Download English and American Drama in the 1950s

English and American Drama in the 1950s
Doctorand Luminiţa CEBOTARI
Universitatea „1 Decembrie 1918” din Alba Iulia
The 20th century literature is characterized by a rebirth of dramatic interest, both in Great
Britain and in the US. In England the influence of Ibsen made itself strongly felt in the problem
plays of G.B. Show and in the realism of John Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham. T.S. Eliot
revived and enriched the reverse drama. John Osborne expressed the rebelious attitude of the
“Angry Young Men” in “Look Back in Anger”. Written as a reaction against the drawing-room
comedies and middle-class drama of Noël Coward and Sir Terence Rattingan, “Look Back in
Anger” was a landmark in the history of the theatre.
Eugene O’Neill, Tennesse Williams and Arthur Miller gave America a serious drama in the
period, with modern features, influenced by the European experiments. America was a more
persuasive presence in the European theatre than ever before. In the fifties English and American
drama had been open to new influences. The theatre could and did fall back on its inharited
tradition of plays and acting styles, notable in its rethinking of Shakespeare and its revivals of
recent European drama.
1. English drama in the 1950s
1.1 Introduction
During the 19th century Britons believe that the sun never set on the English Empire. But the
20 of England saw the same disillusion and breakdown of values that afflicted America after the
war.
In the immediately post-war years, the Empire melted into the larger concept of the
“Commonwealth” an associated fellowship of independent colonies dominated by Britain’s closest
wartime allies, the old Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The loss of
the Empire was probably deeply resented only by those members of the upper and middle classes
who had once felt called to serve it as colonial governors, civil servants, district administrators and
law officers.
Britain’s international positions was steadily declining: the years 1947-9 saw independence
for the colonial possessions India, Pakistan, Ceylon and during the 1950s most of the African
colonies followed suit.
Symptomatic of this decline was the fiasco of the Suez crisis (1956): when Egypt threatened
to seize control of the canal and nationalize it.
Britain’s relationship with America became very close, especially after the foundation of
NATO and British foreign policy suffers from the need to demonstrate some semblance of
independence from its more powerful ally.
During the fifties the general attitude became rather complacent. Britain was well on the way
to becoming an affluent, consumer society.
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Sections of the working classes could now afford to buy their own homes, cars and holiday
abroad. But social attitudes and behavior are changing. The number of people living alone has risen
significantly. By the end of the century it is expected to rise to one in three.
By the Education Act 1944 all children had the right to have free secondary education. 1 But
in the 1950’s some people disagreed with system because it did not give equal educational
opportunities.
In modern English society, the traditional role of the Church is becoming less and less
important. Church leaders fear that people do not need the Church anymore. All religions are facing
difficulties in modern Britain. The Ecumenical Movement is a movement for closer ties and
cooperation between the various branches of the Christian Church.
The influence of television became decisive. English people dedicate less time to their
hobbies and given up going to theatre or sporting events, not mention reading books. All their time
seems to be controlled by television and this leads to the alienation of the individual. The most
dangerous aspect is that young men watch spectacles of violence and sadism, explicit sex which
distort their perception of what is normal.
Society became more permissive and the early fifties saw a particular relationship on the part
of young people with the whole world of fashion image style music, dance-Youth Culture.
1.2. Disillusion and the “Angry Young Men”
It is becoming clear in the mid-fifties that the new world promised in 1945 would not
materialize. Despite the reduced importance Britain had in the world after the war, the
“Establishment” (the traditional institutions of the state) seemed incapable of change and to have
no sense of direction
The alienation and the dissatisfaction felt by many of the young led to a reaction against
middle-class values and a release of working – class energies.
The term “Angry Young Men” was applied for about 10 years to writers of the time who
expressed their disillusion without having many positive values to put in the place of those they
opposed.
Kenneth Allsop defined in “The Angry Decade” (1958) this group of writers of the late
1950s as “irreverence, stridency impatience with tradition, vigour, vulgarity, sulky resentment
against the cultivated”.
These feelings were founded in the sense of betrayal and futility which succeeded the
exalted aspirations generated by post-war reforms. Colin Wilson’s study of alienation, “The
Outsider” (1956), was judged by many an important manifesto for the movement. But the classic
dramatic embodiment is in John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” (1956) whose anti-hero Jimmy
Porter has come to represent the definitive “angry young man”.
The prototypical action occurs in a provincial, lower-middle working-class setting, around a
solitary, rootless male protagonist whose persistent conflicts are rendered with a sardonic humour
frequently verging on luxuriant scorn.
