4.1 Climax and Anticlimax
The biggest challenge for the playwright is to find a crisis with an ending which is acceptable to his artistic conscience and the dramatic effect he requires. It is more challenging to write a good last act as a good first one. Likewise it is easier to dramatize the moment of the birth of a crisis than to come to a definite and intensely dramatic conclusion for it. Lack of a good ending leaves the audience unsatisfied and disappointed. The dramatist’s range of choice is unlimited, and
the difficulty of wise choice has become infinitely greater, since the traditional fixed moulds or pre-ordained outcomes of tragedies and comedies have been broken. Comedies now tend much more to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come a “boring” way to escape from life or its troubles. The nearer the story is to reality, the greater the challenge becomes.
The higher the form of drama, the more truth and the dramatic effects may seem to clash. In melodrama, the curtain falls when the hero is rescued and the handcuffs are transferred to the villain’s wrists. In an adventure play, farcical or romantic, the play is done when the adventure is over. In the higher order plays, the challenge is often inherent in the theme to be brought to a natural ending, to get the crisis to resolve decisively with dramatic crispness and avoiding mechanically forced endings.
The relaxed approach to Aristotle’s form of “beginning, middle and end” may suggest a new intimate relation to life and sincerity of artistic experience. It is a natural development and doesn’t imply a decline in craftsmanship. Themes should be judged in accordance with their inherent quality, and authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the themes that do call for a definite solution from the themes which do not. Endings should not be indecisive, careless, huddled up or makeshift. An “unemphatic” ending can be in the form of a deliberate anti-climax following a much elevated tension line in the penultimate act and it can be that the consequences of a great emotional or spiritual crisis cannot always be worked out within a short time of it’s culmination.
A good example of an unemphatic ending is the last act of Arthur
Pinero’s “Letty”. This justified anticlimax is not an artistic blemish or mistake. The play could have ended with Letty’s awakening from her dream, and her flight from Letchmere’s rooms. There is no indecisiveness here. But the author wanted to draw a character, and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty’s character that we should know what she made of her life.
An act of anticlimax should be treated as unpretentiously and with the least emphasis as possible. To make major scene changes is to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.
Some modern dramatists have gone to the other extreme in moving away from the conventional patterns, to that extreme of always dropping their curtain when the audience least expects it, and may experience it as very disconcerting. This is not a practice to be commended and the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by surprise. The audience should feel the moment to be rightly chosen too. To let a play, or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is really over, is very dangerous. A remarkable play, “The Madras House”, was ruined on its first night by a too long final anticlimax, and disinterest in the final dialogue and the choice of leading characters for the last scene.