Twentieth Century British Drama
Twentieth Century British Drama
Twentieth Century
British Drama
John Smart
P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E P R E S S S Y N D I C AT E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A M B R I D G E
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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Cambridge University Press 2001
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relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2001
Reprinted 2004
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
Typefaces: Clearface and Mixage
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
Introduction
10
11
14
16
Noel Coward
18
The 1930s
19
Workers theatre
20
21
21
24
25
26
27
29
30
33
34
1968
35
Edward Bond
37
David Edgar
38
David Hare
40
41
Women playwrights
42
Caryl Churchill
43
Pam Gems
45
Womens voices
47
Timberlake Wertenbaker
48
Joe Orton
49
Alan Ayckbourn
50
Tom Stoppard
52
55
Assignments
58
59
59
59
60
64
Characterisation
67
69
Theatre movements
70
Assignments
71
3 Play extracts
72
Stanley Houghton
from Hindle Wakes
72
Harold Brighouse
from Hobsons Choice
74
Tom Thomas
from Their Theatre and Ours
76
John Osborne
from Look Back in Anger
78
Arnold Wesker
from Roots
79
Theatre Workshop
from Oh, What a Lovely War!
81
Harold Pinter
from The Homecoming
83
Edward Bond
from Saved
84
Harold Pinter
from Landscape
86
Tom Stoppard
from The Real Inspector Hound
87
Caryl Churchill
from Top Girls
88
Tom Stoppard
from The Real Thing
90
Timberlake Wertenbaker
from Our Countrys Good
92
David Hare
from Amys View
94
Martin Crimp
from Attempts on her Life
96
98
Kinds of criticism
98
98
103
106
Assignments
109
110
Using criticism
110
110
111
Discussing context
113
Comparative study
115
Assignments
116
6 Resources
119
Further reading
119
Glossary
122
Chronology
124
Index
126
Acknowledgements
128
1 Approaching 20th-century
British drama
How does 20th-century British drama relate to its social, cultural and
historical context?
What are the major theatrical movements and genres of the 20th century?
Social conflicts
However, there were underlying problems. Having led the world in many of the
great inventions of the 19th century, Britain fell behind in the newer industries of
the 20th. Industrial competitors had caught up fast, and many eyes turned to
Germany with an admiration that quickly changed to fear.
In a society in which it was said that 1% of the population owned 70% of the
wealth, the rigidity of the class system and its inequalities came under scrutiny
from a Liberal government led by Asquith (19081914), from the growing number
of socialists and from the unemployed. Many of the tensions of the time were
focused on industry. In an increasingly competitive market, the relationship of the
workers to employers came under strain. This was the context in which the Labour
Party was born in 1900. Legislation was passed that made strike action near to
impossible and, as a result of the ensuing outcry, was just as quickly repealed.
Industrial relations deteriorated when prices went up, but wages stayed the same.
8
Between 1910 and 1912 there were strikes by dockers, miners and railwaymen. The
organised and strengthened unions were now clearly a powerful force, and, when a
Triple Alliance of the three largest unions was formed in 1914, it seemed that
confrontation was inevitable. Rarely can a play have caught the spirit of the
moment as accurately as John Galsworthys Strife (1909) which centres on a strike
in Trenartha Tin Plate works and the conflict between the starving miners and the
Board of Directors.
It was not only conflict in industry that seemed to be reaching a crisis point: in
Ireland, Nationalists were beginning to plan rebellion and Unionists were preparing
for armed resistance; in England, the suffragette movement transformed a political
protest into a campaign of violent action. No wonder then that the newly
established repertory theatre and its advanced thinkers were full of ideas and
questions about the ills of society and of capitalism. George Bernard Shaws
socialist ideas were shared by Granville Barker who exposed the corruption of the
family business in The Voysey Inheritance (1905), and the whole world of the
couture industry from retail drapery to high fashion in The Madras House (1910).
The repertory theatre brought societys problems to the audiences attention and
gave voice to the underclass.
