Write a critical essay on the growth
and development of Shaw’s Theatre of Ideas.
Answer: The drama of ideas or the theatre of ideas is that kind of drama that provokes the intellectuals of the audience, rather their emotions. Indeed any kind of drama carries a certain idea to its audience, but what distinguishes the drama of ideas is that the actions or incidents inside the play is not of primal importance, what counts is the discussion and the ideas the dramatist wants to deliver for his audience. Ibsen and then Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker were the chief exponents of this realistic drama of ideas. Since it is all about ideas, then we must know what ideas influenced the playwrights of the modern age, they "… adopted from Charles Darwin and other scientists and philosophers a worldview that insisted on the shaping power of the environment, inheritance, and other material circumstances." ( Puchner)
In his book The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocation in Theatre and Philosophy, Puchner mentioned Bentley's definition of the drama of ideas in his 1946 study, The Playwright as Thinker, noting how ideas became an essential part of drama " In a drama of ideas… the ideas are questioned, and it is by the questioning, and could only be by the questioning, that the idea becomes dramatic, for seldom or never is there drama without conflict.”
