(Decades of Modern British Playwriting) Steve Nicholson - Modern British Playwriting - The 1960s - Voices, Documents, New Interpretations-Bloomsbury Methuen Drama (2012)
(Decades of Modern British Playwriting) Steve Nicholson - Modern British Playwriting - The 1960s - Voices, Documents, New Interpretations-Bloomsbury Methuen Drama (2012)
THE 1960s
VOICES, DOCUMENTS, NE W
I N T E R PR E TATIONS
VOICES, DOCUMENTS, NE W
I N T E R PR E TATIONS
Steve Nicholson
Methuen Drama
Methuen Drama
Methuen Drama
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
www.methuendrama.com
The rights of the authors to be identified as the editors of these works have been asserted
by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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CONTENTS
General Preface ix
by series editors Richard Boon and Philip Roberts
Acknowledgements xi
vi
4 Documents 216
John Arden 216
Edward Bond 224
Harold Pinter 233
Afterword 243
John Arden by Bill McDonnell 243
Edward Bond 249
Harold Pinter 254
Alan Ayckbourn 260
Notes 266
Select Bibliography 288
Index 295
Notes on contributors 304
vii
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GENERAL PREFACE
ix
for example). A glance at the bibliographies for the earliest and latest
volumes quickly reveals huge differences in the range of secondary
material available to our authors and to our readers. This inevitably
means that the later volumes allow a greater space to their contrib-
uting essayists for original research and scholarship, but we have also
actively encouraged revisionist perspectives – new looks – on the
‘older guard’ in earlier books.
So while each book can and does stand alone, the series as a whole
offers as coherent and comprehensive a view of the whole era as
possible.
Throughout, we have had in mind two chief objectives. We have
made accessible information and ideas that will enable today’s
students of theatre to acquaint themselves with the nature of the
world inhabited by the playwrights of the last sixty years; and we offer
new, original and often surprising perspectives on both established
and developing dramatists.
x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
xi
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INTRODUCTION TO THE 1960s1
1. Domestic life
Things we bought
Hard toilet rolls, wooden tennis rackets, footballs with laces, polyar-
moured cricket bats, roller skates, pink shrimps and raspberry chews
at four an (old) penny, jamboree bags, chocolate cigarettes, Gibson
Flying V guitars, Sindy (‘the doll you love to dress’), duvets, formica
tables, stainless-steel kitchens, stacking chairs, cardboard chairs,
plastic chairs, inflatable chairs, paper furniture, electric fires with real-
istic living flame coal effect, golliwogs, Minis and miniskirts, vinyl
floor coverings and vinyl LPs, mono records, stereo records, a cartridge
to play stereo records on mono record players, stereograms (so you
don’t need the cartridge), reel-to-reel tape recorders, cassette tape
recorders, transistor radios, electric typewriters, denim skirts, parkas,
braces, flared trousers, bell-bottomed trousers, beads, joss sticks,
kimonos, Afghan coats, flowers for our hair, plastic pacamacs, camera
films that take eight small black-and-white photographs, anything to
do with the Beatles, Dalek soap, Dalek wallpaper, Dalek slippers,
Dalek jelly babies, Dalek porridge bowls and crème de menthe.
Home life
Incomes rise throughout the decade, and spending on household
appliances soars by 100 per cent – with many items bought through
hire purchase. In the early 1960s only a third of households have a
refrigerator and even in the early 1970s the figure is around two-thirds.
Freezers come later. Washing machine ownership grows (mostly twin
tubs rather than automatics) but many people still go to launderettes
or have their washing collected. Only around half of houses have their
own telephone line – red phone boxes are in common use; no mobiles,
of course. Full central heating is unusual, but some people have large
storage heaters. Hot-water bottles are more common than electric
blankets. Other electric applicances marketed ‘for Mrs Everyman of
Acacia Avenue’ include coffee makers (‘a superb gift for any house-
wife’), heated hair rollers (‘with free record token’) and a three-speed
food mixer (‘the extra pair of hands you’ve always wanted’).
Britain has a high rate of marriages, with an average of around 2.5
children. It also has the highest divorce rate in Europe; in 1969,
marriage breakdown becomes the sole grounds for divorce, removing
the necessity to apportion blame.
Work life
Male unemployment is low for most of the decade, with average
weekly earnings rising by 130 per cent between 1955 and 1969.
However, faced with a growing trade deficit and economic difficulties
the Labour government imposes a freeze on wages, which leads to
austerity and bitter industrial confrontations. By the late 1960s, union
power is strong, and strikes over pay and conditions are frequent and
widespread. Between 1962 and 1968 the total number of working
days lost to strikes is less than 3 million; in 1968 alone it is 4.7
million, in 1969 it is 7 million, and by the early 1970s an extraordi-
nary 23.8 million.
There is an increase in the number of married women in paid
employment (though many work part-time). From one in five in the
2
Introduction to the 1960s
early 1950s, by the 1960s it is one in three, and by the 1970s almost
one in two. Women are often paid less than men for doing the same
jobs, and in 1970 the government introduces the Equal Pay Act.
2. Society
Sex
A poem by Philip Larkin suggests that the very invention of sexual
intercourse can be dated to 1963 – ‘Between the end of the
“Chatterley” ban and the Beatles’ first LP’.2 While this was not strictly
accurate, the decade’s reputation for sexual freedom, liberation and
promiscuity is partly deserved. In 1967 a new law makes it possible
for consenting same-sex adults over the age of twenty-one to have a
private sexual relationship (except in Scotland) without liability to
prosecution. Abortion also becomes legal, as Harold Wilson’s Labour
government pursues a programme of liberal reforms. Also crucial is
the invention of ‘the pill’ which – at least in theory – allows women to
take control of contraception and thus their own sexual behaviour. At
first, the pill is only for married women, and it is only in the latter
part of the decade that it becomes more readily available. In fact, a
survey undertaken in 1970 suggests that only 10 per cent of women
have ever used it. But in the second half of the 1960s we are told that
all we need is love, and encouraged to see it as a way of opposing war.
There is more provocative sexual imagery to be seen in the media and
in fashion than ever before, while prurient stories about the dissolute
antics of young people in general, and pop and film stars in particular,
provide great newspaper copy.
Violence
Violent crimes had increased in the 1950s, and the trend continues.
In 1955 some 6,000 are recorded; by 1960 the figure has doubled to
nearly 12,000 and by 1970 it is 21,000. Violent south-coast clashes
between tooled-up mods and rockers become a regular feature of
bank-holiday weekends, and fighting around football grounds is
equally disturbing and destructive of property as well as people. Some
3
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Obscenity
In 1965, the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan makes history – and the
front pages of the national press – when he becomes the first person to
use the word ‘fuck’ on television. A couple of years earlier, Lenny
Bruce – ‘the farthest-out of all the American sick comedians’3 – has
been banned from entering Britain to perform ‘because in the view of
the Home Secretary it would not be in the public interest’ to allow
him to do so.4 One of Bruce’s provocative and satirical riffs mocks the
insistence of the establishment on censoring images and language
related to love, by comparison with its much greater tolerance of
hatred and violence. He points out that the only context in which
films can show a female breast is when it has been mutilated in a
violent crime, and that ‘unfuck you’ would be a better term of abuse
than the one we commonly use. Society moves slowly, but some shifts
do take place through the 1960s. In 1959, the Obscene Publications
Act had ruled that artistic quality and significance could be taken into
account when making judgments, and in 1960 a prosecution against
Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover is defeated. The
decision reverberates throughout the decade. For some, it marks a
more grown-up attitude to sexuality; for others, the start of a decline
into anti-Christian permissiveness and immorality, which must be
4
Introduction to the 1960s
Education
At the start of the decade, all children take an eleven-plus examination
to decide whether they can go to grammar school. Between 75 and 80
per cent fail the exam and go to a secondary modern school, which
they will probably leave at fifteen. Grammar schools are much better
resourced, and around half their pupils continue into the sixth form,
and go on to university. This division at the age of ten is increasingly
recognised as unfair, and the Labour government rapidly expands the
number of comprehensive schools – though not without considerable
opposition and resistance from those who believe it will lead to a fall
in standards.
Meanwhile, a government report recommends increasing higher
education opportunities by 50 per cent. New universities are created,
and polytechnics are also introduced to counter the universities’
perceived bias towards the arts. Another alternative is art colleges, and
some of these acquire a reputation for radical practices not just in art
but in politics and in ways of living. One of Harold Wilson’s greatest
achievements and legacies is The Open University (or ‘University of
the Air’), which is conceived and created in the late 1960s.
Housing
The early 1960s is a time of severe housing shortages and homeless-
ness in major cities, largely due to slum clearances, and a decline in
the private renting sector. In 1966 the charity Shelter is launched,
following a huge public response to Cathy Come Home, a powerful
and shocking television play about homelessness. In some areas,
housing conditions remain appalling. In the mid-1960s there are
reportedly around three million urban homes without bathrooms or
running hot water, and a report in Sunderland suggests that 90 per
cent of houses there have no indoor toilets, 75 per cent no bath and
50 per cent no running water.
5
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Drugs
In 1960, there are 235 cannabis convictions; in 1964, 544; in 1967,
2,393; and in 1970, 7,520. The number of teenagers registered as
heroin, cocaine or opium addicts triples between 1964 and 1965, and
by the late 1960s heroin addiction in Britain is growing at the fastest
rate in the world. In the second half of the decade, some campaign
for the legalisation of drugs, asserting their power to expand the mind
and open new worlds. They argue that whereas alcohol encourages
violence and hate, dope encourages peace and love. Drug taking
becomes particularly associated with rock music, with hippies and with
utopian visions of a better world, and a persuasive phrase invented by
the maverick American psychiatrist Timothy Leary becomes a slogan:
‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out.’5 Indeed, ‘dropping out’ (from main-
stream society and values) becomes an aspiration and the rebellion of
choice for many educated young people from middle-class homes.
Some drop back in again when their holiday is over, but others create
alternative lifestyles and continue to live in communes.
Environment
In 1960 it is announced that all insurance policies covering property
and personal injuries will now exclude damage ‘arising out of ionising
radiation or contamination by radioactivity emanating from nuclear
fuel or nuclear waste’. Successive governments remain committed to
nuclear power for cheap electricity, but the 1957 disaster at the
Windscale nuclear power station in Cumbria (the full details of which
6
Introduction to the 1960s
are suppressed for thirty years) has caused some soul-searching, and
although a new station opens in Gloucestershire in 1962, the
programme to expand is temporarily slowed. In the mid-1960s,
however, the government announces plans for a new generation of
supposedly safer nuclear power stations based on gas-cooled reactors.
In 1962, the writer and naturalist Rachel Carson publishes Silent
Spring, warning that current industrial practices are polluting the
earth and threatening life forms. Her book effectively launches the
environmental and ecology movement. In Spaceship Earth (published
four years later) James Lovelock puts forward his Gaia Hypothesis,
suggesting that the Earth is a single living organism with a
self-regulating system which is now under threat from human behav-
iour. An environmental disaster in 1967 widens awareness of
environmental issues when the Torrey Canyon runs aground off the
Scilly Isles, spilling thousands of tons of crude oil into the sea and
devastating sealife and coastline. Friends of the Earth is founded in
1969, and environmental campaigns start to put pressure on govern-
ments to change policies.
Women’s liberation
The National Organisation for Women (NOW) is launched in
America in 1966 to campaign for equal rights, and the world has three
women prime ministers (in Ceylon, India and Israel) as well as the
first female astronaut in space. In Britain, Barbara Castle becomes the
first female Secretary of State (though men make up 95 per cent of all
MPs), and it is the 1968 strike for equal pay by women machinists at
Ford which paves the way to the Equal Pay Act. There are no overtly
feminist magazines yet in the UK, though the Guardian launches a
women’s section which ‘deals frankly with topics that otherwise get
wrapped up in cosy euphemisms’ and ‘treats them as free and inde-
pendent equals of men’.6 Some of the political energy of the 1960s
comes to fruition in 1970, which sees the first national meeting of the
women’s liberation movement, the passing of the Equal Pay Act, the
publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and the disrup-
tion of the annual and televised Miss World Beauty Contest by
protesters armed with flour, stink-bombs and water pistols.
7
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Travel
The number of cars on British roads rises during the decade from 2.3
to 11.5 million. Yet even in 1969, less than half of households own
one. In 1960 there are less than 100 miles of motorway across the
whole of the UK; by 1970, the figure has gone up to over 600 (at time
of writing it is well over 2,000). The number of deaths on the road is
high – nearly 150 people are killed just in the four-day Christmas
period of 1959. In 1960, the Ministry of Transport introduces the
first annual MOT test, which becomes increasingly rigorous. A legal
drink-drive limit is introduced for the first time in 1967, along with
breathalyser tests; it is a restriction which draws remarkable levels of
vitriol and venom from the Jeremy Clarksons of the day against
Barbara Castle, the minister responsible. Seat belts are also introduced
to the front seats of new cars, though it is not compulsory to wear
them.
In 1961, Dr Beeching is appointed as Chairman of the British
Railways Board; the annual government subsidy of the network is
around £100 million, and to make the system economically viable,
Beeching proposes massive cuts on unprofitable branch lines,
involving the loss of 5,000 miles of track, more than 2,000 stations
and thousands of jobs. Many rural communities lose access to their
key form of transport, and more traffic takes to the roads.
Electrification of railway lines takes place, and before the end of
the decade steam trains have disappeared. In 1968, the National Bus
Company is created – the forerunner of National Express.
8
Introduction to the 1960s
4. Culture
Music
Even now, many of those who dismiss or trash the ideals of 1960s
counterculture still pay homage to its music. For some, the decade is
synonymous with a succession of mostly white and mostly male bands
who invented rock music; they include the Beatles, the Rolling
Stones, the Who and Cream, and these bands – and others – provide
a collective and totemic soundtrack for a generation which rejected
the values and world-view of its predecessors and dared to dream of a
different way of living. In 1969, two legendary open-air pop festivals
take place, one at Woodstock in New York State, the other on the Isle
9
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
10
Introduction to the 1960s
text a series of poems by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen.
Although the ostensible setting for this oratorio is the 1914–18 war,
the first performance is given to consecrate the new Coventry
Cathedral, built after the destruction of the previous building in Nazi
air raids. But in 1962, the performance speaks also to fears of a
possible future and devastating Third World War between America
and the Soviet Union.
Concerts of Indian classical concerts can be heard on the radio,
and the sitar and tabla find their way into the progressive rock scene.