A P P R O AC H I N G 2 0 T H - C E N T U RY B R I T I S H D R A M A
made you think about a particular issue, and perhaps made you reconsider your
own position on it. How did it make its points and try to convince you?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using drama to promote a cause?
The actor-manager
At the centre of the performance was the star himself perhaps the famous Henry
Irving at the Lyceum, or Herbert Beerbohm Tree riding a snow-white horse at His
Majestys. These were the great actor-managers of their day and the central figures
of the theatrical system. Like the great magnates of industry, they controlled all
aspects of their world. They paid the wages, rehearsed the cast, were responsible for
the theatre itself and, of course, took the leading roles in the plays they directed.
Many consequences flowed from this structure. To maximise profits and to make
full use of an elaborate set, a long run was eminently desirable. Plays that made too
many demands on the audience or touched on difficult or uncomfortable subjects
were unsuitable.
MCOMAS
MRS CLANDON
MCOMAS
This extract from Bernard Shaws play You Never Can Tell (1897) sums up the
conservatism of the commercial theatre of Edwardian times. The theatre of H.A.
Jones (18511929) and Arthur Wing Pinero (18551934) was not without ideas
and sharpness, but it was confined within its social and artistic straitjacket. The
judgement of a contemporary Italian visitor was that The entire organisation of the
theatre reflects that special and aristocratic conception of its status which is the
10
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and experience as a man of the theatre helped him to make the minority theatre a
commercial and popular success.
The new drama demanded a new, simpler staging and a new kind of theatre.
The Court Theatre, under the directorship of Harley Granville Barker (18771946)
from 19041907, became the leading avant-garde theatre in London. (As the Royal
Court, 50 years later in 1956, this theatre was to assume the same role with its
production of John Osbornes Look Back in Anger.) Shaw, whose plays formed the
basis of the programme, wrote with characteristic immodesty that the first Court
season marked the most important event in the history of the British stage since
Shakespeare and Burbage ran the Globe Theatre on Bankside.
Certainly the Court established some of the approaches which were to influence
theatre in the 20th century. The convention of the long run was replaced by a
repertory system. This allowed a much more daring approach, as a play that failed
could be deleted from the repertoire without major difficulty or financial loss. The
role of the actor-manager was replaced by the novel idea of the director who had
overall control of the production. This development was pushed to its logical
conclusion in the work of Gordon Craig (18721966). The idea of the central role of
the director is one that is almost taken for granted in todays theatre.
12
In other words, Shaws wit is not decorative, but essential to his purpose.
Unlike Brecht, Shaw had no radical or original approach to staging or to plot.
He used the familiar forms of romance, historical chronicle and melodrama. What
he did achieve, however, was to give each of the familiar plots his own twist, to
surprise an audience and to frustrate their expectations. Surprises and reversals are
embedded in Shaws plots, and in the verbal wit for which his plays are known.
Pygmalion
Pygmalion (1914) is the story of a flower girl metamorphosed into a society lady by
Professor Higgins, who teaches her phonetics so effectively that she is mistaken for
a duchess. Shaws point about the superficiality of class distinctions is well made,
but Elizas change from mechanical speaking doll to a live woman who is on equal
terms with her creator leads an audience to expect the fairy tale ending of the
princess marrying the crusty bachelor and reforming him by showing him a
humanity he lacked. From the time the first actor played Higgins and threw red
roses at Eliza between the end of the play and the final curtain, to the film
adaptation in My Fair Lady, Shaws ending has been altered or seen as
unsatisfactory. Shaw deliberately set up and then rejected the romantic ending as
sentimental. By denying the conventional ending, Shaw left Elizas future open
and made the audience revise its expectations.
