(sorry about the partially mediocre translations. I did not find english versions of all plays yet)

Of course theses statistics don’t tell much about the contents of the plays or the importance of the female characters, but they had and have an impact on German theatres (ok, we have a different theatrical system here of municipal and state theatres, but that is another matter). Anyway, the impact goes as far as that the theatre ensembles  very often comprise of one third actresses and two thirds actors – even though of course these companies not only perform classical plays.

Let’s have a look at another play:

Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner (published 1836, premiered 1895).

LEONCE AND LENA sounds like the story of a couple but rather than it being a love story it is indeed more of a political satire, and actually the play could also have been named Leonce and Valerio, since those two converse longer with one another and also more profoundly.  Leonce is named 2nd on the character list, Lena 3rd, there are 5 parts with names (2 women, 3 men), in addition to that 7 parts (1 woman, 6 men) stated with their professions (a governess, a president, a schoolmaster and so on) and finally servants, councillers, peasants. Leonce appears in 7 scenes, Lena in 6 (Valerio also in 7).

That sounds quite good, doesn’t it? But actually, after a little statistical text analysis look at this diagram, here we find the number of spoken words. Leonce gets 3180, Lena 626, and Valerio 2377.

When we look at Lena’s text in the final scene we find (and actually HERE you can read the whole play in English) this is what she says:

Yes.
Leonce?
I’ve been deceived.
O chance.

And her last exchange with Leonce reads thus:

Leonce: Shall we build a theatre?
(Lena leans against him and shakes her head)

which actually is quite comprehensible. What would she do with a theatre if she, while being one of the protagonists, does not really have a lot to say?

Just recapping on the plot of this – highly enjoyable – play from Lena’s point of view: princess Lena takes flight from her home, accompanied by her governess, because she is to be married off (to Leonce, who incidentally for the same reason flees from his father’s palace). Both meet without knowing of the other’s identity – namely, Prince of Bum and Princess of Piddle – and in the end they get married, incognito so to speak, and finally realize that their respective spouse was the one intended for them by kings and ministers.

In her brief appearances Lena mostly talks to her governess, and those short conversations don’t primarily focus on the prince or men in general. But that is another matter.

If you are wondering now why I have called this text “A Flower on the Stage” I can tell you. Years ago, before my first trip to Japan, I prepared for it by among other things reading a lot, and one old paperback I read was called “Women in Japan” (I think. Actually, I have been looking for this book for some time now but have not found it yet). In this book there was a chapter called “The Flower of the Office”. I think this was about women being underpriviledged in offices since they had to cook tea for everybody all the time and therefore could not work uninterruptedly on important things. Also a lot of them would get married early. I sort of quoted this sad and beautiful image from there.

Actually, of course there is a great number of modern plays with women not being a marginal phenomenon, but that is another matter. Today I just wanted to give a first impression which probably is nothing new to theatre actresses and actors or theatre lovers. But some people may not have heard of this ratio, and therefore I started the theatre topic with this.