The lead comes mainly from the Beatles and George Harrison, whose
interest in meditation, yoga and Indian culture inspires an instant
following. Ravi Shankar is one of the top names at the Woodstock
Festival.
Books
The early 1960s sees the publication of several novels focused on
contemporary working-class life – notably Stan Barstow’s A Kind of
Loving and David Storey’s This Sporting Life. Other important writers
who publish during the decade include Kingsley Amis, Anthony
Burgess, John Fowles, William Golding, Graham Greene, Doris
Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell, J. G. Ballard, A. S. Byatt and
Margaret Drabble. Bestsellers include works by Ian Fleming, Alistair
MacLean, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie and Barbara Cartland.
John le Carré’s Smiley novels start to appear from 1961 onwards.
Other notable books of the decade include Catch-22, One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich, Kes, The Bell Jar, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The
Spire, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Crying of Lot 49, Herzog,
The Magic Toyshop and The Third Policeman. Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings makes it on to the W. H. Smith bestseller lists, and becomes a
more or less compulsory text for literate drop-outs. One work of
non-fiction which captures the spirit of the times (it is even serialised
in the Daily Mirror) by challenging previous certainties is Desmond
Morris’s The Naked Ape, which analyses human society – not least our
sexual behaviours – in terms which emphasise our closeness to the
animal kingdom.
There is a big increase in the number of books being published,
11
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Poetry
In June 1965 the Royal Albert Hall is the site for the so-called
International Poetry Incarnation, an extraordinary evening of
American and British Beat poetry which sells out the venue’s 7,000
seats. For some it marks the arrival of a counterculture, and it is also a
significant moment in the development of performance poetry.
Readers at the Albert Hall include Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Logue,
Michael Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell and George MacBeth. The second
half of the decade also sees the rise of the Merseyside poets, Brian
Patten, Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, though for many, the
most important British (or British-based) poets of the decade would
include John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
Sport
The highlight of the decade (in one part of Britain at least) is England
winning the 1966 football World Cup, after staggering their way
through to the semi-finals. We might have seen it coming three years
earlier when they implausibly defeat a Rest of the World team
including Yashin, Pelé, Di Stéfano, Puskás, Denis Law and Eusébio.
In successive years, Celtic and then Manchester United win the
European Cup to break the decade-long stranglehold of Spanish,
Italian and Portuguese teams.
In tennis, the 1961 women’s singles final at Wimbledon is an
all-British affair (Angela Mortimer beating Christine Truman) and in
1969 Ann Jones wins the same event. The best showings by British
men are in 1961 and 1967 when Mike Sangster and Roger Taylor
(respectively) reach the semi-finals. Until 1968, when the ‘open’ era
12
Introduction to the 1960s
13
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
14
Introduction to the 1960s
5. Media
15
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
16
Introduction to the 1960s
Film
With no home videos or rentals, and television offering so few chan-
nels and not permitted to broadcast recent films, cinema visits are a
regular agenda item. Unlike almost everything else in Britain (shops,
theatres, sports stadia) cinemas are open on Sundays – indeed, it is
usually the day their programme changes. Most cinemas have only
one screen, but towns may have several venues. Films are licensed
with U, A or X certificates, the latter indicating adults only, the A
requiring adult supervision and the U open to all. A programme typi-
cally involves a double-bill of features, often with a travelogue or other
short film as well. Audiences can come in at any point and sit (or
doze) through as many showings as they want – though on quiet days
it is not unknown for reels to be shown in the wrong order, without
anyone appearing to notice. American films dominate, but there are
some notable British commercial successes as well, including several
James Bond films, the Carry On comedies and a couple of Beatles’
films. The early part of the decade sees a continuation of the gritty
depictions of working-class life which had begun in the 1950s, with
films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life,
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Billy Liar. Joseph
Losey makes two powerful films with screenplays by Harold Pinter,
while Edward Bond works on the screenplay for Antonioni’s Blow-Up.
In 1968, comes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and the following year Lindsay Anderson’s extraordinary If...., in
which a group of schoolboys (led by Malcolm McDowell) destroy
their public school and all it represents by gunning down the staff and
parents attending a Founders’ Day service. Many of us cheer them on.
Art
In 1960, London holds an exhibition of abstract art, defined as work
which is ‘without explicit reference to events outside the painting’.12
‘Pop Art’ becomes another key term, as artists challenge not just forms
and conventions but principles and ideals. In America, Andy Warhol
bases much of his two-dimensional work on photographic reproduc-
tions of mass-media advertisements or labels from products – notably
including Campbell’s soup tins and Coca-Cola bottles. His sculptures
17
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Leisure
The decade sees a massive growth of interest in DIY and gardening.
Travel agents’ shops start to appear on the high street, as more people
take package holidays abroad; Spain is the most popular destination.
Some fly, but coach also remains a popular option. Yet although the
number of traditional British seaside holidays and trips to holiday
camps declines, in the middle of the decade only 4 per cent of British
holidays are foreign package trips, and even in 1971 the figure is less
than 8.5 per cent. Caravanning becomes a popular form of British
holiday.
There is no National Lottery, but a 1962 survey shows 75 per cent
households taking part in weekly football pools. Many people have
premium bonds (introduced in the late 1950s) with monthly winners
chosen by Ernie (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment).
Architecture
In 1965, London’s Post Office Tower is proudly opened by govern-
ment ministers. It becomes the tallest building in London, changing
the city’s skyline for ever, and while the height and design serve its
function, it is also an architectural statement. Yet the decade will be
more associated with the concrete brutalism still visible in most towns
and cities today, and typified in London’s South Bank complex of the
Hayward Gallery, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. It
is also the decade of ‘new towns’ constructed and expanded to cope
with rising populations at Redditch, Telford, Runcorn, Skelmersdale,
Warrington, Peterborough and Milton Keynes. As well as the ‘streets
in the sky’, it is a decade of shopping centres (Birmingham’s Bull Ring
is the first to open in 1964), flyovers, underpasses, subways and
multi-storey car parks, as towns and cities are increasingly shaped
around cars rather than pedestrians. In 1969, little red and green men
appear on traffic lights to control our pace and movements further.
18
Introduction to the 1960s
Newspapers
In 1960, more people in Britain read national newspapers than in any
other European country except Sweden. The most popular daily paper
is the Daily Mirror, which is selling around 5 million copies a day,
followed by the Express (4.3 million), the Mail (2.6 million), the
Herald (1.4 million) and the Telegraph (1.2 million). In 1964 the
left-leaning Daily Herald disappears and is replaced by the Sun, a
broadsheet which initially leans in the same direction. Sunday colour
supplements start in the early 1960s, and in 1966 The Times puts
news on its front page for the first time, replacing its traditional
columns of notices and advertisements. The Guardian advertises itself
as the Avant-Guardian, but becomes better known as the Grauniad on
account of its frequent misprints. There is no Independent yet. In
1969 the Sun is sold to Rupert Murdoch and becomes a tabloid.
Comedy
At the start of the decade, the airwaves feature several ‘service come-
dies’, including The Army Game and Tell It to the Marines, which look
back with some nostalgia to the Second World War. Tony Hancock is
a household name for his radio shows in the 1950s, but his most
remembered television episode – ‘The Blood Donor’ – is not made
until 1961. Hard-hitting satire of a kind not previously seen on televi-
sion appears with That Was the Week That Was, and some elements are
maintained in The Frost Report. Meanwhile Hancock abandons his
writers, Galton and Simpson, and they invent Steptoe and Son. Harry
Worth is a television clown, and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
produce Not Only . . . But Also. By far the most controversial – and
arguably the funniest – comedy of the second half of the decade is Till
Death Us Do Part, with its central figure of Alf Garnett displaying his
ignorant and reactionary political views yet somehow attracting our
sympathies even while we condemn him. Right at the end of the
decade, Monty Python’s Flying Circus brilliantly reinvigorates the
absurdist brand.
19
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
6. Political events
1960
A wave of anti-semitic attacks occur in Britain, Germany and else-
where. The Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is captured and sent
for trial in Israel. An American reconnaissance plane is shot down over
the Soviet Union. The Congo achieves independence from Belgium.
In apartheid South Africa, the Sharpeville massacre occurs when white
armed police fire on unarmed black protesters opposing the racist
‘pass laws’.
The Conservative British prime minister, Harold Macmillan,
makes a speech in South Africa about ‘the winds of change’ blowing
through Africa; it is seen as heavily critical of that country’s white
minority regime, and he meets significant opposition both in South
Africa and within his own party. This leads to the formation of the
right-wing Monday Club. At home, National Service is abolished,
and the Labour Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, resists attempts by CND
to make him adopt a policy opposing nuclear weapons.
1961
J. F. Kennedy becomes president of the USA, succeeding Eisenhower.
East Germany closes its border with the West and begins constructing
the Berlin Wall. American forces invade Cuba in a failed attempt to
overthrow President Castro (the Bay of Pigs). The USSR detonates an
enormous H-bomb in the Arctic, and there are meetings between
American and Soviet officials to discuss disarmament; meanwhile, the
Soviet astronaut Yuri Gargarin becomes the first man in space – a
defeat for the USA in the race to the stars. Gargarin visits Britain – his
reception in London is low-key but in Manchester he is fêted and the
Soviet flag flies over the town hall. The USA sends military aid to
assist South Vietnam in its civil war against Communist North
Vietnam. Cyprus achieves independence. South Africa leaves the
Commonwealth. Eichmann is found guilty at his trial in Jerusalem.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) holds a mass
rally in Trafalgar Square. Trials begin in London of members of a spy
ring accused of passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Britain
20
Introduction to the 1960s
1962
The USA and USSR come desperately close to nuclear (world) war
over Cuba. The former establishes military command in South
Vietnam. In Israel, Eichmann is hanged. In America, the first black
man enrols at the University of Mississipi, having been banned by the
state governor; he is attacked and riots ensue, which are ended only
when President Kennedy sends in 5,000 troops to restore order.
Harold Macmillan agrees to allow American Polaris missiles to be
sited on British submarines – effectively abandoning the idea of
Britain continuing as an independent nuclear power. Uganda and
Tanganyika become independent of Britain. The government passes
the Commonwealth Immigration Act to limit the numbers of people
entering the country from its former colonies. With his government
increasingly unpopular and his economic policies in disarray, Harold
Macmillan sacks his chancellor and a third of his cabinet in what
becomes known as ‘the night of the long knives’.13 The move fails to
restore his popularity.
1963
Increasingly violent racial conflicts take place in America, with serious
riots in Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King is arrested, and
also makes his famous ‘I have a dream . . .’ speech.14 The USA, USSR
and Britain agree to ban nuclear tests, and a direct ‘hot line’ is estab-
lished between the White House and the Kremlin to diffuse future
nuclear confrontations. In November, President Kennedy is assassi-
nated in Texas. His killer is subsequently murdered on live TV. The
Organisation of African Unity is established in Addis Ababa with
thirty-two African countries joining.
21
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
1964
Lyndon Johnson is elected as president of the USA and more
American troops are sent to fight in Vietnam. In the Soviet Union,
Nikita Khrushchev is deposed by a peaceful coup and replaced by
Leonid Brezhnev. In Africa, Kenya becomes a republic under Jomo
Kenyatta, while Tanzania and Zambia are created with Julius Nyerere
and Kenneth Kaunda as presidents. Ian Smith is elected as leader of
the remaining part of Rhodesia which remains under British authority.
Arafat becomes leader of an Arab guerrilla force, Al Fatah. There are
race riots in New York and other American cities. President Johnson
signs the Civil Rights Act, outlawing racial discrimination and segre-
gation; but in Mississippi, three civil rights workers are murdered by
the Ku Klux Klan. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is sentenced to
life imprisonment.
In Britain, new anti-drug laws are passed. There are violent clashes
between mods and rockers at seaside resorts on bank holidays. Mary
Whitehouse launches a Christian ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign. The
Labour Party under Harold Wilson narrowly wins the general elec-
tion, ending thirteen years of Tory government.
22
Introduction to the 1960s
1965
The USSR admits supplying arms to North Vietnam. There is heavy
bombing of North Vietnam by the Americans, and some US planes
are shot down. In America itself, there are significant demonstrations
against the war. There are more bitter clashes over race and civil rights,
and Malcolm X (the American black Muslim leader) is shot dead in
New York.
In Africa there is a revolution in Algeria, and Gambia becomes
independent. Humberto Delgado, who had founded a National
Liberation Movement in Portugal and stood for the presidency against
the country’s right-wing dictator, is murdered by Portuguese secret
police. The murder takes place shortly after Delgado has been refused
a visa for entry to the UK. In Rhodesia, Ian Smith declares unilateral
Empire
In 1962, a former US Secretary of State declares in a widely reported
speech that ‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role’. The
process of break-up and independence for former colonies had started
before the 1960s, and it is inevitable that the remaining countries will soon
follow. Nations which achieve freedom from Britain during this decade
include British Somaliland, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, British
Cameroons, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Western Samoa,
Kenya, Zambia, Zanzibar, Malta, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Gambia,
Mauritius, Swaziland, Aden, Fiji and Tonga.
The case of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) is very different. In the mid-
1960s it is ruled over by a white minority government headed by Ian
Smith, which has no intention of sharing power or wealth with a black
population which outnumbers whites by more than twenty to one. Britain
will grant independence to former subject nations only on condition that
majority rule is guaranteed, but in 1965 Smith unilaterally declares inde-
pendence (UDI), confident Britain can do nothing about it. Harold Wilson
employs a mixture of trade sanctions and negotiations with Smith to try to
resolve the situation. None of these is successful. The United Nations
endorses the sanctions, but a small number of countries (including South
Africa) break the embargo, and it will be the end of the 1970s, following a
long and bloody civil war, before the white minority finally cedes power
and Zimbabwe is formed. It is a legacy which continues to be deadly
today.
23
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
1966
In China, the ruling Communist Party declares a Cultural Revolution
and imposes repressive and hard-line policies. Indira Gandhi becomes
prime minister in India. The South African prime minister, Hendrik
Verwoerd, is assassinated, but is succeeded by the equally right-wing
John Vorster. There is fighting between Israel and Jordan, and a mili-
tary coup takes place in Ghana. Albert Speer (Hitler’s architect) is
released after twenty years in Spandau prison. American Gemini
missions begin to prepare for a Moon landing, and the USSR lands an
unmanned probe on the Moon.
In Britain, Wilson shrewdly calls an early general election and
increases Labour’s majority from 4 to 97. He admits his government
has been ‘blown off course’ by the worsening economic situation and
announces a ‘standstill’ in wages and prices. In Dublin, an IRA bomb
destroys Nelson’s Pillar, and there are sectarian killings in Northern
Ireland, following the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising.