1.3 Political Drama of the 50s
“Look Back in Anger” by John Osborne opened on 8 May 1956. The date is often quoted as
a watershed in modern dramatic history. It marks the begining of a period when plays would no
longer be concerned with middle class heroes or set in country houses.
Osborne’s play gave voice to violent discontent in a character of a young man who was
aware that he could find no place in the society around him.
1
Great Britain does not have a written Constitution for education. The system of education is determined by the
National Educational Act.
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The English Stage Company’s production of “Look Back in Anger” was significant in a
different way: “though conventional in form, Look Back in Anger restored passion and vitality to
the English stage, and established the Royal Court Theatre as a home for new drama, which it has
remained until the present day”.2
As Osborne’s later work has proved, he was not really a political dramatist and his work
bears little relation to those who followed after him. But “Look Back in Anger” prepared the way
for them by making managements and directors aware of a new direction in contemporary writing.
In 1954 Tynan wrote: “The bare fact is that apart from revivals and imports, there is
nothing in the London theatre that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for more than five
minutes”.3
Osborne’s play, which Tynan was to praise as the “best young play of its decade”, provided
a voice for a post-war generation, disillusioned with a world that was neither brave nor new.
The origins of Osborne’s style do not lies, in what was once known as “the legitimate
theatre” but are also found in the noisier, more various world of vandeville. “Look Back in Anger”
introduced the noisiest of what contemporary journalists dubbed the “angry young men” to theatre
audiences.
The action of the play takes place in an one-roomed flat in Midlands. It centres on the
marital conflicts of Jimmy and Alison Porter. To Jimmy, Alison and her upper-class family
(including her brother Nigel) personify the “establishment”. Cliff is their lodger.
Osborne’s hero, Jimmy Porter, is 25 and a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful
malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination
which alienates the sensitive and insesitive alike. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of
vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth. To be as vehement as he is, is to be almost noncommittal.
With Jimmy Porter, Osborne established a new voice in the theatre. He also found his own
voice although he has found many different dramatic disguises for it.
His central character is driven by furious energy. In the world where there are no new brave
causes left, they try to discover a role or to endure the one they have been born to play. But they do
it turbulent by and passionately: “One of us is mean and stupid and crazy. Which is it ? Is it me ? Is
it me, standing here like an hysterical gire, hardly able to get my words out ? Or is it her ?”4
In his attack, Jimmy makes use of the words “sycophantic”, “phlegmatic” and
“pusillanimous”: “All this time, I have been married to this woman, this monument to nonattachement, and suddenly I discover that there is actually a word that sums her up. Not just an
adjective in the English language to describe her with – it’s her name Pusillanimous ! It sounds
like some fleshy Roman matron, doesn’t it ? The Lady Pusillanimous seen here with her husband
Sextus, on their way to the Games”.
He was for the 1950s what the restless, idealistic, public-school misfits had been to the
1930s. He is, as his wife’s friend recognizes “born out of his time”. Jimmy Porter is a revolutionary
without a revolution, or, to put it in terms grasped in the 1950s, he is a rebel without a cause.
In “The Entertainer” (1957) Archie Rice – especially as he was created by Laurence Oliver,
with his tatty jokes and determination to play his audience for all they are worth, remains an image
of a man trying to shore up something against his ruin.
Humanity, civilization and truth need constantly to be defended against brutality, barbarism
and lies.
1.4. The Action in which “nothing happens twice”
Peter Mudford, The Development of the Theatre, din volumul “The Twentieth Century published by the Penguin
Group, London”, 1994, pag. 377.
3
Kenneth Tynan, A View of the English Stage, 1984, pag. 147.
4
Look Back in Anger, Act I.
2
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In the 1950s are notable for the first production in London (1955) of Samuel Beckett’s
“Waiting for Godot” and in 1956 of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger”.
“Waiting for Godot” was a new kind of drama in which the old principles of play-makingplot, characters, development, appeared to be no longer important. Its action has been described as
one in which “nothing happens twice”.
Like the rest of his plays, “Waiting for Godot” succeeds in areas where Fry’s and Eliot’s
proved weakest. “Beckett renewed the language of drama in a manner comparable to Donne’s
renewal of the language of the Elizabethan sonneteers”.5 He did so not just to dialogue but also
stage-space, scenary, action and lighting. Everything that happens on the stage and the stage itself is
part of the metaphorical meaning of Beckett’s plays. Like “Waiting for Godot” this mime
exemplifies what John Peter has defined later in Vladimir’s Carrot (1987), as a “closed drama”, an
action which we either accept or reject as an image of man’s existence.
