Top 10 Most Bizarre and Spooky Plays of the 20th Century

Twentieth Century plays were kind of bonkers. Between Expressionism, Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, and Absurdism these plays covered all the chaotic bases. Theatre has the ability to manifest the beautifully tragic and transcend the script itself. These playwrights created strange atmosphere and defied traditional theatrical conventions.

These works of art rise above their nonsensical plots and provide audiences with truly unique experiences. Looking back on this last century it would seem like theatre artists were striving to write the most bizarre and tragic story. Rooted deeply within their historical context and functioning as an ugly mirror image of society, these ten twentieth-century plays are truly bizarre and dismally tragic. These are your strangest dreams manifested right onto the stage.

Lulu: A Monster’s Tragedy or Earth Spirit/Pandora’s Box (Frank Wedekind)

Lulu: A Monster’s Tragedy is a two-part play written by German playwright Frank Wedekind. The first section was written in the 1890s, but the plays weren’t performed until the first decade of the 20th century. The first play is called Earth Spirit (Erdgeist) and introduces the audience to the character Lulu, a beautiful woman who marries several men throughout the course play. Each man dies a tragic death, making her a sort of a Pandora’s Box, the name of the second installment (Die Bücshe Der Pandora). While Lulu is using her sexuality for her benefit, she is not the driving force behind the men’s destruction; it's their own sexuality. They become obsessed with Lulu in every possible way.

The play is an expressionist masterpiece filled with love triangles, murder, and sex. What makes it so bizarre is the nature of Lulu as a character. She represents everything uncivil in the world and serves as a symbol of the dangers of the female sex. After everything she endures in the play she ends up being killed by Jack the Ripper out of nowhere in the very last scene. He stabs her on stage and rips out her vulva after raping her. No one in the play ever fully understood Lulu in her way of living. She was used for her body, her spirit, and her experience. Her presence, ability, and sexual power call into question many of the social norms of the time. For a play performed at the very start of the 20th century, it was quite the radical piece of theatre featuring sex, murder, a lesbian relationship, and a “monstrous” female protagonist.

From Morning to Midnight (Georg Kaiser)

Georg Kaiser created a morality play in seven bizarre and chaotic scenes. The play is filled with dark themes and poetic language and directly comments on German society. It premiered in Munich under the artistic direction of Otto Falckenberg in April of 1917. The play was heavily censored which caused quite the delay in its release. Diving into the dark and morbid subject matter of Kaiser’s play, one can gain a better understanding of life during that time in Germany. The protagonist, the Cashier, was a model for all German citizens. He was stuck in the rut of his boring life, unable to escape the cogs of the machine. One day while at work, a beautiful woman touches his hand and his life soon unravels. He starts a quest to leave is old life behind, including his wife and children, to pursue a relationship with this woman. He steals a large sum of money from his bank and after being rejected by the lady he quickly seeks to find another thrill.

The Cashier’s journey to find significance in his life and a renewal of his spirit was Kaiser’s way of commentating on the social structure of the times and by centering his story around this everyday fellow searching for a way out of a meaningless existence, he was able to incorporate dark and morbid obstacles to further his point. His one-day journey involves stealing, gambling, abandonment, a brothel, and death. Each scene creates a distinguishable environment from the next and presents a machine-like atmosphere.

Masses and Men (Ernst Toller)

 This play goes back and forth between abstracts of reality and dream sequences. It follows a Woman as she struggles with fighting for revolution without bloodshed. Nameless One insists that strikes may end a war but they will not evoke change within a system that enslaves its workers. The Woman, whose name is actually Sonia, rejects the notion that violence is the only answer. Nameless One and Sonia have a heated debate as the Nameless One demands a fight with the blood of martyrs. Sonia, whose husband is a member of the bourgeois, is condemned to death.

The play has seven scenes. The first, third, fifth, and seventh scenes are abstracts of reality. These scenes include the Woman working on a solution for the mistreatment of herself and the other workers. The second, fourth, and sixth scenes are called ‘Dream pictures” and take place in a dream-like setting whereas the Woman and various other characters play different roles than in their abstract reality scenes. The story is about the machine-like systematic oppression on working class Europe.

Hamletmachine (Heiner Müller)

Heiner Müller wrote Hamletmachine in 1977. The play is a postmodern surrealist tragedy that borrows from Expressionism, Theater of Cruelty and the Absurd. It was meant to shed light onto the events happening in East and West Germany and the horrors the people were seeing and living on a daily basis. What makes Hamletmachine rise from a simple tragedy to a mixture of Surrealism, Expressionism, Cruelty, and the Absurd is the execution of the violent and gruesome images it projects. Müller goes into graphic detail when describing the situations surrounding the characters. The script is only seven pages long. It consists of five scenes, each one distinctly different, but connected in themes.

It’s a retelling of the classical Shakespeare play Hamlet and features several of the main characters, but under much different circumstances. The story is fragmented, crazy and nonsensical. The conflict between the East and the West and the influence of communism plays a large part within the context, which would allow the audience to relate to the fears of the characters. Both Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s speeches are dark, disturbing and eerie. One scene is simply an Ophelia monologue while another has anti-capitalist speeches from not Hamlet but Hamlet- Actor, a version of Hamlet on a television screen.