1967
Following growing tensions, Israel launches a military attack against
Egypt and the Six-Day War occurs. The Arab powers are defeated,
and Israel takes control of significant new territories. Heavy American
bombing of Hanoi in North Vietnam leads to big anti-war protests in
Washington. Martin Luther King leads an anti-war march, and some
people refuse their draft papers. Race riots continue in America, and
there is a Black Power conference. During a visit to Canada, General
de Gaulle calls for the freeing of Quebec. Che Guevara is killed in
24
Introduction to the 1960s
1968
America is shaken by two more political assassinations – those of the
black civil rights and religious leader Martin Luther King (a former
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize), and Robert J. Kennedy, a senator
standing for the Democratic presidential nomination, and brother of
J. F. Kennedy. Richard Nixon becomes president, promising to end
the war in Vietnam. There are student uprisings across Europe, but
especially in France (‘les événements’) where demonstrators occupy the
Sorbonne and take control of other important public buildings. The
protests are partly about Vietnam, but more broadly embody an
attack from the Left on the injustices inherent within a capitalist
system. There is extensive fighting in Parisian streets between the
authorities and the protesters, who include students and workers. The
army is called in, and De Gaulle returns early from a foreign trip to
deal with the crisis. Meanwhile, Russian tanks invade Czechoslovakia,
one of its satellite Communist states which had begun to institute a
programme of liberalising reforms. Alexander Dubček is removed
from office, and the so-called Prague Spring is forcibly ended.
In Britain, there are riots in Grosvenor Square at the American
Embassy following large-scale protests against the Vietnam War. The
government makes a £716 million cut in public spending in an effort
to address the trade gap, and increases taxation by £923 million.
25
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
26
Introduction to the 1960s
1969
American astronauts are the first to walk on the Moon. De Gaulle
resigns as president of France and Georges Pompidou succeeds him.
Two American military officers stand trial for their part in the My Lai
massacre – an atrocity committed by US soldiers against a village of
unarmed women and children, and an event so shocking that it helps
turn public opinion against the war. The American withdrawal from
Vietnam begins.
Race
Race – and prejudice – is a key area of social conflict in Britain in the
1960s, with sections of the white population fearful of the changes that
immigration may bring, and unwilling to question racial stereotypes. In
1962, the Conservative government introduces a Commonwealth
Immigration Act which limits the rights of entry for Commonwealth pass-
port holders to those able to obtain a work voucher. Labour opposes the
Act, but once in office, reduces the number of available vouchers, and in
1968 introduces a second Act which requires that successful applicants
must have a parent or grandparent who was born in (or is a citizen of) the
UK. In 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell makes an infamous
speech warning of the threat to Britain posed by (black) immigration, and
predicting a racial war and rivers ‘foaming with much blood’ unless the
government not only cuts immigration but puts pressure on those already
here to return ‘home’. Powell also attacks the Labour government’s Race
Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, which have made it illegal to discrimi-
nate ‘on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins’.
Although his party leader, Ted Heath, expels him, Powell earns discon-
certingly large amounts of media and public support, with thousands of
workers marching and striking to demonstrate their agreement. The
Labour government decides to introduces a Commonwealth Immigrants
Act to restrict the number of Asians able to enter Britain from Kenya and
Uganda.
Racial abuse and discrimination are widespread – visible not least in
the humour. One of the most controversial television comedies of the
period is Till Death Us Do Part, written by the left-wing playwright Johnny
Speight, but featuring the deeply racist and offensive character of Alf
Garnett. While Speight and Warren Mitchell – who plays the role – detest
everything Garnett stands for, this is self-evidently not the case for all
audiences, and a character who is supposedly being ridiculed becomes
hard to hate.
27
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
28
CHAPTER 1
THEATRE IN THE 1960s
29
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
For the actor Ian Bannen, who had recently played the title role in
John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance at the Royal Court, the
problem was clear: ‘In England there is really so little following for the
drama that sometimes you feel you are barking up the wrong tree if
you believe that, as an actor, you have some social function. I mean,
everybody raves about Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance now, but hardly a
soul came to see it.’ The theatre, said Bannen, was doing its best to
initiate change, but audiences – ‘still so often composed of old ladies’
– lagged behind: ‘You hear the most insane remarks from the stalls,
and you wonder what the hell we are all doing. In some beautiful
scene, where everything is going right and the meaning is quite clear,
you hear remarks like, “I wish she’d stop dragging her leg!”’3
Bannen’s perspective is a reminder that in assessing and under-
standing the theatre of any period it is not enough to look only at
what was occurring on the stage; we need also to pay attention to
what was happening in the auditorium (and beyond) and in the press.
If you were watching from the right place, the 1960s would prove to
be a hugely exciting and groundbreaking decade for new writing and
performance; but from other angles the view might seem altogether
more restricted. When the decade dawned, My Fair Lady had already
been running for two years in Drury Lane, and it would keep going
for well over 2,000 performances. Oliver!, which premiered in the
West End in June 1960, would enjoy an even longer run, as would
The Sound of Music, which opened in May 1961. Meanwhile, The
Mousetrap spanned the decade – as it has every one since. ‘How big is
the audience which is prepared to assist in the growth of the theatre
by supporting the dissenters, the off-beat and the experimental?’
worried Encore.4 It was not alone in its concern. ‘The young drama-
tists are full of energy, are fresh, are often very amusing,’ wrote the
theatre critic of the Manchester Guardian, ‘but they don’t in fact write
many plays which give great pleasure.’ On the contrary, ‘older regulars
are alienated’ and younger audiences ‘come away feeling very often
30
Theatre in the 1960s
1960–64
The most revolutionary director of the late 1950s and early 1960s –
probably both aesthetically and politically – was Joan Littlewood.
Based at the Theatre Royal in the East End of London, Littlewood
had established Theatre Workshop as a creative ensemble which
brought innovative approaches to its work on both classical and new
plays, and to the training of actors. In 1961, however, Littlewood
announced that she was abandoning the British theatre (albeit briefly,
as it turned out), frustrated by its economic structures and their
impact on the company’s work. Theatre Workshop’s problem was not
lack of an audience but the opposite; several of their recent produc-
tions had transferred successfully into the West End, but this had
inevitably prioritised commercial gain over creative development.
Explaining her reasons for leaving, Littlewood accused the West End
of having ‘plundered our talent and diluted our ideas’, and expressed
her distaste for a culture where financial profit rather than art was the
driving and irresistible imperative, and where theatre ‘belongs to the
managers or the landlords’.6 Encore published a paean of praise for
what she had achieved:
31
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
32
Theatre in the 1960s
33
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Some theatre makers were asking even broader questions about the
place and role of theatre in a modern society. What was its function
and its value? What could it contribute? And would it really matter if
live theatre disappeared? ‘If you are honest with yourself, you know in
your heart of hearts that what you do is totally unnecessary,’ wrote
Peter Brook in 1961.
The terrible truth is that if in this country you closed all the
theatres the only loss would be that of a well-bred community
feeling that a certain civilised amenity – like buses or tapwater
– was lacking . . . There would be one less subject to talk about,
maybe. But would there be a real sustained crying-out, a feeling
of lack?14
34
Theatre in the 1960s
35
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Shakespeare
36
Theatre in the 1960s
Italian director Franco Zeffirelli had been ‘invited to put new life into
Romeo and Juliet’ at the Old Vic.21 According to reviews, the produc-
tion downplayed the lyrical evocation of young love and instead
‘concentrated on the themes of youth and violence’, and ‘the lack of
understanding between one generation and the next’. Juliet – played
by a young Judi Dench – was given ‘a beatnik heart’, and the produc-
tion was praised above all for the ‘authenticity’ of the world it evoked
– a world in which ‘children scuffle in the alleys and vendors bawl
their wares’. This was ‘Romeo with the gloves off ’, with characters
who ‘seem to have stepped out of a painting by some Italian Breughel’.
22
Five years later, the Polish theatre writer and critic Jan Kott
published a book which was to prove hugely influential, entitled
Shakespeare Our Contemporary.23 Kott cited Shakespeare in relation to
current political and philosophical arguments, and to absurdist play-
wrights such as Beckett and Ionesco. Peter Brook made a similar
connection in an article called ‘Endgame as King Lear or How to Stop
Worrying and Love Beckett’.24 Meanwhile, the Royal Court director
Lindsay Anderson rewrote parts of Julius Caesar in order to ‘improve’
it, declaring that ‘There is no more exciting and contemporary writer
now represented on the London stage than William Shakespeare.’25
Kott’s analysis caught a mood of the times, and suddenly
Shakespeare was found to fit comfortably within a Theatre of Cruelty.
Brook’s landmark production of King Lear, for example, excised a
passage in which two servants express their disapproval of the vicious
blinding of Gloucester they have just witnessed (here carried out by
Cornwall using the spur of his boot). Instead, Gloucester is ‘pushed
from side to side by a group of servants as he tries to stagger away’.26
But Kitchin, whose book was published in the same year as Kott’s,
took a very different view. He was contemptuous of such ‘distortions
of Shakespeare’, which he saw as misguided attempts to bring the
Bard ‘into line with popular taste’ and make him ‘conform to the
trends of pulp literature and mass-media drama’. For Kitchin, this was
‘Pop Shakespeare’, ‘Shakespeare packaged and marketed in such a way
as to reach people living at our tempo, in our world, inhabiting our
environment of supermarkets, advertisements and television’. He
attacked recent productions of Henry V which had adopted a less
37
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Staging reality
38
Theatre in the 1960s
But few of the regular theatre critics shared his enthusiasm. ‘The
subject of decadence seems to have produced a play form which is
itself decadent – and boring into the bargain’, wrote one; ‘an evening
39
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
40
Theatre in the 1960s
our colonial policy, often in the way our police treat an under-
sized enemy, and daily in our uniquely savage yellow Press. The
mood that once drew us to Tyburn and Bedlam was shamefully
revived at The Connection, and the cast, nearly all American
and therefore unused to such barbarism, looked as if it had
been hit between the eyes.35
41
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Arguably, the satire here looks backwards to the past, but in a more
contemporary sketch, a government representative reassures a women’s
institute meeting – in essentially the same voice as that of the army
officer above – that there is no need to worry about nuclear attack:
Beyond the Fringe was comedy for the middle and intellectual
classes. When it opened in London in 1961, The Times noted that it
‘smacks a little of the Third Programme’.40 But the new tone and
irreverent attitude towards the establishment and the powerful
reflected shifts in British society; according to one review, the show
had ‘pulled the contemporary world to shreds’.41 Indeed, much of the
satire was directed against the very people it attracted. ‘We audiences
have tasted our own blood and liked it.’ Where British revue had
previously seemed safe and comfortable, this felt very different. ‘One
by one they hold up by the tail our dead prejudices, our diseased
snobberies, our wounded bigotries like so many skinned rats.’42 Some
critics found the show took a definite political stance which targeted
‘right-wing Tories, VC’s, transcendentalists, Empire Loyalists, Lord
Beaverbrook, and Civil Defence workers’.43 Others thought it lacked
any principles and cared only about one thing: ‘Laughter is what they
are after, and they get it.’44 Either way, Beyond the Fringe ran in
42
Theatre in the 1960s
London for over five years and two thousand performances, and
reports speak of audiences being helpless with laughter. Why was it so
popular? In a perceptive analysis written at the time, Michael Frayn
suggested that the show seemed almost to be responding to an
unspoken and previously unrecognised need:
The success of Beyond the Fringe spawned a new wave of satire, not
least the magazine Private Eye and the revolutionary television series
That Was the Week That Was. As Frayn observed, not all of it was good,
and satire quickly lost its ability to surprise:
Theatres of war
43
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
success of Beyond the Fringe in daring to attack cows which had once
been sacred. Joan Littlewood’s most celebrated production opened at
Stratford East in March, transferring to Wyndham’s Theatre in June.
Some accused Oh, What a Lovely War! of political naivety and selling
out to commercial values; they claimed that audiences went home
cheerfully singing escapist songs which made light of the horrors of
the First World War. Others thought it brilliantly combined political
punch with popular entertainment. The immediate inspiration had
been a radio programme of First World War songs, superficially cheery
but often deeply layered with irony. ‘We’re here because we’re here
because we’re here because we’re here’ to the tune of ‘Auld
Acquaintance’; ‘Gassed last night and gassed the night before’ to
‘Drunk Last Night’. We witness naive young men seduced into
signing up by a female music hall performer who promises ‘to make a
man of any one of you’; the lies of media propaganda which persuades
English and German women back home to make identical assump-
tions and accusations (‘You know what they’re doing now? . . .
Melting corpses for glycerine’ . . . ‘Weisst du, was sie jetzt tun? . . . Sie
schmelzen Körper für Glyzerin’). The war itself is presented as a kind of
seaside entertainment, performed by a pierrot troupe on the prome-
nade. Most unsettling were the juxtapositions of generals celebrating a
‘success’, or insisting on the cheerfulness of wounded and dying
soldiers, with authentic photographs and unadorned facts projected
on to a Newspanel (‘somme battle ends . . . total loss 1,332,000
men . . . gain nil’ . . . ‘average life of a machine gunner under
attack . . . four minutes’).46
Oh, What a Lovely War! was seen by some people as ‘anti-British
propaganda’ – and it certainly was an attack on aspects of Britishness.
Yet, with few exceptions, the critics enthused. The Daily Mail called it
‘a devastating musical satire’, and endorsed its portrayal of General
Haig as ‘the villain of the piece’ – a man who ‘in any decently ordered
society, would have been employed, under the supervision of an intel-
ligent half-wit, to run the very simplest sort of public lavatory.
Instead, he ran a war.’47 Most critics treated Oh, What a Lovely War! as
a play about the past – safely remote. However, others recognised that
its implications went beyond the events of 1914–18: ‘It attacks
44
Theatre in the 1960s
everything that is sacred and decent’; ‘It is an all-out attack upon our
Christian faith.’ Therein lay its danger: ‘What a picture of our country
to give to those who come to our theatre from abroad at this time of
year, and what a misbegotten philosophy to feed to the hundreds of
younger people of our own country who appear to flock to this kind
of thing.’48
From a contrasting political perspective, A. J. P. Taylor – a leading
and well-known historian – adopted the play’s title for his own vale-
dictory lecture at Oxford University, and praised the production for
‘doing what the historians have failed to do’ in providing a valid anal-
ysis of what the war was about. ‘Stage Says It Better than Historians’,
as the headline in The Times put it, in reporting his lecture. But
Taylor’s main point pulled the politics out of the past and firmly into
the present of the nuclear age and contemporary debate. The key
principle in the argument for developing nuclear weapons – the justi-
fication for spending millions of pounds on weaponry and missiles
which everyone hoped would never be used – was that their very
existence would act as a ‘deterrent’, preventing an enemy from
attacking because they would know that you would respond in kind.