Words in Beckett’s plays are used with economy and precision. “Waiting for Godot”
implies the despondency of waiting for something which never happens. Between hope and
despondency lies the state of unknowing, out of which the tension of the action rises. What Beckett
plays upon in the audience is not essentially different to what Shakespeare plays upon in Hamlet.
Beckett’s “Godot” written in French6 gave him a wide international reputation.
In Act One, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a leafless tree for the arrival of
Godot, with whom they believed they have an appointment. In order to pass the time, they play
verbal games reminiscent of the cross-talk of music-hall comedians. When Pozzo arrived, holding
his slave Lucky with a rope, the tramps wonder if he is Godot. To the discomfort and confusion of
Vladimir, Estragon and the audience, he makes Lucky “dance” and then “think”. The long tirade of
Lucky’s thought is allusive and incoherent. Then, a boy arrives to tell the tramps that Godot will not
be coming that day “but surely tomorrow”. In Act Two the tree has lived, Lucky is now dumb, but
Pozzo is unaware of any difference. When they have gone, a boy who claims to be his brother
arrived with the same message. Still determining to go, the tramps do not move.
The Play inspired a great variety of interpretative criticism, much of it centred on the
character of the cryptic Godot. Its real subject, though, is not Godot but waiting.
Samuel Beckett worked closely with James Joyce and his international circle in Paris and
remained part of a polyglot and polyphonic world of literary innovation.
The trilogy of novels, “Molly” and “Malone Meurt” (1951) and L’Innommable (1953) has
established Beckett as the most discussed and respected of the avant-garde Parisian writer of the
early 1950s. This reputation was cemented by his later work for the theatre, notably the play know
by their English titles as “Endgame” (1957). He also wrote innovatively for the radio: “All that
Fall” (1957), “Enbers” (1959) and for BBC television “Eh, Joe” and “Ghost Trio”.
Beckett was consistent in his use of drama as an extension of his wider interest in the gaps,
the jumps and the lurches which characterize the functioning of human mind. In his plays-ideas,
phrases, images and mind overlap.
Beckett’s dialogue, for which “Waiting for Godot” is particularly remerkable is the most
energetic and supple written by any twentieth century playwright. His comedy, whether visual,
verbal, ritual, slapstick is the most subtle and surprising.
When he uses silence, as in “Film” and the mime play “Act without Words II”, he seems to
be directing his audiences to explore the value of new sensory and physical formulations. Beckett
never plays with minimalism and reductionism for the sake of the aesthetic effects he could achieve.
In parallel to the work of certain Modernist architects and composers, he was exploring the
radical potential of the idea that “less is more”. Time-present, as he represents in his plays, is
5
Peter Mudford, The Devel..., pag. 381.
Waiting for Godot, was originally written in French and first performed in Paris in 1953. Beckett’s own English
translation was first presented at the Art Theatre, London, in 1955, directed by Peter Hall
6
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broken, incosistent and inconsequential. The structural principles on which he built his plays can be
related back to the pattern of ideas explored in 1931 in the dense critical essay on Proust.
1.5 Verse Drama
In 1950 verse drama was regarded as the form most likely to renew the tradition of serious
theatre.
T. S. Eliot invented a form of dramatic dialogue in which rhythms of speech reflected the
age of jazz. But his plays continue to be revined because he was preoccupied with a theme central
to the modern imagination: the tension strained to breaking-point between private self and public
being.
He was instrumental in the revival of seventeenth-century poetry and “Jacobean drama as
well as laying the foundations of a critical theory of artistic creation and response to experience –
the “objective correlative”.7
In 1947 Eliot had written “The Cocktail Party” (1947), and had still to write “The
Confidential Clerk” (1953) and “The Elder Statesman” (1958). “The Cocktail Party” based on
Alcestis of Euripides was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949.
In outer shell of the play, with its quartet of lovers from the fashionable society is familiar
from drawing-room comedies. But Eliot’s concern is with modes of spiritual reconciliation for
individual Christians. The central action restores the unsatisfactory marriage of Lavinia and Edward
Chamberlayne. Its achievement requires, in a way uneasily assimilated by the accomplished of the
poetic dialogue, the Christian martyrdom of Edward’s lover, Celia, a sacrifice that permits secular
life of the community to continue.