13
Just as the villain may be a dramatic fiction, so may the hero: in fact heroism, like
idealism, was always likely to be debunked in Shaws drama. Apparent villains like
Mrs Warren, in Mrs Warrens Profession (1902), who organises prostitutes, or
Andrew Undershaft, the capitalist arms manufacturer in Major Barbara (1905), are
allowed to make their cases forcefully. Undershaft himself is seen as a model
employer and a hater of the true evil of poverty. Indeed, as Shaw wrote in
discussing the plays of Ibsen (Major Critical Essays, 1986), this moral uncertainty
was exactly what distinguished the new drama:
In the new plays, the drama arises through a conflict of unsettled
ideals [and] is not between clear right and wrong the question
that makes the play interesting is which is the villain and which the
hero.
14
Theatre opened. This was the first theatre specifically built for a repertory company.
Perhaps the most influential of the companies was that founded at the Gaiety
Theatre, Manchester, by Miss Horniman in 1908. Here a strong local tradition
found its voice in the plays of the industrial north of Allan Monkhouse, Stanley
Houghton and Harold Brighouse the so-called Manchester School which
represented working class life with a sympathy and a humour born of close
observation. Clayton Holmes, an American critic, wrote in 1917 that the two
greatest theatres in the British Isles are the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Gaiety
in Manchester.
Arthur Wing Pinero outlined the future of the theatre under the influence of
Ibsen. He looked forward to a drama based wholly on observation and experience,
which lays aside the worn-out puppets and proverbs of the theatre and illustrates
faithfully modern social life. However, he was not the playwright who expressed
these aims in the theatre: it was left to Shaw, Harley Granville Barker and John
Galsworthy (18671933) in London, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the
Manchester School to develop a drama to meet the challenge of the times.
Find out as much as you can about your local theatre. When was it built? How has
it changed? Can you define the kind of audience it attracts? What sort of plays does
it put on? How has its role in the community changed since it was built?
A theatre of ideas and of social comment risked dryness and dullness. It was to the
credit of many of the Edwardian dramatists that their characters lived on stage to
such an extent that the audience did not feel they had been buttonholed to listen to
a dramatic lecture or sermon. Or perhaps the intensity of the issues and conflicts
that the drama embodied carried its own charge of dramatic energy.
The drama very often centred on a family and explored the conflicts between
the younger generation and the older. The older generation was typically
represented by an unyielding patriarchal figure whose values, but not necessarily
conduct, were Victorian. The struggle between the generations often involved the
rights and freedoms of a young woman who found herself in conflict because she
did not want to marry her lover (Stanley Houghtons Hindle Wakes, 1912); wanted
to divorce (Granville Barkers The Voysey Inheritance); or to have an abortion
(Waste, 19061907). The plays were set firmly in the world of work and of business:
Galsworthys Strife starts six months into a strike by workers in the Trenartha Tin
Plate Works; The Voysey Inheritance is based on a lawyers practice, and even the
lighter comedy of Hobsons Choice (1915) by Harold Brighouse is an entirely
believable picture of work in a northern cobblers. These firmly established settings
allowed the dramatists to give force to their analyses of class and the financial bases
of power relationships.
A P P R O AC H I N G 2 0 T H - C E N T U RY B R I T I S H D R A M A
15
What happened in the theatre in the early years of this century was an outburst
of dramatic energy. In many ways the Edwardian stage acted as a prologue to the
themes of the century: the division between the commercial theatre and the
smaller, poorer, but ultimately much more important theatre that we associate with
the repertory movement and the little theatres; the sense of theatre mediating to a
wider audience the crucial issues of the moment, rather than being an exclusive
entertainment for the upper and middle classes; the movement away from
Londons West End to the provinces; the presentation of working class people on
stage. All these would find echoes and restatements throughout the century.
What do you think were the two or three main issues that were most important to
Edwardian playwrights? What are the three major issues that seem most important
to dramatists today? Note down the main similarities and differences.
Read carefully the extracts from Hindle Wakes and Hobsons Choice (Part 3, pages
7276). How far and in what ways do they reflect the social and political issues
discussed above?
16
the Tyne and the Wear, and the mining industry of South Wales, were some of the
areas where the promises of Lloyd George must have sounded exceptionally hollow.