In discussing Theatre Workshop’s production, it was this principle
which Taylor sought to expose:
The cause of the First World War was the deterrent: the belief
that if you are strongly enough armed you can prevent a war
. . . When you say if you have the deterrent you can prevent a
war you have the example of the First World War to show you
that you are wrong. Those who are so bitterly preparing against
the third world war have it there. They are merely speeding the
pressing of the button, the explosion of the world.
45
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
46
Theatre in the 1960s
Tanky later returns talking and dancing with the charred corpse,
though the others claim it can’t be a British soldier because it doesn’t
47
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
look like one, and because it screamed too much (‘No British squaddie
goes on like that’). The script was also laced with a dark humour and
sexuality (two soldiers compare ‘mirages’ and masturbate to the music
of a belly-dance tune, while the loading and firing of a gun is narrated
in terms of a sexual encounter with a woman’s body). Even Winston
Churchill – the ultimate icon of Britain’s glory and military success –
is mauled by the play. In one scene, a touring comedian sits on the
lavatory with puppets of Churchill and Eisenhower on either hand,
conversing together: Churchill is clearly spoiling for a battle and
expresses himself ‘determined to get as much fun and personal satis-
faction as I possibly can out of this war and bring my rich and rousing
personality to bear upon the men and women engaged in the
day-to-day jobs of battle’.54
Wood’s play was proposed for production at the National Theatre.
But it was one thing to question the conduct, and perhaps even the
values of the 1914 war; the Second World War was more recent and
clearly constructed as ‘Britain’s finest hour’. Moreover, there was a risk
that the tone and message of the play might promote opposition to
current and future wars:
48
Theatre in the 1960s
Beyond words
49
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
the Daily Mail,59 while for Kenneth Tynan it was ‘a feminist docu-
ment’ and ‘an attack on the dominant male and the submissive female
who puts up with him’.60 Or, as the Evening Standard headline put it
(in what was unlikely to have been intended as a compliment): ‘only a
woman could write about sex like this’.61 The Royal Court also staged
John Osborne’s two satirical Plays for England, one attacking royalty
and the other press corruption, though his attack on English society
was not generally well reviewed: ‘his hatred has the effect of blinding
his eyes, choking his throat, and clogging his pen’ and ‘Osborne
Misses with Both Barrels’ were not untypical judgements.62
Alongside Arden’s Workhouse Donkey and Theatre Workshop’s Oh,
What a Lovely War!, 1963 brought Spike Milligan’s irreverent and
occasionally political comedy The Bed-Sitting Room, as well as Skyvers,
a study of a disaffected generation of young people in their final days
at a comprehensive school, written by the Jamaican-born playwright
Barry Reckord. The RSC– after long arguments and extensive negoti-
ation with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office – gave the first British
performances of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Representative, a highly contro-
versial German play and ‘a violent indictment of Pope Pius XII, and
tacitly, of Christianity itself, that the former made no overt gesture to
prevent the wholesale massacre of Jews by Hitler’.63 Performances of
The Representative were approved only after the theatre agreed to
insert material in the programme contesting these claims and telling a
different version of history. Other highlights of 1964 included John
Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, Joe Orton’s provocative first play
Entertaining Mr Sloane and Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun,
with its notorious mime sequence in which Spanish conquistadors
scale the Andes to invade a kingdom ruled over by Robert Stephens as
Atahuallpa, the Sun God of the Incas. In a play which invites us to
contrast European rationalism with the creative innocence of the
pre-civilised, we witness a mimed massacre in which ‘wave upon wave
of Indians are slaughtered’ by Spanish soldiers, until ‘a vast blood-
stained cloth’ billows over the stage as ‘howling Indians . . . rush off;
their screams fill the theatre’.64 Even here, perhaps, we can catch an
echo of Artaud. Altogether more physically restrained was the
National Theatre’s production of Beckett’s Play – in which a man and
50
Theatre in the 1960s
two women buried to their necks in urns recount through three sepa-
rate and intercutting monologues the mundane story of an affair
– speaking without pause or expression, and as if under interrogation
by a spotlight which provokes their speech.
Such examples make the complaints about the lack of new plays
somewhat surprising. However, there was also a growing challenge to
the prevailing assumption that all theatre has at its heart the play-
wright and the word. In January 1963, the experimental director and
writer Charles Marowitz suggested that ‘the theatre is moving towards
movement and silence’. Following Artaud, he declared that a new art
form was developing in which ‘imagery will be paramount, words
relegated to the level of sound-objects, and gesture given a new and
vital pertinence’.65 Of course, such calls and predictions had been
made before, but they had had relatively little effect on theatre in
Britain. A few months later, Marowitz launched a more vehement
attack: ‘In fleeting moments of clarity, I suddenly see the contempo-
rary theatre as a mouldy, gnarled and arthritic old man decked out in
the latest Savile Row fashions’, he taunted; ‘No matter what shape it
assumes, its stilted gait and tired old accent give it away. It thinks in
old frames, moves in beaten paths.’ The problem was not simply a
matter of ‘crusty old playwrights’, but ‘the entire diction of that
theatre which no longer holds up; which begs to be annihilated’.66
In the same month, Marowitz was part of a performance event
which was arguably the first example of ‘Action Theatre’ or ‘a
happening’ to occur in Britain, and which reached the front pages of
the newspapers. In September 1963, everyone who was anyone in the
world of contemporary theatre attended an International Drama
Conference in Edinburgh, timed to coincide with the Festival. The
many contributors included Brook, Wesker, Tynan, Albee, Arden,
Littlewood, Pinter and Priestley, and one speaker, the playwright John
Mortimer, confidently told the conference ‘that writers should be
grateful that at present they were in a writer’s theatre’.67 Marowitz was
unimpressed by the level of discussion and ideas on display:
The week had been filled with intellectual belching and critical
one-upmanship . . . each delegate had his own definition of
51
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
52
Theatre in the 1960s
Inevitably, it was the ‘Nude Girl Incident’ that attracted the press.71
The City Provost for Edinburgh described the disruption as the ‘irre-
sponsible actions of a few people sick in mind and heart’, while
Kesselaar, who had been paid four guineas for her role, was duly
charged with having acted ‘in a shameless and indecent manner’ and
John Calder, as conference organiser, with failing to prevent the inci-
dent.72 But performance art, or performance as intervention, had
arrived.
53
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
According to Plays and Players, 1964 was the year when ‘Theatre of
Cruelty replaced Theatre of the Absurd as the number one talking
point’.73 In January and February, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz
staged an experimental season at the LAMDA theatre club, a rotating
series of short plays, including Artaud’s own extraordinary Spurt of
Blood. Later in the year, the project fed directly into the company’s
mainhouse season at the Aldwych, and it was this which stirred up
bitter opposition. In June, the RSC revived Afore Night Come, which
was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain only on condition that ‘the
severing of the murdered man’s head . . . takes place not only
“upstage” of a tree but also with a screen of large boxes hiding it from
the audience’.74 In August they gave the premiere of Peter Weiss’s The
Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the
Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis
de Sade (or Marat/Sade), a text influenced both by Brecht and Artaud,
in which the actors play the inmates of an asylum, who are themselves
performing a play about the French Revolution, in which Marat is
stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday. Taking lessons from
the Living Theatre, Brook aimed for an immersive performance with
no clear start or finish, and the audience both enter and leave the
auditorium with the inhabitants of the asylum on stage.
Marat/Sade carries an intellectual debate between its two principal
characters, but it was above all the visual imagery which gave the
performance its impact: a mass guillotining with buckets of blue and
red blood to represent aristocracy and commoners, for example, and
the whipping of a half-naked de Sade by Corday, carried out with her
hair. Reviewers called it ‘two hours of agony’; ‘an assault on the senses,
emotions and intellect that never stops’; ‘a bloodbath violently
attacking the emotions and sensibilities of any audience’.75 The Times
said it was an ’Ambitious Example of Theatre of Cruelty’; the
Guardian that it would ‘send Aunt Edna round the bend’ but was ‘the
best theatre to be seen in London at the moment’; Bernard Levin in
the Daily Mail described it as ‘one of the most amazing plays I’ve ever
seen’, which came ‘as close as this imperfect world is ever likely to get
54
Theatre in the 1960s
55
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
and Dad hate ’em. They would never dream of taking the chil-
dren.’ Why, he asked, were theatres abandoning what people really
wanted?
56
Theatre in the 1960s
57
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
1965–69
Nothing that the two major companies are doing eradicates the
fact that the London theatre is in a dismal state. Managements
are more cautious and conservative than ever before . . .
holding their crumbling fort with thrillers and the threat of old
Coward stand-bys . . . looking more and more towards the
family comedy and the ‘happy’ musical. One has nothing
against either form; what is distressing is the monstrous
imbalance.90
58
Theatre in the 1960s
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Documentary theatre
‘It was overdue. It was inevitable that it should come. And sure
enough it has arrived.’ So declared Plays and Players at the end of
1966.105 The ‘it’ was ‘Theatre of Fact’, for documentary theatre was
‘now fashionably in’.106 Although there was no shared understanding
of what the term meant – both Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen and Peter
Shaffer’s Royal Hunt were described as ‘documentary’ by some critics107
– the form had a history in Britain that went back at least thirty years
to Unity Theatre and its Living Newspapers. But if its definition and
boundaries remained necessarily vague, it was a genre which was
indeed beginning to take centre stage. At Stoke’s Victoria Theatre,
Peter Cheeseman had already presented a series of musical documen-
taries about local history, researched and authored by the company.
Moreover, Cheeseman was adamant that staging the past was anything
but a retreat from the present: ‘I find that by using historical subjects
one can comment with greater freedom on contemporary situations,’
he insisted. Following The Jolly Potters and The Staffordshire Rebels, his
most successful and acclaimed production was The Knotty, staged in
1966, which focused on the history of railways in the region, but has
as ‘its real subject . . . the impact of science on a community’.108
Cheeseman was far from alone in the field. Oh, What a Lovely War!
was one of several productions by Theatre Workshop to which the
slippery ‘documentary’ label could be applied. In 1964, Oxford
University’s Experimental Theatre Club presented Hang Down Your
Head and Die, an attack on capital punishment which presented a
range of materials in the form of a circus ‘where the clowns are
macabre figures who build gallows, shift scenery, or become judge and
jury as occasion demands’.109 The performance had seemed likely to
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be banned until its case was taken up by MPs and members of the
House of Lords. In 1965, the RSC planned to produce a documen-
tary drama about the 1926 General Strike, closely based on historical
documents, and incorporating well-known historical figures,
including George V. The production fell through, but in the same
year they presented The Investigation, Peter Weiss’s edited adaptation
of the Nazi war crimes trials in Frankfurt. The RSC had already staged
The Representative, and in 1966, after long-drawn-out arguments and
negotiations, they were finally able to produce an equally controversial
text In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Written by the German
playwright Heinar Kipphardt, the drama focused on the 1954
American security investigation of the senior nuclear physicist and
‘father of the atomic bomb’, Robert Oppenheimer, in which he was
humiliated and discredited for his Communist affiliations. It was
sometimes suggested that Oppenheimer’s real ‘crime’ in American
eyes was a reluctance to allow his experiments to be channelled to the
creation of a hydrogen bomb, so the underlying theme and implica-
tions of this play were anything but remote.
Kipphardt’s text drew heavily on the 3,000-page transcript of the
month-long Atomic Energy Commission hearing. ‘Every effort has
been made to give a faithful interpretation of what happened without
altered emphasis’, the RSC insisted, but it set a series of alarm bells
ringing for the censorship. ‘All those impersonated are living and the
event is very recent’, warned one of the Lord Chamberlain’s advisers.