Christopher Fry also attempt to revive the fortunes of poetic drama. He put his considerable
international critical succes in the early 1950s down to what he saw as a reaction against “surfacerealism” in the theatre.
Fry wanted to recreate an Elizabethan ambiance in which “the accent of living” was placed
on “the adventuring soul”.
In the early 1950s he enhanced his considerable reputation by translating into English two
plays by Jean Anouilh – “Invitation au château” in 1950 and “L’Alouette” in 1955 – and one by
Jean Giraudoux. These translations bear witness to the fact that British theatre was not as insular as
it is sometimes made out to be.
Christopher Fry had a growing reputation. The young Richard Burton, John Gielgud, Claire
Bloom and Pamera Brown appeared in “The Lady’s Not for Burning” designed by Oliver Messel in
1949 and performed at the Arts Theatre. Later it was transfered to the Globe with John Guilgud as
Thomas Mendip. The story, conveyed in artificial lively verse dialogue, concerns Jennet
Jourdemayne accused of murder by witchcraft and Thomas Mendip impelled to “confess” to the
murder. When the corpse turns up alive, Thomas finds himself surprised into wanting to live by his
love for Janet.
The following year Laurence Oliver directed and took the leading role in “Venus Observed”
and in 1954 Peter Brook directed Edith Evans in “The Dark is Light Enough”.
Fry’s character were aware that they were speaking poetry. A studied elegance of expression
created a drama that was mannered, arch and artificial, though wilty and humorous. He did not
succeed in renewing any of the several forms of language of which drama is composed.
1.6 Experimental Theatre
7
Derek Allen, Paul Smith, English Literature, pag. 140, 1995, Milano, “La Spiga languages”.
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In the late 1950s the director Peter Brook encouraged the development of experimental
theatre as part of the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Brook was deeply influenced by the
work of Antonin Artand, who died in 1948. Artand had been convinced of the inexorable forces
which act upon individual lives – “the sky can at any time fall upon our heads” – and the need to
develop in the theatre a physical language which could express through movement, dance, mine and
action, because words were sometimes impotent to express. He wanted a theatre of “ritual” and
“shock”.
Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, established at the Theatre Royal in 1953, was equally
significant at the time. Littlewood was inspired by a vision of a people’s theatre in a working-class
area. This vision did not materialize, but her view of the play and her insistence on the importance
of improvisation have proved durable.
Thus, Littlewood was responsable for the production of Brendan Behan’s “The Quare
Fellow” and “The Hostage”. This production integrated styles and the newflash for the purpose of
exposing the mindlessness, waste and incompetence of the First World War. The discontinuities of
the action, now so familiar, have seldom been used to greater effect.
Peter Shaffer’s first major success in the theatre “Five Finger Exercise” (1958), established,
among other things, his skill in exploiting different areas and level of stage-space, to dramatize the
complexity of family life.
Shaffer was always been aware that a play only comes into existence when performed. In a
note he writes “My hope was always to realize a kind of “total” theatre, involving not only words,
but rites, mimes, masks and magic. The text cries for illustration”.8
John Mortimer (b. 1923), like Peter Shaffer, has worked within a tradition which owes much
to naturalism. He was extended his tradition not so much by theatrical devices as by his feeling for
individual character. Mortimer”s character are often excentric,9 but he is a realist aware of the
sombre stuff of which fantasis are made. The writer achieves in dramatic portrait of a play
combining of form with subtlety of characterization.
2. American drama in 1950s
2.1 Introduction
American theatre returned to peacetime business in 1945 and its situation in some ways
resembled that of the British theatre after the Puritan Revolution. Things were no better in the
sphere of theatre organization. Broadway continued on its accustomed cause, marked by the
contrary spirals of mounting costs and collapsing buildings.
The declension form the thirties to the mid-fifties can be traced in the career of a popular
writer like Irwin Shaw who made his debut in 1936 with “Bury the Dead” – a pacifist fantasy,
about six dead soldiers who refuse to be buried and march off against those who had sent them out
to be tilled. Leaving the theatre, he produced his heroic war novel, “The Young Lions” and then,
early in the fifties, his deeply pessimistic “The Troubled Air” showing an “controversial” hero
progressively stripped of his job and his family by the poisonous climate of the time. Shaw’s hero is
a mass-communications man, and his fate, proclaiming the impossibility of heroism, reflects that of
the Hollywood Ten and the many other demoralized survivors.