It was in exactly these regions that workers theatre grew.
A P P R O AC H I N G 2 0 T H - C E N T U RY B R I T I S H D R A M A
17
Noel Coward
Noel Coward depicted and embodied the moneyed and escapist world of the 1920s
and 1930s. The Sketch of 29 April 1925 wrote of him as probably the most famous
man of his age in England as he is but twenty-five and is the author of two plays
running in town The Vortex and Fallen Angels. Coward played the lead in The
Vortex (1924), a much praised and constantly discussed drama. Coward himself
said that the play established me both as a playwright and as an actor and allowed
him the trappings of success, which included a car, silk shirts and an extravagant
amount of pyjamas and dressing gowns.
Cavalcade
Perhaps Cowards outstanding success, and a play that seemed to catch the mood
of the nation, was Cavalcade (19301931). With its theme of the pageant of
English history, Coward had produced a play of epic proportions. The plays 22
18
scenes begin with the Boer War and follow the events of the early 20th century
through the eyes of a middle class family and its servants. Domestic scenes
alternate with public ones as the impact of the century is measured in the suffering
and the pride of the family. Coward packed the stage with 400 extras to make the
crowd scenes as spectacular as he possibly could. The final stage directions
indicated the blend of effects Coward was looking for:
Noise grows louder and louder. Steam rivets, loudspeakers, jazz
bands, aeroplane propellers, etc., until the general effect is complete
chaos.
Suddenly it all fades into darkness and silence and away at the
back a Union Jack glows through the blackness.
When King George V and Queen Mary came to see the play, cast and audience
joined in singing God Save the King amid scenes of patriotic fervour. Cowards
reputation was at its peak.
The play is central because it was seen at the time as the play of the century,
and because its presentation of history strangely foreshadowed not only Joan
Littlewoods Oh, What a Lovely War! but also the state of the nation plays of the
1980s, though from a very different political perspective. In developing a wit that
comes from character and situation, Coward paved the way for Joe Orton, and in
developing the plots of tangled sexual relationships and their complicated
geometry, he can be compared to Alan Ayckbourn.
Coward was a major playwright of the 1920s and early 1930s. Despite his
limitations, he held up a mirror to his times reflecting the wit and gaiety of his
generation and class. His plays present a glamorous wasteland with a mixture of
fascination and loathing.
The 1930s
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 not only ruined the lives of thousands of Americans,
it also affected the financial markets throughout the world. The economic
depression which followed and the rise in unemployment in Britain to two and a
half million in 1931 set the keynote for the whole decade. The spectre of poverty
and hardship became a reality as the hunger marchers from Jarrow in the north
east marched on the capital in 1936. At a time when capitalism seemed hard to
defend morally, it also seemed to many to have failed to deliver prosperity and jobs.
Many thinkers saw in the economic crises of the 1930s the fulfilment of Marxs
ideas that capitalism was doomed. They began to look with admiration at Russian
communism, which seemed to offer a fairer and a more efficient system.
The crisis was not only a domestic one. Germany was turning towards fascism:
A P P R O AC H I N G 2 0 T H - C E N T U RY B R I T I S H D R A M A
19
economic crisis and the rise of Adolf Hitler pointed to threatening times ahead.
Politics in Britain were becoming more extreme as fascists fought communists in
the East End of London. The Spanish Civil War crystallised the struggle between
the forces of socialism and those of fascism, and many young British men rushed
to Spain to fight for the left as socialists or anarchists.
Workers theatre
The commercial theatre of Londons West End remained insulated from the
pressures and economic realities of the time, offering little for the politically aware.
A more direct response came from the workers political groups that established
themselves throughout Britain in the 1930s. This was theatre at the opposite
extreme to the West End. Many working class left wing groups formed themselves
into companies of actors to inform, educate and propagandise. They called on the
working class to understand the issues, and went onto the streets or to the factory
gates to put over their message. The names of the companies tell us a good deal
about their purpose: Theatre of Action, Red Megaphones, Unity.