Especially concerning was the question of setting a precedent: ‘this
would be a dramatic representation of an actual trial of recent date’,
wrote the adviser, which ‘might open the flood gates’ and lead to ‘a
mass of plays depicting trial scenes involving living people – e.g. the
Ward/Profumo case’.110 Another problem in the equation was how the
Americans might respond, and after consultations with Washington
via their ambassador in London, the RSC production was delayed by
a requirement that the company check the absolute accuracy of the
playtext against the transcript of the actual proceedings. The produc-
tion eventually opened in a private performance at the Hampstead
Theatre, while the RSC and the Lord Chamberlain quibbled over the
authenticity of the script, and the juxtaposition of fictional
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Staging Vietnam
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quotes directly from the words of politicians and other public figures,
or presents the audience with simple facts. At other times it juxtaposes
childish verse patterns with the horrors of what is going on (‘You put
your bombers in, you put your conscience out/You take the human
being and you twist it all about’). In the final scene, Glenda Jackson
delivers a devastating speech directly to the audience, wishing on us
the reality of war as the only thing which will finally break through
our comfort and complacency:
At the end of this speech, another actor carries on a box, from which
he releases real butterflies into the auditorium. Then he appears to
take a last one out and set light to it. The stage direction insists: ‘We
cannot tell if it is real or false.’ The actors freeze, the house lights come
on and ‘the actors stay immobile until everyone has left the theatre’.113
There was no curtain, no curtain call, no applause and no closure. As
one review put it, ‘Their fixed gaze seemed to dare us to go out and
not do something about trying to stop the war.’114
Inevitably, US received very mixed reviews; many were angered by
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Jacobean drama barely seen for 350 years. ‘The times have caught up
with it’, said a review of Trevor Nunn’s production; ‘The representa-
tion of a self-destructive society without morality . . . is no longer a
neurotic fantasy’, and it was therefore ‘only logical that the RSC
should revive this apocalyptic death-rattle of a play’.119 Albert Hunt
took a different route. In 1967, to coincide with the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Soviet Revolution, the ‘solid Yorkshire city’ of Bradford
took on the role of St Petersburg in 1917, as Hunt worked with 300
students on ‘an experiment in public drama’ which involved a
‘re-creation of some of the events of the October revolution’.120
Race
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In 1966, Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel received a full
production at the Royal Court, given by what the Daily Telegraph
called ‘a Negro Company’.131 Soyinka had been a contemporary in the
Royal Court Writers’ Group of Edward Bond and Ann Jellicoe, and
this was not his first play to be staged in London; indeed, the Stratford
East Theatre Royal production of The Road (presented as part of a
Commonwealth Arts Festival), had been chosen by the Observer critic
as one of the best new plays of 1965. On a narrative level, this new
play focused on the clash of traditional with imported Western values
which are imposed on a Nigerian village. But it was as much the form
– which incorporated song, dance and clowning – which broke fresh
ground for the Royal Court. The Times was enthusiastic for what this
brought to the British theatre tradition: ‘this work alone is enough to
establish Nigeria as the most fertile new source of English-speaking
drama since Synge’s discovery of the Western Isles’, enthused a
remarkably fulsome review; ‘Even this comparison does Soyinka less
than justice . . . to find any parallel for his work in English drama you
have to go back to the Elizabethans.’ The Road was a ‘superb comedy’
by ‘a highly sophisticated craftsman’, impressive for ‘the sheer inge-
nuity’ of the plot, as well as the ‘originality of scene construction’.132
But other reviewers were made uneasy by the use of ‘a lot of
near-Shakespearean language’ within an African village.133 Certainly,
such fluency was a far cry from the gritty realism and limited language
favoured by many plays of the period. The previous year, London’s
Commonwealth Arts Festival had also presented two plays by another
Nigerian playwright, John Pepper Clark. The Masquerade and Song of
a Goat were described as ‘wholly indigenous and defiantly unsophisti-
cated’, and again the poetic expansiveness of the language was difficult
for some people to take: ‘Their prime fault is that they beat about the
verbal bush and are frequently clogged with metaphor.’134 By contrast,
The Times delighted in the ‘richly expressive range of speech idioms’
in The Lion and the Jewel, with its sparring match fought through
proverbs.135 But more typically, Soyinka’s play was patronisingly
described as ‘mild and artless’, derivative and reactionary’. It was ‘a
simple parable’, a play of ‘naïve and childlike simplicity’.136
In an article published in 1967 entitled ‘Theatre of Integration’,
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actors replaced by a white one. And it is also striking that even though
they were working there, none of the four black actors was cast – or
invited to audition – for other plays in the National’s repertoire.141
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The year 1967 also brought the first visit to Britain by La MaMa,
an experimental company founded in the early 1960s in New York by
Ellen Stewart. Stewart stated at the outset that her company was
‘dedicated to the playwright’, and it produced plays by writers
including Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter. However,
she emphasised her commitment to writers who worked on an audi-
ence’s subconscious rather than on their conscious or rational minds,
creating ‘subliminal theatre’. It was an approach she considered more
likely to appeal to a younger generation: ‘People in their fifties and
sixties aren’t attuned to this.’147 In August 1967, La MaMa was both
acclaimed (‘the sensation of the Festival’ – the Observer148 – and ‘far
and away the most adventurous and exciting offering in this year’s
Festival drama programme’ – The Times149) and denounced (local
magistrates attempted to close the production down) for Futz, a play
by Rochelle Owens in which a farmer falls in love with his pig,
Amanda. Futz transferred to London, and although La MaMa was
supposedly committed to the voice of the playwright, the spoken text
was not necessarily the priority of the production: ‘The shouted
dialogue is largely inaudible and anyway isn’t of prime importance’,
suggested the Observer; ‘the stage is awash with gyrating rhythms,
ritual eruptions and frenzied coupling’.150 And The Times agreed: ‘they
use words as much for sheer sound value as for sense, and for much of
the time language gives way to barnyard noises and choric rhythms’.151
At the same time as presenting Futz and three short plays in one
London theatre, La MaMa also opened Paul Foster’s Tom Paine. ‘The
show is the most impressive demonstration so far of the company’s
skills’, wrote Irving Wardle in The Times. ‘They have the acrobatic
techniques to create a storm-tossed ship, a bear-pit, or a palace inte-
rior from a few multi-purpose props.’152 However, although the title
seemed to signal a historical and biographical element, the perform-
ance eschewed any responsibility for informing: ‘The spectator must
draw his own conclusions from what he sees on stage’, warned the
company’s official programme; ‘If he knows nothing of the life of Tom
Paine he will not learn much from the play.’153 As Peter Lewis in the
Daily Mail reported: ‘I went in knowing only that Tom Paine was the
author of The Rights of Man and was mixed up in American
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In 1966, Charles Marowitz warned: ‘The English theatre has used the
past ten years to catch up; now it is in danger of standing still again.’
By way of contrast, he cited a festival of experimental theatre he had
attended in Frankfurt ‘where five out of the six presentations were not
plays at all, but events, audience-assaults’.156 Marowitz had long been
arguing that play-based theatre was ‘a moribund art-form’ – a corpse
which audiences and critics treated with an absurd and misguided
reverence because they had not noticed the body was dead.157
Certainly, some of the more striking performances of the late 1960s
came from a different tradition. But claims about the death of the
play and the playwright were surely exaggerated. In his retrospective
analysis, Michael Billington argues that ‘the period from 1964 to
1970 looks like a golden age: an equivalent to the first Elizabethan
era’, and that it produced ‘a wealth of new writing’.158 Leaving aside
for the moment Arden, Bond, Pinter and Ayckbourn, this includes
the final plays of Joe Orton, some of which reached the stage only
after he had been murdered in August 1967; the arrival of Howard
Brenton, whose Gum and Goo, The Education of Skinny Spew, Revenge
and Christie in Love were all staged in 1969; and Peter Nichols’s A Day
in the Death of Joe Egg – a black comedy about bringing up a child
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Within minutes we are watching the same 13th Earl of Gurney in his
bedroom, dressed (or undressed) with the help of his servant, in white
tutu ballet skirt, long underwear and sword, making his choice from a
selection of ropes with which to ‘relax’ into a sexual fantasy (‘may I
suggest silk tonight, sir’), before accidentally hanging himself ‘with a
lustful gurgle’.161
This was nastier than the gentler satire of Mrs Wilson’s Diary,
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launched Inter-Action and the ICA opened at its new site under
Michael Kustow. It was also the year in which Jerzy Grotowski’s hugely
influential Towards a Poor Theatre was first published in English.
The first night after the Lord Chamberlain’s authority was removed
saw the much-delayed West End opening of the rock musical Hair. Its
messages now seem naive, crude, banal and, perhaps, tame. But with
its (actually quite brief ) nudity, its celebration of an ‘all you need is
love’ philosophy, of drugs, of dropping out, of burning army sign-up
papers (‘the draft is white people sending black people to make war on
yellow people to defend the land they stole from red people’),170 of
rock music and of sexual freedom, it captured – or at least aped – a
mood of youthful rebellion, and a rejection of the old order. In reality
– as with so many aspects of the counterculture – we might recognise
Hair now as essentially a safe, marketed, commercialised and pack-
aged version of rebellion, processed for easy consumption. On
Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue, how could it not be? Yet bril-
liantly directed by Tom O’Horgan – an experienced member of La
MaMa – the show seemed dangerous and threatening to those who
felt endangered and threatened by the possibility of youthful revolu-
tion. ‘Plenty to alarm unwary in hymn to freedom’ as The Times
memorably headlined its review.171 And as Michael Billington says: ‘if
you want to understand what the late Sixties was like, you only have
to listen to the original cast’s recording’.
Billington also notes ‘how indebted our alternative theatre was to
America for its expression of anti-Establishment values’.172 At the end
of 1966, Charles Marowitz had suggested that
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Fundamental to the audience experience was ‘the way and the degree
to which the actors invade us’. As one reviewer described it, ‘They
swarm among us, hysterical, hectoring, muttering their grand slogans
on impotence and despair.’177 Under the headline ‘The Dying
Theatre’, the Sunday Times dismissed the show as ‘a collage of
humming, moaning, shouting, screaming, writhing and stamping,
intermittently varied by incursions into, and physical attacks upon,
the audience, amid a stench of sweat and sleetstorms of saliva’.178 Yet
for all the cynicism and anger, the heckling and outrage and walkouts,
it is clear that such responses tell only one side of the story. ‘As I write
now’, admitted Nicholas de Jongh in his review, ‘the stage and audito-
rium is crammed with actors and audience, talking, disputing,
walking around.’179
Conclusion
Examine the work of the period and you get a sharp sense of
the political scepticism, youthful disaffection, sexual freedom
and spiritual questioning that were part of the times. There is
also little doubt that British theatre at the end of the decade
was infinitely richer than when it had begun. It combined a
corps of first-class dramatists, unequalled in scope since the
first Elizabethan age, with a new generation of theatre-makers
anxious to subvert the primacy of text.180
It is hard to disagree with this judgement, and the 1970s clearly had a
rich legacy and an extraordinary potential on which to build. True,
the West End was still dominated by long-running musicals, and the
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Royal Court had just revived Look Back in Anger (‘From herald of
revolution to respected modern classic in thirteen years’181). But not
only Hair but also Brecht was on Shaftesbury Avenue; regional thea-
tres were on the rise; new playwrights were emerging. There was a
National Theatre Company, a vibrant Royal Shakespeare Company, a
developing Theatre-in-Education movement and a fringe. And all
over the place, new experiments in performance were taking place.
A decade is a long time in theatre – certainly it had been in the
case of the 1960s. When it began, stage performances were subject to
a law from the 1730s which gave the head servant of the royal house-
hold (the Lord Chamberlain) carte blanche to ban any play, or parts of
a play to which he took exception. Unacceptable phrases in 1960
included ‘get stuffed’, ‘turd’ and ‘suffering Jesus’, as well as the blowing
of raspberries and any mention of contraceptives.182 Before it ended,
the press had published photographs of the Queen’s eighteen-year-old
daughter dancing on stage with the cast of Hair, a ‘love-rock musical’
featuring mass nudity and songs celebrating drugs, masturbation,
homosexuality and free love. ‘Anne among the hippies’, as the Daily
Mail headline put it.183 In 1960, the plays of Pinter, Beckett and
Ionesco were as far as things went in terms of experimentation or
challenges to the conventional well-made play. Artaud was unknown.
This had been the decade when not only nudity and sexuality but also
violence and cruelty were for the first time thrust ‘in yer face’. As a
cynical theatre commentator observed somewhere in the middle of
the decade: ‘In the higher reaches of the theatre, severed heads are
becoming obligatory.’
The form and the trappings were changing too. Performances had
exploded out of theatres, and ‘happenings’ and avant-garde experi-
ments were everywhere, with even the boundaries between stage and
auditorium, actors and spectators, no longer immutable. In theatre, as
elsewhere, the 1960s was a decade when the status quo was chal-
lenged, attacked and derided. Often it was the young leading the way,
bringing a contempt – perhaps a healthy one – for the world they had
grown up in, and for those whom they blamed for accepting it. These
sentiments found forceful expression through many cultural anthems
of the period, not least in Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are
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Well, this is the world which we, you, created. Youth at the
prow and puberty at the helm. The privilege of youth has
turned into a bloody great arrogance . . . all of them invoked
theatrical devices which, whatever their origins, seemed very
up-to-date. The audience were by turns arraigned, insulted and
bored. The theatre of contempt seemed to be with us for
keeps.184
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CHAPTER 2
INTRODUCING THE PLAYWRIGHTS
John Arden was born in 1930 in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Before her
marriage his mother had trained as a primary school teacher. His
father came from a wine-making dynasty, but rejected the family busi-
ness in favour of a job managing a glass-making factory.
On the Arden side he came from an impeccable pedigree, able to
trace his family genealogy from the Norman Conquest. A distant
forebear was Mary Arden of Stratford, the mother of William
Shakespeare. Municipal corruption was also in the bloodline. The
history of the Ardens took in the Ardens of Beverley, including a Dr
Arden, who was six times mayor of the town during the
mid-eighteenth century, and, in the spirit of the day, was an enthusi-
astic and effective briber of voters. The Ardens were not a family of
writers, but of talkers: talk imbricated with the English literary tradi-
tion. In a memoir, Arden describes his family’s ‘old-fashioned’ ways of
speaking, recalling that his mother spoke ‘like Jane Arden’. As a child
he was obsessed by the great myths and legends of Western literature
– British, Arthurian, Roman, Greek and Irish – an ‘aspect of European
Literature’, he later wrote, ‘which is now inseparable from my imagi-
nation’. As well as a deep love of literature he also imbibed from his
parents a reflexive liberalism, which included a determined opposition
to British imperialism and its violences. His father was a liberal activist
and militant who had ‘opposed the colonialist Boer War’. Arden
recounts a story about his father’s cousin who, at a family gathering,
spoke ‘with enthusiasm of a day of riot in Cairo, when the British
colonial authorities had successfully sent British troops into the
“native quarter” to overawe the nominally independent Egyptians’.
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Arden’s mother had asked incautiously, ‘“But why should our troops
go in? Isn’t it the Egyptians’ own country?” This remark was not well
received.’1
Life outside the family home was altogether tougher. Barnsley was
a small working-class town in the South Yorkshire coalfields, and had
held, since the Industrial Revolution, a central place in the history
(and mythology) of labour-movement militancy. Operating in one of
a number of solid Labour fiefdoms, local politics was defined by
paternalistic egalitarianism and petty corruption, and Arden would
regularly mine his birthplace for inspiration. Plays such as Live Like
Pigs, The Workhouse Donkey and Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance were
located in a town very like it. Later he would write of his support for
Irish Republicanism: ‘My background is that of the northern English
industrial communities . . . a wary solidarity with irredentist Irish
dissidence comes easier.’2
The young Arden was not happy at the local primary school,
where he was mercilessly bullied, and in 1939, on the eve of war, he
was packed off to preparatory school near York. He boarded there for
five years before moving on to another public school, Sedbergh, in
Cumbria, where he took English, French and German for his Higher
School Certificate. The escape from Barnsley’s streets came as a great
relief:
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The Life of Man won the BBC’s North Region New Play prize, and
brought the young playwright to the attention of George Devine,
then Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre. Devine asked
Arden for a play for the Court’s series of Sunday-night ‘productions
without decor’. The first he submitted, based on Arthurian legends –
a theme to which he would later return – was rejected. The second,
The Waters of Babylon, was accepted and was produced at the Royal
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‘The old recluse and the young man have been trapped in the same
room’, explained Bond later. ‘Clearly the author intended that they
should both look alike – yet not too alike.’ And he advised the director
of the 1980s revival against staging the final scene in a way which
linked the characters too explicitly:
The old man’s face is hidden. If the young man turns his face
from the audience, the two men will be all but identical! The
image becomes one of Absurdity and says: ‘All people are the
same, no more than mindless objects in an empty space made
even emptier by their presence.’
Possibly thinking of Beckett and Pinter, Bond added that ‘There are
forms of theatre which make such statements. We should not make
them.’ A theatre which risked implying that all human beings face the
same and inevitable suffering was not what Bond intended, since it
reconciles us to despair rather than encouraging us to believe in the
possibility of change.