Earlier in the century, the American theatre had passed through phases of Labour, Federal,
repertory and regional organization: perhaps not like European companies, but presenting continous
opposition to the commercial system and sustained by powerful ideals of what the theatre could
be.10 One survey estimates that an investor who supported all the shows on Broadway between 1948
8
Peter Shaffer, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, 1964, pag. 9.
For example his two most famous barristers in The Dock Brief and Rumpole
10
American Literature since 1900, edited by Marcus Cunliffe, published by the Penguin Group, 1993, pag. 205-206.
9
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and 1958 would have profited by 19.5 per cent a year. It is a rule – applying equally to Europe and
America – that the most influential work is often begun under the most hopeless conditions: a fact
acknowledged in HERBERT BLAU’s memoir of the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, “The
Impossible Theatre”. Blau’s organization, was begun in poverty and run by near-amateur
enthusiasts – like Morcow Art Theatre. In their two decades of life they have established a powerful
counter-atmosphere, far richer and more varied than the social theatre of the thirties: it presents a
spectrum of events deriving from graphic art, drug experience, political work of the Black Arts
theatre network, commedia of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Californian Teatro
Campesino (whose main purpose is to incite strikes among the Mexican-American grape-pickers).
These developments often took place under the shadow of European cultural models but we
could say that there has been a strong positive feedback and at the end of the sixties America was a
more persuasive presence in the European theatre than ever before.
2.2 Williams and Miller – a special couple
Playwrights are not the heroes of the story, but the post-war theatre brought two of the best
playwrights the country has ever produced: TENNESSE WILLIAMS and ARTHUR MILLER.
They appeared almost instantaneously: Williams with “The Glass Menagerie” in 1945 and Miller a
year later with “All My Sons”.
Both moved straight on to Broadway and have stayed there ever since. As eternal opposites,
Miller and Williams invite all kinds of dualistic comparison: North and South; the intellect and the
senses; social and personal; tribunal and confession; male and female. In some general way they do
occupy antithetical positions, but most of the contrasts break down under examination.
For instance, the “feminine” Williams excels in the creation of male animals and the whole
range of American drama has no more personal confession to offer than the socially-conscious
Miller’s “After the Fall”.
Looked at in the twenty-year perspective, the differences between the two writers are less
important than their similarities.
Both grew up in the Depression and underwent the common collapse of family fortunes.
Miller’s father lost a clothes-manufacturing business in Brooklyn and Miller paid his way to college
by working in an automobile-parts ware-house. Williams was transplanted from rural Mississippi to
St. Louise slum when troubles overtook his hated salesman father.
Both established some contacts with pre-war progressive theatre: Miller with the Federal
Theatre Poject and Williams by collecting a Group Theatre prize in 1939 for “American Blues”. In
a curious way each suggest a character that the other might have created. The marriage of Miller the
intellectual to Marilyn Monroe might have furnished Williams with a plot and Williams solitary life
illustrates Miller’s preoccupation with those who barricade themselves from the world.
The world, for them is the American world. They serve to lend intensity to local themes.
Miller is attached to his own place and time. They had more talent than anyone else of their
generation. Both children of the thirties, they shared an ability to articulate what many Americans
were feeling. In the land of succes, they wrote about the unsuccessful. They met the entreched myth
of virility with sexual ambiguities.
Both show the continuation of American tradition, the dream of lost paradise that haunts
Williams’s characters in their fragile sanctuaries and runs through Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”
as an off-stage flute melody. These plays are alegories, they are not so much for a happy land as for
a place were the dramatic hero can regain human dignity.
For Williams and Miller the only available figure was “the little man” of old Expressionist
drama and film comedy whose stature had been diminished since his debut in the aftermath of the
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First War.11 Following the Second War, the playwrights’ task was somehow to equip Mr. Zero with
personal identity and significance.
American drama characteristically prefers action to speech. Miller found one solution to
reconcile the taste for action in “The Crucible” by commenting on the present from the vantage
point of historical melodrama. The usual approach was to conduct a plot enmeshing past to present.
Technically, this meant superimposing non-realistic devices on realistic tradition and the trick was
to show actions taking place between characters whose lives were finished before the curtain wentup. These non-realistic devices are all methods of releasing theatrical time from the simple liniar
chronology of Naturalism. There are borrowings from cinema, the flashback which produced a
number of scenes showing a character drifting moodily off to gaze through the window and say: “It
wasn’t always like this. Do you remember the time when ...”. Te curse of the past was no doubt a
legacy of O’Neill to America’s post-war playwrights. None of them handled it quite as perfectly as
he did in his greatest play, “Long Day’s Journey into Night”, which finally reached the stage in
1956. His successors started something of their own. Miller antiquated “good-guy liberal”
succeeded in forging a ling between the old social drama and his own complex society. Williams
showed that the sympathies and emotions of an audience need not be enlisted, but atention may be
held by a series of shocks. And he also demonstrated any concerned for men which may have
disturbed the philosophies of his older playwrights was unnecessary.
