Naturalism and Realism

During this part of our course we looked at the difference between naturalism and realism, to explore this we looked at the simple action of making a cup of tea. Ben started by asking Seamus to get up and make a cup of tea as he would at home with everything as realistic as possible including the actual waiting time for the kettle to boil. Ben then explained this was naturalism and the difference between naturalism and realism was the fact that naturalism wanted everything to be exactly as it would in actual life, where as realism wanted only the highlights and snapshots of real life while still keeping it as believable and lifelike as possible. To demonstrate this Ben asked me to make a cup of tea and to only show the highlights of this without the realistic waiting times. Ben then described that some people can find naturalism boring which was why realism was born, in fact he gave us a quote that read 'naturalism merely wants to focus on the superficial appearance of real life'. To give other examples Ben also described times he'd seen such things as meals being cooked on stage. This lesson was a real eye opener for me because I've never understood that there was a difference between realism and naturalism and by focusing on that difference I could really understand what I was doing in A Doll's House and even the method Stanislavski created.