For Bond, it has always been imperative to keep the message to the
fore when making decisions about staging: ‘Whenever we’re faced
with these aesthetic or dramatic problems we must look for the polit-
ical solution.’7
The Court’s Sunday-night performances were minimal in terms of
resources and commitment, but still attracted national reviews. The
Pope’s Wedding contained sixteen relatively short scenes with no divi-
sion into Acts, and this was hardly a familiar or comfortable form for
most critics: ‘The author . . . seemed incapable of sustaining a scene
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I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you speak
is open to any number of different interpretations.1
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an audience who miss the key scene which explains it all. There are no
obvious signals of comedy, and yet the dialogue is strangely amusing.
The atmosphere is tense and uncertain, perhaps even sinister, but it is
hard to locate the danger or to know if it is substantial. As Harold
Hobson wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘The play makes one stir uneasily
in one’s shoes, and doubt, for a moment, the comforting solidity of
the earth.’5
The Birthday Party, Pinter’s next play, had similarities in terms of
style, language and atmosphere – and perhaps even in narrative. In a
run-down southern seaside boarding house, a woman talks insistently
to her husband about breakfast before he leaves for his day’s work as a
deckchair attendant; her single lodger, Stanley, is visited by two
strange and unsettling figures who seem to have been looking for him;
they insist on holding a party for him, at which they deliberately
smash his glasses and interrogate him with quickfire and apparently
random questions; the next day, they take him away – a broken man
– and no one intervenes. The Birthday Party would later be recognised
as one of Pinter’s most important works, but London at the end of the
1950s was not ready for its absurdities and non-sequiturs. Only
Harold Hobson detected a level of meaning below the surface: ‘Mr
Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge
of disaster.’ Hobson found echoes of Henry James and The Turn of the
Screw, and understood that the play’s ‘spine-chilling quality’ lay
precisely in the fact that the threat could not be named:
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almost be the intruders from The Birthday Party, but this time the
twist is different, for it transpires that one of them is to be the victim.
Again, the play could have been a chilling thriller, and at times it is.
But the edge of comic absurdity and the sometimes Beckettian trivi-
ality of the men’s arguments as they wait for something to happen
makes it more treacherous than that. The Lover (1963) was equally
disconcerting, as a suburban husband and wife double as their own
illicit and secretive lovers by day. They are – or are they? – the same
couple.
The Lover was shown on television before it was staged, and in the
late 1950s and early 1960s Pinter wrote several other texts for televi-
sion and radio. He also contributed short sketches to revues and wrote
screenplays for two darkly compelling films directed by Joseph Losey
– The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). In 1969 he wrote a film
adaptation of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. Meanwhile, Pinter’s
acting roles included Mick in The Caretaker (1961) and Lenny in The
Homecoming (1969), while he also appeared in a televised version of
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (1965).
Pinter’s early plays were often dismissed as derivative attempts to
jump on to a passing bandwagon. ‘It’s all very well to imitate Ionesco
and Beckett provided you have something else to offer beside the
pastiche’, disparaged the Lord Chamberlain’s Reader; ‘Mr Pinter
imitates both without anything more to add – and my God! How
boring he is.’7 Later in his career, when his involvement with political
issues became explicit, critics began to read back into these early plays
a politics which had been largely missed. Pinter himself had always
known it was there. Speaking in 1960 of the unexpected intruders in
both The Room and The Birthday Party, who arrive ‘out of nowhere’,
he commented: ‘I don’t consider this an unnatural happening. I don’t
think it is all that surrealistic and curious because surely this thing, of
people arriving at the door, has been happening in Europe in the last
twenty years. Not only the last twenty years, the last two to three
hundred.’8 Yet Pinter also refused a request from the director of the
original production of The Birthday Party ‘to clarify, to put a final
message into the play so that everyone would know what it was
about’. The play, explained Pinter, showed ‘how religious forces ruin
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our lives’. But to spell this out would have been entirely inappropriate:
‘Who’s going to say that in the play?’ asked Pinter; ‘That would be
impossible.’9
Before long, Pinter’s style was termed ‘Pinteresque’, and he in turn
had his imitators. His genre was branded as ‘the comedy of menace’,
and his use of silence and – especially – the pause identified as trade-
mark features. Pinter sometimes bemoaned the rather lazy critical
obsession; it is perhaps as well that he couldn’t know that the headline
of his New York Times obituary would label him as ‘Playwright of the
Pause’. For Pinter, the pauses had never been particularly complicated
or mysterious: ‘All I was talking about was a natural break, when
people don’t quite know what to do next’, he told one interviewer;
‘But this damn word “pause” and those silences have achieved such
significance that they have overwhelmed the bloody plays.’10
However, he also knew their weight as ‘part of the body of the
action’ which the actor had to locate:
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CHAPTER 3
PLAYWRIGHTS AND PLAYS
JOHN ARDEN
by Bill McDonnell
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‘The revelation’
In Act 1, scene 3 the soldiers meet at sunset in the churchyard. They
have returned from scouting the town, and as Musgrave asks each
man what he has seen, their responses form an arresting series of cine-
matic vignettes, the western motif alive in each. The repetition adds
to the accumulating atmosphere of latent fear and hostility, of cold
and emptiness:
But for the cold it could be another colonial enclave, with the soldiers
as an occupying force. Hurst makes this connection explicit in the
scene’s first revelation, that the soldiers are deserters on the run and
bent on some retributive act. He himself has killed another soldier,
though we do not know why. This act, blamed on ‘rebels’, binds him
to Musgrave, whose messianic rhetoric he rejects, but whose purposes
he supports.
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Hurst I thought when I met you, I thought we’d got the same
motives. To get out, get shut o’ the army – with its ‘treat-you-like-
dirt-but-you-do-the-dirty-work’ – ‘kill him, kill them, they’re all
bloody rebels, State of Emergency’ . . . It’s nowt to do with God. I
don’t understand all that about God, why do you bring God into
it! You’ve come here to tell the people and then there’ll be no more
war . . .
Musgrave Which is the Word of God! . . .
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Flings open the lid of the big box, and hauls on the rope . . . the
rope is attached to the contents of the box, and these are jerked up
to the cross-bar and reveal themselves as an articulated skeleton
dressed in a soldier’s tunic and trousers, the rope noosed around the
neck. The People draw back in horror. Musgrave begins to dance,
waving his rifle, his face contorted with demonic fury. (p. 84)
Hurst We’ve earned our living by beating and killing folk like
yourselves in the streets of their own city. Well, it’s drove us mad
– and so we come back here to tell you how and to show you what
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it’s like. The ones we want to deal with aren’t, for a change, you
and your mates, but a bit higher up. The ones as never get hurt.
(He points at the Mayor, Parson and Constable.) Him. Him.
Him. You hurt them hard, they’ll not hurt you again. And they’ll
not send us to hurt you neither. But if you let them be, then us
three’ll be killed yes – aye and worse, we’ll be forgotten – and the
whole bloody lot’ll start all over again!
He gives out the mugs in the following order: the Mayor, the Parson,
the Slow Collier, the Pugnacious Collier, the Constable. Each
man takes his drink, swigs a large gulp, then links wrists with the
previous one, until all are dancing around the centrepiece in a chain,
singing.
Annie has climbed the plinth and lowers the skeleton. She sits with it
on her knees. The Dragoons remain standing at the side of the stage.
Musgrave and Attercliffe come slowly downstage. The Bargee fills
the last two tankards and hands one to Walsh, who turns his back
angrily. The Bargee empties one mug, and joins the tail of the dance,
still holding the other. After one more round he again beckons Walsh.
This time the latter thinks for a moment, then bitterly throws his hat
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on the ground, snarls into the impassive face of the Dragoon, and
joins in the dance, taking the beer.
The scene closes, leaving Musgrave and Attercliffe on the front stage.
(p. 99)
Mrs Hitchcock Ah, not for long. And it’s not a dance of joy.
Those men are hungry, so they’ve got no time for you. One day
they’ll be full, though, and the Dragoons’ll be gone, and then
they’ll remember.
Human life is short, but history is long, she is telling him; you are
lost, but your cause is not. This is the message of Arden’s play, and of
another great anti-war play, Brecht’s Mother Courage. And, like Mother
Courage, Arden’s play refuses banal solutions to intractable historical
problems. Walsh’s question takes on special resonance in this context:
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Please don’t attach too much weight to the drama critic of The
Times who says, ‘When this play first appeared, its sidelong
references to the Cyprus troubles overshadowed the main
content . . .’ Cyprus may be a solved problem. May be. Aden?
Malaysia? Do I have to list them? Rhodesia was once a
Victorian Imperialist adventure. Vietnam has never been a
British colony of course, but . . . 1965–6 is an ugly year’s-end
as was 1958–9, when this play was conceived and written.13
Hobson would later revise his opinion, but in that moment his
response seemed decisive for Musgrave’s commercial success. It played
to third-full houses, and cost the Court its entire Arts Council subsidy
for 1959. Arden’s next play would address a very different theme,
municipal corruption.
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come earlier, with the 1960 production of The Happy Haven, which
had been taken off after two weeks: ‘That was the end of Arden at the
Court. Indeed the board seems to have vowed “No more Arden ever
again!”’ For a long period after the ‘humiliation’ of the Happy Haven
débâcle, D’Arcy writes, Arden was in a state of ‘collapse and depres-
sion’.14 One fruitful side effect was the remarkable month-long
community arts festival which the couple organised in their home in
the Yorkshire village of Kirbymoorside in 1961.
For the moment, however, Arden turned again to his birthplace,
Barnsley, for inspiration. In an autobiographical fragment, Arden
writes of his home town that it was ‘run by a self-perpetuating mafia
of Labour Party demagogues’, its politics dominated by Labour politi-
cians whose ideology was in many respects ‘humane and excellent’ but
whose secure hold on local government had led to a ‘highly compla-
cent local politics’, and culture of complacent low-level corruption:
I wanted to set on the stage the politics, scandals, sex life, and
atmosphere of Barnsley as I remember shocked Conservative
elders talking about it in my youth . . . certain key incidents –
the burglary at the Town Hall, the incident at the Victoria, the
politics of the art gallery, and so on – belong in not so veiled
form to the politics of Barnsley.15
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Not with bread and marge you know, as they used to in the
workhouse, but with a summation of largesse demanding for
its attendance soup-spoons in their rank, fish knives and forks,
flesh knives and forks, spoon for the pudding, gravy and cruet,
caper sauce and mayonnaise . . . and I by my virtue stood the
President of the Feast . . . Philosophy be damned . . . We piped
to them and they did not dance, we sang our songs and they
spat in the gutter. (He pats the little Demonstrator’s head.) I was
the grand commander of the whole of my universe. (p. 125)
He wraps the tablecloth around him like a shawl, takes a paper chain
and hangs it around his neck, and places a ring of flowers that had
garnished the buffet on his head. He is a prophet abandoned:
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Butterthwaite, for all his flaws, was a socialist in the mould of T. Dan
Smith. He had presided over a flawed and corrupt but warmly human
polity. We have, says Arden, more to fear from the ‘ferocious integrity’
of a Feng than from the cupidity of a Butterthwaite.21 Boocock is
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clear-sighted about the corruption which pervades all classes and all
relations, and yet – and this is the play’s point – there is a type of venal
harmony here, which produces schools and homes even as it traduces
civic ethics.
Given Arden’s later flirtations with revolutionary Marxism, and his
commitment to Republican irredentism, the play may seem to lack
ideological freight, its critique of class inequalities too light, and its
vision of an ideal order too liberal. Butterthwaite’s lament as he is
dragged away to prison could be construed as a warning about the
vulnerability of democracy in the face of entrenched class interests,
the comic counterweight to Mrs Hitchcock’s counsel to Musgrave:
Yet, despite the political sources of these plays, in none of them does
Arden propose a different order of society, or even suggest that one is
possible, or explore how it might be achieved. This has led some to
accuse him of a naive romanticism. Clearly a committed internation-
alism and anti-imperialism went hand in hand at this stage with a
pre-lapsarian vision of human community. In the preface to The
Workhouse Donkey he extolled the virtues of Dionysus, including in
them generosity and lasciviousness, but also corruption and ease. His
vision for the perfect production of The Workhouse Donkey was of an
all-day durational performance, with interludes, with audiences free
to wander among fairground stalls, play and eat, returning to the
theatre as they chose to pick up the narrative. This was close, he
acknowledged, to Joan Littlewood’s concept of the Fun Palace, but
also to Breughel’s paintings, such as ‘Lenten Fair’, where we find a
similar celebration of social existence, of a flawed but energised
humanity. For the pre-1968 Arden the ideal human community is
more likely to be found in the paintings of the medievalists Breughel
and Cranach the Elder than in the school of Soviet socialist realism.
Talking about the ‘tradition’ of comic theatre, he sums up his purposes
in The Workhouse Donkey as follows:
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John Lindsay, poet, diplomat and tutor to the young James, is sent to
bring the ‘maist ferocious of these thieves’, Johnny Armstrong of
Armstrong, ‘intil the King’s peace and order’ (p. 151). Lindsay, ‘ane
very subtle practiser’ of the diplomatic arts, prized for his urbane
charms and ‘discreet humanity’ will seek a rational solution to the war
using ‘Policy, nocht force’ (p. 151).
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time, carrying a free pardon and safe conduct from the King, and
inviting him to join the royal hunt. Flattered, and trusting Lindsay, he
goes with him. But the invitation is a trap. The King, disguised as a
soldier, meets Armstrong, hidden soldiers disarm him and his men,
and, after a violent struggle, the outlaw is hanged from a tree.
While the play is subtitled ‘an exercise in diplomacy’, it bodies out
Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics
by other means’. Lindsay’s error – and Arden stresses this – is to
assume that his belief in human discourse and rational dialogue could
survive the Machiavellian imperatives of either court. He and
Armstrong are both pawns, guilty of political naivety. The one is led
astray by impetuousness, the other by a lack of seriousness. For
Lindsay diplomacy is a game, and one he thinks he is very good at.