The outside factor that contributed most to the succes of Miller and Williams was the high
quality of American naturalistic acting. Although it was specifically national style, it derived from a
foreign source and provides a classical example of America’s repeated attempts to absorb
transatlantic cultural models.
The creators of the three dominant production styles of modern Europe Stanislavsky
(psychological realism); Copeau (revitalized classicism); Brecht and Piscator (epic theatre) – had all
worked in America and implanted seeds that continued to grow after their departure.
2.3 Albee and Simon – a complementary couple
After Williams and Miller only two have really established themselves on Broadway. These
are Edward Albee and Neil Simon, a complementary couple.
Albee, a stylist with a deadly ear for American speech is usual classed as an “absurdist”. He
has been affected by the French avant-garde. “The American Dream” might have been written as an
deliberate exercise in the manner of Eugen Ionescu. Simon is a Bronx comedian, famous for “Come
Blow Horn” and “Plaza Suite”. His plays are all Manhattan folktales and in the midst of all the
restrictions of Broadway, he appears as a free man.
These two exceptional figures apart, theatrical vitality has moved away from the comercial
center in successive waves. The process immediately after the war with the development OffBroadway.12
Off-Broadway earned its way as American’s first spring-board for the post-war Continental
avant-garde: Beckett, Ionesco and Genet.
There are two main companies of Off-Broadway: The New York Shakespeare Festival and
the Living Theatre – created by Joseph Papp. As much in his life as in his work, Joseph Papp
occupies an heroic position in the post-war American scene. His real work began in 1952 with his
formation of the Shakespearian Theatre Workshop in a Presbyterian Church on the Lower East
Side. Papp’s main interest was in evolving an American approach to classical texts. He wrote: “The
11
It is about a process conducted by army centres revealing the average American male to possess a mental age of
thirteen.
12
The definition of Off-Broadway is any theatre not in the concentrated area between 41st Street and 52nd Street, in the
Broadway theatre district.
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future of our theatre lies in creating a new style of playing that will combine the vitality and
humanity of the modern actor with the discipline, grace and eloquence of the classical actor”.
Conclusion
Aristotle called drama – “imitated human action”. The 20th century literature is
characterized by a rebirth of dramatic interest. Both in Great Britain and in the US. In England the
influnece of Ibsen made itself strongly felt in the problem plays of G.B. Show and in the realism of
John Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham. T.S. Eliot revived and enriched the reverse drama. John
Osborne expressed the rebelious attitude of the “Angry Young Men” in “Look Back in Anger”.
In part written as a reaction against the drawing-room comedies and middle-class drama of
Noël Coward and Sir Terence Rattingan, “Look Back in Anger” was a landmark in the history of
the theatre. Although not generally thought as a great play in itself, it nevertheless manages to
convey the sense of restlessness and dissfaction of the time with intencity and vigour, idiom of the
actual speech of the young.
After its first production in 1956 the theatre in Britain opened up to a whole range of
influenced and became livelier than at any time for more than 250 years.
Nevertheless, Jimmy Porter is the protagonist in an otherwise affirmative play, one in which
love and loyalty are tested. He may be a new type of character, classless, restless and aimless. When
a middle-aged Jimmy Porter returned to the stage in Osborne play “Déjà Vu” in 1992, the force of
those dramatic and philosophical conventions became self-evident.
The anger, the dissent, the vexatiousness, the protest and the theatricality of Osborne’s
characters has always be an extension of his perception of himself.
Eugene O’Neill, Tennesse Williams and Arthur Miller gave America a serious drama in the
period, with modern features, influenced by the European experiments. They established some
contacts with the pre-war progressive theatre and shared an ability to articulate what many
Americans were feeling: in the land of success they wrote about the unnsuccessful. American drama
prefers action to speech and its development took place under the shadow of European cultural
models.
America was a more persuasive presence in the European theatre than ever before. In the
fifties English and American drama had been open to new influences. The theatre could and did fall
back on its inharited tradition of plays and acting styles, notable in its rethinking of Shakespeare
and its revivals of recent European drama.
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