The rulebook of Unity, London, defined its purpose: To foster the art of drama
by interpreting life as it is experienced by the majority of the people, to work for the
betterment of society. Theatre groups like Unity took their plays to where people
worked, acting out scenes at the factory gates, on the street corners, in canteens
and clubs. They swept away many of the trappings associated with British theatre
high prices, evening dress and a middle class audience watching its own reflection
on the stage. The conventional Fourth wall naturalism was obviously unsuited to
this kind of theatre and the groups developed new ways of getting their message
across. Pantomime and broad humour were often used, as was choral declamation
and socialist realism. Agit-prop (a contraction of agitational propaganda) was
derived from Soviet Russia. The Living Newspaper style, borrowed from the
American Federal Theatre, allowed an immediate topicality of reference. The Unity,
London, presented, for example, the Munich Crisis as a Living Newspaper. The
Prime Minister, Chamberlain, became a wicked Uncle in Babes in the Wood and
political satire in drama was born.
From the 1930s until just after the Second World War, the workers theatre
movement presented a commentary on events and voiced a left wing sometimes
a communist response to them. It had a truly European perspective and staged
the first productions of Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre in Britain. Its importance lay
not so much in the plays that emerged although there were many of merit like
Joe Corries In Time o Strife but in the ways in which it broadened the sense of
what theatre was for and how it could be performed. Joan Littlewoods roots lay in
the movement and the upsurge of British theatre in the 1960s was built on these
earlier foundations.
20
Read the extract from Their Theatre and Ours (Part 3, pages 7678) and discuss the
ways in which Tom Thomas outlines the difference between the two kinds of
theatre.
A P P R O AC H I N G 2 0 T H - C E N T U RY B R I T I S H D R A M A
21
speech would join to create a new art form to express social criticism, as in Audens
The Dance of Death (1934).
When W.H. Auden turned to the theatre he was already the poetic prophet of
the English left. His approach to theatre was no less radical than his poetry. As a
writer he shared Brechts sense of the urgency of the times. He had lived in Berlin
and seen Hitlers rise to power at first hand. He shared the view of Unity that
conventional theatre was dead and that the theatre of commitment had to look for
new ways of capturing an audience. As a poet he wanted to create a new dramatic
language which would engage and challenge, and as a communist (albeit briefly)
he wanted to contribute to the political struggle.
Auden found the answer to his quest in familiar popular forms the folk tale,
the music hall, the pantomime and the revue. Both he and Brecht drew heavily on
the political humour and the seedy glamour of the cabaret. These formed the
bedrock of the plots he constructed. Auden wrote in a brief manifesto for the first
production of The Dance of Death:
The subject of Drama is the Commonly Known, the universally
familiar stories of the society or generation in which it is written. The
audience, like the child listening to the fairy tale, ought to know what
is going to happen next. ... Similarly the drama is not suited to the
analysis of character which is the province of the novel. Dramatic
characters are simplified, easily recognisable and over life-size.
This, then, was the ideal: a dramatic art that was at once popular and vigorous, full
of songs and low humour, yet capable of political commitment and poetic intensity.
It is of greater importance for the future of drama than all the masterpieces
of Mr Noel Coward, Mr Somerset Maugham and the pseudo-realistic school, wrote
the drama critic of the New Statesman of the first performance of The Dance of
Death. What made it of importance was its clear social theme the play began with
the announcer stating: We present to you this evening a picture of the decline of a
class, and the chorus adding from behind the curtain Middle class. The plot is
simple: a dancer who represents the dying and degenerate middle class performs to
a working class audience who are planted among the real audience. He finally
bequeaths to them his good wishes and worldly goods. The chorus comes on stage
in glamorous dressing gowns, quickly replaced by swimming costumes and then
by fascist uniforms, as Auden satirised the ills of his time, from the cult of the body
beautiful to fascism.
The experimental form of the play, which encompassed the crudest of music
hall jokes, allegory and song-and-dance numbers, left its overall tone and purpose
unclear.
22