Disdainful of Alexander the Great’s need to cut the Gordian knot
(‘could he no be a human man instead and sit down and unravel it?’,
p. 154), he finds to his cost that power always seeks the shortest route
to its object. Diplomacy is long but political necessity is short – ‘the
urgency is merciless’ (p. 154), the Scots clerk tells him in 1.2. Later
his secretary McGlass, dying from the fatal stab wound, goes to the
heart of Lindsay’s problem:
Treachery is not a breach of this moral order, but its binding prin-
ciple. Armstrong states it most clearly: ‘There’s nane that may in a
traitor trust/Yet trustit men may be traitors all’ (p. 159), and just
before he lures his enemy Wamphrey into a trap, and has him brutally
murdered. Yet it is Lindsay, who decries covert treachery, who will be
the agent of the play’s greatest betrayal. Arden is clear in the moral
equivalences he sets up: the murder of Wamphrey is paralleled by the
murder of Armstrong. Treachery and violence emanate from both
sides: expediency, material need and a cruel pragmatic violence is the
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Arden makes clear that Lindsay does not represent O’Brien just ‘as
Armstrong does not represent Tshombe, nor Wamphrey Lumumba’.28
A more accurate reading of the historical parallels would have
Lumumba as James V seeking to contain the secessionary impulses of
Armstrong, whose actions were manipulated by both indigenous
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This calls for a special kind of writing, one that combines scholarly
erudition with a refined poetic imagination, qualities Arden has in
abundance. Directing a play like Armstrong’s Last Good Night, Gaskill
said, is ‘like doing a symphony by Mahler or Bruckner – you have to
be prepared for the length of it . . . with Arden you have to absorb the
entire experience from start to finish before you understand’. In
comparison with a Pinter or Beckett, Arden was, he thinks, ‘very
Shakespearean’, a playwright who ‘wrote in full flood, and the shape
merging as he wrote it . . . I think he is unique in being so.’ It was the
plays’ scale and poetic density which affected their reception, a point
iterated by Geoffrey Reeves, who blamed the conservativeness of the
British theatre system, in particular its actor training, which left it
unprepared for and unable to translate Arden’s demanding plays
adequately to the stage. He makes a striking comment: ‘If he is
performed within the framework of the system, the system feels a
great jolt – and so does the play.’33 Later Arden would dismiss the
Court ‘revolution’ as a myth, which had left the basic and conserva-
tive power structure of the theatre intact. As the 1960s progressed,
such issues would come to the fore as part of a broader ideological
critique of Western society driven by the emergent alternative theatre
movement.
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Britain’s Brecht
Conclusion
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In 1968 many things had come to a head. There was the revolt
of the students and workers in France, with all the consequent
excitement exported abroad from it . . . There was the Russian
invasion of Czechoslovakia . . . There was the prohibition by
Stormont Unionists of a perfectly reasonable Civil Rights
March in Derry . . . the savage attack on the marchers who had
the nerve to defy the ban, and the inexorable slide of the largely
forgotten Irish problem into the maelstrom of blood and bitter-
ness which to this day swirls wider and wider.36
Their work from The Royal Pardon onwards had mined history for
its metaphorical power, its oblique and suggestive political exemplars
for the present. As the 1970s progressed there would be a shift to a
more direct interventionary style and didactic engagement, in plays
which dealt directly with the neo-colonial war in Ireland, and which
took a more didactically Marxian approach to history. Texts such as
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EDWARD BOND
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Most critics denounced the play. Even one of the play’s champions
reported that she ‘spent a lot of the first act shaking . . . and thinking I
was going to be sick’, while the murder was ‘watched by the audience
in utter silence’ – a silence in which ‘Nobody dared move . . . for fear
of vomiting.’3 If anyone had thought of the term, they might have
called it ‘in-yer-face theatre’.
All the plays on which this chapter focuses contain shocking and
brutal images. Bond was often accused of revelling in such violence –
even of celebrating it:
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inhabit.5 Those seeking to keep it off the stage had ulterior motives:
‘The censors are themselves military men, they are trained to use the
bayonet in anger . . . when a soldier says that violence must be curbed
one should at least always have the freedom to ask if in practice that
means conserved.’6 In Bond’s view, the majority of people living under
capitalism are controlled by ‘inhuman institutions whose task is
systematically to destroy them’. Society has violence as its bedrock:
‘They destroy people because . . . our society could not exist unless we
were destroyed. A human being was not designed to work in a factory
. . . as a tool. You’re not made to stand at a bench day after day doing
these mechanical things.’ When a society depends on a system which
involves doing violence against its citizens, it is inevitable that some of
those citizens will themselves commit violent acts. ‘If you take a dog
and you chain it up from the moment it is born, the dog will become
vicious. Now this is in fact what we do with human beings.’7
Moreover, how could it be reasonable to attack a playwright for
showing an enactment of violence while ignoring the real thing? ‘Only
a Philistine can be revolted seeing the stoning of a doll on the stage
and reconciled with the fact that children are being starved to death.’8
A perception which almost exactly pre-echoes a sentiment expressed
thirty years later by Sarah Kane – whose work was in turn defended
by Bond – in the face of the critical assault on her play Blasted at the
time of the Balkan war:
The thing that shocks me most is that the media seem to have
been more upset by the representation of violence than by
violence itself . . . While the corpse of Yugoslavia was rotting
on our doorstep, the press chose to get angry, not about the
corpse, but about the cultural event that drew attention to it.9
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No, I’ve never heard of a baby being stoned to death but I have
heard of babies being bombed to death.12
Saved had not arrived from nowhere. In the late 1950s Bond had been
part of the Writers’ Group nurtured at the Royal Court, and his first
performed play, The Pope’s Wedding, had been given a Sunday
performance there in 1962. This led directly to the commission which
would result in Saved, the script of which had been gathering dust in a
drawer in the theatre until Bill Gaskill took over as Artistic Director
and immediately decided to produce it. The Lord Chamberlain’s
Office refused to issue a licence (‘this revolting play . . . ought not to
be shown on any stage’13) without more than fifty cuts, including two
entire scenes, and the resulting confrontation has often been credited
– not least by Bond himself – as the key weapon which detonated
under the 230-year-old system of theatre censorship and brought it
crashing down: ‘It was either the censor or me – and it was going to
be the censor.’14 Thumbing its nose at the censors, the theatre
announced that it would constitute itself as a private club for fourteen
performances, with admission restricted to members only. The Lord
Chamberlain promptly advised the Director of Public Prosecutions
that he doubted the club would be ‘genuine’, and that this was
‘disguised public performance’;15 but although the theatre was taken
to court and fined on the grounds that its ‘private’ performances were
effectively public, the financial penalty was tokenistic and the censor’s
authority had been fatally wounded.
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Playwrights and Plays
task: to try and dramatize the lives of the inarticulate.’18 Those who
attacked the play criticised them as ‘a bunch of brainless, ape-like
yobs’;19 ‘moral imbeciles’; ‘foul-mouthed, dirty-minded, illiterate . . .
barely to be judged on any recognizable human level at all’.20 Bond
agreed they were ‘hooligans’, suffering from ‘moral illiteracy’. But he
located the root of their illiteracy not within the individuals, but in
society. It was, he said, ‘the disease most people are being left to rot of ’,
and the education system was doing the leaving: ‘There’s really no
difference between our State prisons and our State schools’, he wrote;
‘They function in the same way, and they are organized, in the same
way, to serve the same purpose.’ And that purpose was the deliberate
production of ‘zombies’ – in other words, ‘alienated slaves, who will fit
into our society, at least to the extent of consenting to it’.21 Writing in
the programme, Bill Gaskill also challenged the easy demonisation of
the characters: ‘Some of the critics of Saved talk of the people in the
play as if they were freaks or psychopaths’, he noted, ‘but to me they
are absolutely ordinary people with whom it is very easy to identify.’
By labelling and separating, he said, ‘you avoid responsibility’.22
One of the more positive and perceptive reviews of Saved was
written by Penelope Gilliatt in the Observer. Gilliatt wrote primarily
about film – a medium which frequently puts less into words and
invites us to read behind what we see and to extrapolate meaning. She
had no problem in seeing the implications of the play:
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one assumes that if you are going to show a murder on the stage
one doesn’t have to get up or make one of the characters say
before or after – this is horrible and ought not to happen. That
is self evident and a writer must be able to rely on his audience
to some extent.27
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Yet he was also clear that he had meant the play to disturb. ‘It is
shocking and intended to shock’, proclaimed the leaflet advertising
the Teach-In; ‘The intentions of the author are unquestionably
serious’, it insisted, ‘and though he offers no moral solution, he poses
the problem in such a way that one knows a solution must be found.’28
Bond himself stirred things up further by describing the violence as ‘a
typical English understatement’, since the murder of a single baby was
‘a negligible atrocity’ when compared, for example, with the British
air-strikes on German towns at the end of the Second World War.29 ‘I
wanted to evoke the heartlessness of all violence’, he wrote, ‘the after-
math of an air raid, the atrocities in Africa, the garrottings and firing
squads in Asia.’ For Bond, the killing of a single baby was also ‘insig-
nificant’ if set alongside ‘the cultural and emotional deprivation of
most of our children’.30
The way in which the killing is actually staged is also critical, as
Gaskill explained at the Teach-In: ‘if I wanted to give an audience a
vicarious thrill to their masochistic instincts I should have done it
much more successfully’, he declared; ‘It’s not a difficult thing to do, I
promise you.’31 Curiously, some of the reviewers who objected most
had also complained that the killing had not been theatrically
convincing (‘I knew there was no baby in the pram, just as I could see
there were no stones in the actors’ hands’32). In fact, Gaskill’s inten-
tion had been to present it in such a way that the audience could
watch it ‘with great detachment’. It was on the men and not the baby
that the audience should focus, and Gaskill’s staging promoted this –
as some critics appreciated:
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For Bond, it was vital that the play should not just be a photographic
slice of life: ‘Saved isn’t naturalistic’, he insisted; ‘Naturalism asks:
what? Realism shows what and asks: why?’; crucially, he added, ‘this
has implications for the performance, since the “why” obviously
determines the way the “what” is shown’.34
In some respects, Saved focuses less overtly on the causes of the
murder and more on its consequences. At first, it may appear that
these are also few or non-existent. There is no repentance or regret, no
clear sign of anyone learning lessons or changing their lives – everyone
and everything seems to carry on largely as before. Fred is convicted,
but expresses no guilt or remorse either before or after his imprison-
ment. ‘It was only a kid’, he says without irony, accepting no blame
and even accusing Pam of having ‘ruined my life’ (pp. 83–5). In
Bond’s own words, ‘Fred regards going to prison as a middle-class boy
would regard going on one of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Outward
Bound courses – as an initiation and something to boast of.’35 Nor do
we see any direct evidence after his release that Fred has faced up to
what he has done. Perhaps even worse is the fact that Pam appears
equally unconcerned about the baby she has lost; she remains as
obsessed with Fred as ever, and it seems hardly to occur to her to
blame or question him for what he has done. Some reviewers thought
this must be the point Bond was making: ‘His purpose, if I under-
stand it, is to show that even this can happen and life goes on as
before.’36 This was a misreading of the playwright’s intentions:
I wanted to show that violence and what you could call misdi-
rected sex cannot be indulged in – in an interlude from normal
life – and then forgotten: the agent is affected as well as the
victim. These effects change the structure of his life in less
obvious but more far-reaching ways than the effects of social
exposure or punishment. They force compromises and give
psychological wounds that often turn the remainder of his life
into tragedy.37
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differently: ‘Yer ain’ seen what it done t’ ’im. ’E’s like a kid. E’ll finish
up like some ol’ lag, or an ol’ soak. Bound to. An’ soon. Yer’ll see’ (p.
126). And in a devastating scene towards the end of the play Pam
finally breaks down into uncontrollable crying and suicidal despair,
realising the hopelessness and poverty of her existence: ‘Whass
’appenin to us? . . . All my friends gone. Baby’s gone. Nothin’ left but
rows. Day in, day out. Fightin’ with knives . . . I’ll throw myself some-
where . . . I can’t go on . . . Yer can’t call it livin’ . . . I can’t stand any
more. Baby dead. No friends . . . ’No ’ome. No friends. Baby dead.
Gone . . .’ (pp. 122–3).
According to Gaskill, ‘Everything about the play is planned and
organized so that the audience’s experience will pass from the shock of
violence to an understanding of its causes and finally to a statement
which is positive rather than negative.’38 True, there is no revelation or
redemption, no sudden vision of a better world. But to resolve such
profound problems on the stage would be manifestly dishonest – and
would also let the audience off the hook, since it is they who must
take the responsibility to try and initiate change. ‘If I had written a
meretricious, modest little piece, with a facile panacea in the last
scene, I could have had the critics clapping their hands off ’, claimed
Bond – and he was probably right.39
Bond emphasised that while Saved ‘leads up to tragedy’, yet ‘it
doesn’t fall into tragedy’.40 Indeed, he famously described the play as
‘irresponsibly optimistic’.41 The most obvious manifestation of the
positive is invested in Len – a deeply flawed character, hardly more
able than anyone else to articulate or perceive what is wrong within
the world of the play, but someone who at least aspires to a code of
moral values, and who consistently tries to help others. For Bond, Len
was the centre of the play – a point which most critics failed to iden-
tify: ‘Hardly one of them has noticed that the play is about a liberal,
although he is in every scene, and about his attempts to pacify his
environment. These attempts fail, and not only because of his
personal failings. He is finally captured by his environment.’42 Len,
says Bond, is ‘naturally good, in spite of his upbringing and environ-
ment’. Yet he is ‘not wholly good or easily good because then his
goodness would be meaningless’.43 The fact that he observes the
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Playwrights and Plays
While Saved has retained its status as one of the iconic plays of the
1960s, Bond’s next play has been largely forgotten – other than for its
distinction of being the last play banned in its entirety by the Lord
Chamberlain. With its cruel satire against such pillars of historical
respectability as Queen Victoria and FIorence Nightingale, it might
have been designed to get up the noses of the establishment. But it is
much more than just a rude and provocative gesture, for one of Bond’s
starting points is that the values established in the nineteenth century
continue to dominate in the second half of the twentieth. This was
not, then, a play that was only about the past.
While most critics saw Early Morning as a grotesque and sick
fantasy, Bond describes it as ‘social realism’, and ‘a simple and lucid
record of history’.53 ‘The statement ‘This play is true’ was inscribed in
large print both on the title page of the published text and in the
programme, though the narrative offers a nightmarish dystopia and a
series of extreme events which, on a literal level, are impossible
fictions. There are, of course, other levels on which fictions can be
true. The notes Bond kept kept while writing Early Morning propose
the possibility that Victoria gave birth at the age of fifty-three, ten
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years after she had been widowed, and that this ‘so shocked and
dismayed the British public at large, that every inhabitant of these
islands took a formal vow that they would not tell their children about
these events’. To ensure it remained hidden, he imagines that ‘history
books, almanacs and newspaper record copies of these events were
rewritten’, and ‘a fictitious past was substituted for the actual past’. In
all of this, ‘the Empire co-operated’.54 If, as some historians have
recognised, history is always fictional, and constructed so as to justify
and preserve the present, then Bond’s re-writing is simply an alterna-
tive – and, in his view, a truer fiction. The programme featured a
detail of Goya’s painting of Saturn – a monstrous but recognizably
human figure – devouring his own child. Not only is eating other
people a literal feature of this play, it is also, on a metaphorical level,
what the characters in Saved are doing to each other.