Jet of Blood (Antonin Artaud)

Jet of Blood was written by one the most influential playwrights of all time. Known for his nonsensical and deeply troubling scripts, Artaud was a master of making the audience uncomfortable. He founded a theatrical movement known as “Theatre of Cruelty.” This type of theatre aimed to make the audience suffer.

Jet of Blood, also known as Spurt of Blood, is a short script written in 1925. It premiered in France and represents a battle between society and emotion. The characters are generalized versions of archetypes and include The Young Man, A Knight, A Priest, A Nurse and A Shoemaker. The plot comes second to the feelings it arises in the audience. Feelings of despair and chaos attack the senses through the sights and sounds of the production.

The Sandbox (Edward Albee)

This is another short one. The performance is usually only 15 minutes long. This small play acts as a precursor for another one-act play Albee wrote later called The American Dream where three of the characters from The Sandbox find new life. The play opens with a woman flailing in a sandbox. Mommy and Daddy enter dragging Grandma to the sandbox to bury her. Grandma is still alive, but behaving like a child. A Young Man sits next to the couple and strikes up a conversation with Grandma.

Meanwhile, Mommy and Daddy complain about the burden of taking care of Grandma. The play serves as a brutal commentary on the failing American family and the societal expectations for middle-class America. Through satire and bizarre circumstances, Albee writes a scathing commentary on the American family and the absurdity of the way people treat dying family members. Centered on the lack of empathy, the play uses comedy and absurdism to reflect the errors of the truths of life in America. The play premiered in 1960.

The Ghost Sonata (August Strindberg)

August Steinberg wrote some of the most well-known plays of the 19th century. But one of his most bizarre plays debuted in 1908 in Stockholm, Sweden. The play is a three scene, one-act story. Each scene takes the audience deeper into a mysterious building that holds nightmarish circumstances for its inhabitants. Filled with vampires and ghosts, the plot moves like a dream jumping from glimpses of the past and future.

The play represents an altered reality, a tortured imagination. The first scene takes place outside the building, where the main character, The Student, watches the figures of the building move in the windows. The second scene takes him inside the house where he attempts to interact with the strange inhabitants. In the final scene, he finds himself deeper inside the house in a room filled with flowers where he finally meets The Girl, whom he’s been longing to spend time with since he spotted her in the window.

The story is about the conflict between reality and illusion. The plot is an intricate web of character development and random circumstance. What matters most is discovering the hidden truths behind the people The Student meets. The building is beautiful, but the life inside of it is destruction. The human condition is actually pitiful and painful. That’s what the play is really about.

The Blind (Maurice Maeterlinck)

The Blind is about… BLIND people… In this story, 13 blind people (6 men, 6 women, and a child) are led through the woods, but at the start of the play, they lose their guide. The Priest, who was leading them outside of the asylum, is found dead at the end of the play after the group spends the entire time looking for him and wondering what was happening around them as leaves and snowfall. Near the end of the play a dog shows up and guides one of the men to the dead body of the priest who had been there with them the entire time.

The setting is an early forest described as “An ancient Norland forest with an eternal look under a sky of deep stars.” Maeterlinck was frustrated with the theatrical performances he was seeing. He did not feel actors could properly express reality because there was an emphasis on words not action and the significance of the soul. Soul-to-soul communication comes through silence and the still moments. Invisible forces within the pieces move the universe within the play forward. The dialogue that can seem the most useless is in fact the most important. There can also be too much dialogue that only lessens the symbolic meaning of the text. Subtext, atmosphere, and convention reign supreme for this iconic symbolist masterpiece.

The Gas Heart (Tristan Tzara)

Perhaps the best-known example of Dada, this short play demonstrates the repositioning of avant-garde plays that were happening within the historical and cultural context of World War 1 Europe. The script involves various parts of the human interacting with each other through repetitious phrases and nonsensical dialogue. The characters include Eye, Nose, Mouth, Elbow, and Neck. It is an anti-art piece that was meant to confuse even the most intellectual theatre goers.

Tzara was the leader of the Dada movement, an art movement that arrived during World War I when young artists were trying to come to grips with the destruction the War had on the human spirit. The Dadaist rejected any explanation for their art and created pieces that didn’t take themselves too seriously. It’s a fun play, but also a nihilistic one. Dada is meant to question, intrigue, and confuse. The Gas Heart follows a ridiculous conversation with made up words and inanimate objects. To ask the audience to take it seriously is impossible. That is not the plays purpose. The purpose is to reflect the chaos of the world back into the art that was created out of it.

Wedding on the Eiffel Tower (Jean Cocteau)

This is another post World war 1 play. Written by Frenchmen Jean Cocteau this anti-fascist play centers itself on the anti-theatricality of mechanization. Most of Cocteau’s work follows the tumultuous relationship between technology and theatricality. Wedding on the Eiffel Tower takes place around a traditional bourgeois ritual, a wedding. But the circumstance and conventions of the play take the audience to unexpected places.

The play is only 15 pages or so, but it paints a surrealist picture through bizarre conventions. The story consists of two photographers reciting everyone’s dialogue, leaving the others to simply mime the actions. As the camera clicks to take a picture, instead a mirage of odd entities is produced from a cyclist to a lion. Someone gets eaten by a lion and a child murders members of the wedding party. In the end, everyone disappears back into the camera. Like a surreal dream, the play demonstrates all of the techniques used in the Surrealist movement of theatre. And all within the historical context of a war-torn France.