Rarely performed it may be, but Early Morning is surely one of the
most remarkable and distinctive achievements of any playwright
during the 1960s. At first sight, it seems a complete contrast to Saved.
Where the earlier play had been broadly realistic in style and set abso-
lutely in the present and among society’s underclass, this one was set
in Victorian England among its rulers and shakers. Moreover, its style
crosses into the surreal, drawing on such diverse precedents as
Strindberg’s Dream Play, the films of Buñuel, the nonsense writings of
Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and the art of Bosch, Goya, Magritte
and Blake. Yet there were obvious parallels between the plays in the
way the characters behaved. ‘In Saved Mr Bond seemed to be saying
that brutalization can reach a point at which people can perform any
violent act and slip back into apathetic indifference . . . In Early
Morning he says the same thing about our rulers.’55 The actual
dialogue remains generally reliable and realistic; it is the plot and the
actions which take us closer to the world of Ubu Roi than to Chekhov.
Queen Victoria, for example, has Siamese twins, murders her husband
and rapes Florence Nightingale (who is engaged to one of the twins);
her husband, Albert, has previously plotted to assassinate Victoria
with the help of Disraeli, who sometimes shares a bed with Gladstone
and Florence Nightingale; and the Lady of the Lamp’s distinctive
method of tending wounded soldiers at the front involves having sex
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with them just before they die. Later, Nightingale sets up a brothel,
and disguises herself in a kilt and an appalling Scottish accent as John
Brown, the Queen’s ‘special’ companion. In effect, Bond is under-
mining the conventional view of Nightingale as an exemplary
Victorian heroine and ‘angel of mercy’; from another perspective she
is simply the acceptable face of a brutal political war machine, and
one which helps to legitimise it. The violent abuse perpetrated on her
by Victoria is itself a metaphorical ‘truth’.
Often in Early Morning dead characters refuse to lie down. They
may return as ghosts, or simply come back to life as though nothing
has happened. One of the conjoined sons, George, is reduced to a
decaying skeleton attached to his twin, Arthur, and the final Act is set
in a Heaven (or possibly a Hell), where the characters constantly
consume (and are consumed by) each other (‘Victoria: I’m working
out a roster for the order in which we’re eaten’ – p. 223). In the final
moments of the play, a Christ-like Arthur is resurrected and ascends
to Heaven. The macabre feast continues till the end of the play – a last
and eternal supper for the Victorians, perhaps – and it is surely not by
chance that the final line (‘Pass us that leg’ – p. 223) is spoken by an
eighteen-year-old working-class character – whose name just happens
to be Len.
Early Morning does not so much argue its vision as embody it
through image and metaphor. In fact, the use of cannibalism as
symbol for how capitalism functions has a long history, going back at
least to Marx, with those at the top growing fat as they consume the
bodies, minds and lives of the workers. On one level the play can be
read as a satire (much of it is potentially very funny) which attacks the
myths and hypocrisies of an era which, in Bond’s view, still held sway.
‘I’m all for holding trials in secret and executions in public’, declares
Bond’s Lord Chamberlain; ‘That simplifies government and satisfies
the people’ (p. 143). And again: ‘If you don’t go into battle neat and
clean you never win’, says the Lord Chamberlain with a typically
absurd British arrogance; ‘One guardsman with polished boots is
worth fifty American rockets’ (p. 163). But the humour is also mixed
with a disturbing sadism: ‘Shall I put my foot on him, ma’am?’ asks
the Lord Chamberlain as Albert is dying: ‘Let him crawl’, replies the
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Queen; ‘it circulates the poison’ (p. 161). Indeed, with its plotting
and counter-plotting, its characters who act only in self-interest, its
mingling of the lust for power with sexual appetite, and its sense of a
world on the edge of anarchy, the atmosphere and the view of
humanity are more reminiscent of a Jacobean tragedy than a play by
Chekhov:
The animals would blush to call him brother. The earth isn’t his
– he stole it, and now he messes in it. Even lice crawl off him,
like rats abandoning a doomed ship. He has no pity. He can’t
see further than his own shadow. He eats his own swill and
makes his own night and hides in it. (p. 189)
And while much of the play concentrates on the ruling elite, other
classes feature in their calculations – as when Albert propounds the
ominous vision inspiring his dream of power: ‘The people are strong.
They want to be used – to build empires and railways and factories, to
trade and convert and establish law and order,’ he insists. ‘I know
there’ll be crimes, but we can punish them’ (p. 141).
When he was asked about the last scene of Saved, and Len’s action
of ‘doggedly repairing the chair’, Bond not only confirmed the signifi-
cance of Len’s action but added: ‘it was because of that he was able to
appear as Arthur in the next play’. As he explains, there is ‘a central
character who runs all the way through my plays’, and according to
Bond the whole of Early Morning was ‘written from his point of
view’.56 Arthur starts the play physically attached to George, and with
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In the first Act, he can’t see what the correct sort of political
action for him ought to be either. He doesn’t know whether he
ought to join the Revolution . . . In the second Act . . . he goes
mad . . . he swallows the Victoria line, that’s the law and order
bit, completely and he says, So we are violent, so . . . we must
have law and more law and law enforcement . . . just to keep
the animal in control, and then he says, well, if this is true what
is the point of life . . .
Arthur not only refuses to join in the cannibalism, but his vision
convinces Nightingale to see the world differently: ‘Why didn’t you
tell me this before?’ she asks; ‘perhaps we needn’t be like this’ (p. 211).
There was never much likelihood that Early Morning would receive
a licence for public performance, and the Royal Court planned two
open dress rehearsals on successive Sundays. However, some senior
figures within the management withdrew their support, and the
second one was cancelled. The performance which did take place was
attended by most of the major critics, but according to Bond was ‘a
disaster’ because it was completely under-rehearsed.59 The Daily
Telegraph was ‘not much amused’ and suggested Bond’s writing was
ineffective and impenetrable: ‘He clearly means much more than he is
saying but seems unable to say it with theatrical coherence.’ The Daily
Mail found it ‘obscure, inconsistent, pointless and boring’. Under the
headline ‘Don’t ban this play, just let it fade away’, the paper urged the
Lord Chamberlain to ‘let it just fall flat out of its own sheer tedium’.
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Lear: ‘We’ll make the society you only dream of’ (p. 99)66
Lear was standing in my path and I had to get him out of the
way. I couldn’t get beyond him to do other things that I also
wanted, so I had to come to terms with him.67
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responding to Brook. But the problem lay also with the original text,
and what he saw as Shakespeare’s readiness to give in to despair. From
this perspective, King Lear reflected the position Arthur has reached in
the middle section of Early Morning, and that was a counsel of pessi-
mism. ‘Shakespeare does arrive at an answer to the problems of his
particular society’, claimed Bond, ‘and that was the idea of total resig-
nation, accepting what comes, and discovering that a human being
can accept an enormous lot and survive it.’ This was an ‘inadequate’
response for art to make: ‘Acceptance is not enough. Anybody can
accept. You can go quietly into your gas chamber at Auschwitz, you
can sit quietly at home and have an H-bomb dropped on you.’72
Yet as we might expect, Bond’s own Lear provides no catharsis or
easy resolution. Most reviews of the original Royal Court production
in 1971 saw its view of humanity – the unspeakable things people do
to each other, and the failure of every attempt to break the cycle – as
profoundly negative: ‘a long scream of pain and horror’, ‘no optimism
whatever’, ‘the bleakest play I have ever seen’.73 Bond’s world was a
‘hell on earth’, filled with ‘Goya-like enormities’ and located in ‘a
monochrome dungeon where terrified and merciless insects enact an
endless cycle of political atrocity’.74 Crucially, none of the male char-
acters generally associated with virtue in Shakespeare’s play – Kent,
Edgar, Albany, Gloucester – survives into Bond’s text, while Cordelia,
the virtuous and innocent daughter in the original, becomes – what-
ever her justifications and positive instincts – as ruthless and repressive
as every other dictator. Despite this, and like Saved and Early Morning,
Lear carries seeds of hope. Lear himself may start as a monster, but he
learns and changes – albeit only when he has lost his power. In
Cordelia’s prison, Lear encounters the ghosts of his two daughters as
children, and is suddenly able to imagine a better world in which ‘We
won’t chain ourselves to the dead, or send our children to school on
the graveyard. The torturers and ministers and priests will lose their
office. And we’ll pass each other in the street without shuddering at
what we’ve done to each other’ (p. 54). This is hardly Utopia. It is a
description of what will be absent rather than present. But as grounds
for optimism it will do to start with. Perhaps Utopia can be imagined
best by thinking of what will not be there, rather than what will. In
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to his victim when he leads him away afterwards: ‘Don’t blame me,
I’ve got a job t’ do’ (p. 30). This may not excuse him, but is an accu-
rate recognition of the reality of the situation – and the soldier knows
it could easily be his turn to suffer the following day. The rape and
atrocity at the end of the first act is all too reminiscent of invading
armies – probably at the time of the play’s first performance of the
Americans in Vietnam – but equally sickening is the blinding of Lear,
carried out by a scientist proudly demonstrating his latest piece of
pioneering medical equipment. ‘With this device you extract the eye
undamaged and then it can be put to good use’, he tells Lear proudly;
‘Understand, this isn’t an instrument of torture, but a scientific device’
(p. 77).
Like Arthur at the end of Early Morning, the Lear of the last act
understands at last. He speaks publicly and to whoever will listen as
an oppositional force against Cordelia’s government, and warns her
not to make the same mistakes he has made. He may not convince her
(‘You are like my conscience’, she says, p. 97) but he refuses to be
silenced or to give in to despair. In the final, short scene, the three
shovel loads of wall we see Lear extract before he is shot may seem to
represent no more than a pointless and individual gesture. But to
understand what Bond wishes the scene to say it is necessary to look
at the staging more precisely. It takes place in ‘clear daylight’ – a visual
metaphor which sets the scene apart. And crucially, Lear’s gesture is
witnessed – not only by the theatre audience, but by a small one on
stage. As he begins dismantling the wall, ‘a group of workers come on
and stare at Lear’. After he has been shot, some of them go towards
the body in curiosity, but are quickly moved on. However, while most
of the workers dutifully turn their backs and walk away ‘quickly and
orderly’, a direction tells us ‘One of them looks back’ (p. 102). That,
perhaps, is where the change might begin. Of course, the action has
also been witnessed by us, and the closing image includes not only the
dead body of Lear but a wall which has been partially dismantled, and
implements – not only the shovel Lear has been using, but ‘a stack of
tools’ that are beside the wall. They are ready, perhaps, for us to take
up and carry on what Lear has begun. For tools can build, but they
can also pull things apart.
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‘What period are the characters in?’ Bond was asked by the director of
an American production of Saved in the early 1980s: ‘Our own’, he
replied, ‘and perhaps those of our children.’ And he advised: ‘I
shouldn’t bother about setting it in the sixties.’79 In 2011, Bond gave
permission for a major London revival of Saved – the first time he had
done so for over twenty-five years. One reason was the connection he
saw with the riots which swept across Britain that summer, mostly
perpetrated by the young, who were, in turn, often condemned and
demomised in the same language applied to the characters in Saved.
In a newspaper article published under the headline ‘My play
predicted the riots’, Bond spoke about the play’s continuing relevance:
‘Those girls out there, those guys – were they acting politically? You
have to say “No – they don’t understand their political situation.”
They didn’t find out where the bankers are living – they turned on
their neighbours. They started destroying themselves – and that’s what
happens in this play.’80 Ironically, he is also convinced – probably
rightly – that ‘If I sent Saved or Lear to the Royal Court now they
would reject them.’81
Everything Bond writes is informed by his strongly held and
unwavering political position as a Marxist, and his conviction that
Western capitalist society is fundamentally unjust and needs to be
transformed if we are to survive as a species. For all the horrors of our
history, humanity is not inherently evil, he believes; we have the possi-
bility of saving ourselves, and there are always grounds for optimism
and reasons for hope. A fundamental idea which frequently surfaces
when Bond talks about his work is the wish that his plays will be
‘useful’. And one of the qualities of his writing which gives his theatre
power – certainly in these early plays – is that they do not deal in
abstract political ideas but in the human. As he says: ‘You need to
relate to politics, economics, history, society, and then perhaps to one
shoe abandoned on the sea shore or to say the crumbs lying on the
edge of the universe. The play must enact the inter-relation between
self and society.’82
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HAROLD PINTER
by Jamie Andrews
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The Caretaker
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fair play’ (p. 5) in the face of any number of real and perceived slights.
As Austin Quigley demonstrates, this process of constant renegotia-
tion of social contracts at the micro-level of individuals is often
repeated in Pinter’s work in the 1960s, and even when Pinter later
addresses more explicitly political structures and ideologies, it is still
most often done at the level of local relationships.15 The Caretaker
marks the beginning of this exploration of realistic social relationships
through what Pinter terms ‘a particular human situation’, and as such
this new realism places it at some distance from both his own earlier
work, and from the early critical expectations of an Anglophone
Absurdist.
Nonetheless, in considering the play and its popularity in 1960, its
incorporation of recognisable West End conventions must not be
forgotten. Pinter the actor had spent much of the 1950s in regional
rep, and an element of The Caretaker’s appeal was rooted in his exploi-
tation of classic repertory tricks, the ‘cabaret turns and blackouts’ that
Pinter claimed, in an interview with Kenneth Tynan, to have left
behind.16 The scene in Act II (33), when Davies enters the room and,
unable to switch on the lights, fumbles on the floor for some matches,
is reminiscent of the blackout scene in The Birthday Party, with added
menace provided by the sudden irruption of the Electrolux.
Alongside these elements of more traditional stagecraft, the other
attribute of Pinter’s play highlighted by critics was its humour. The
linguistic excesses of much of the dialogue, for instance the grotesque
poetry of consumerism in Mick’s plans for a table ‘in afromosia teak
veneer, sideboard with matt black drawers, curved chairs with cush-
ioned seats, armchairs in oatmeal tweed’ (p. 47), contains a significant
element of humour, but the real specificity of Pinter’s dialogue lies in
its invocation of what director Peter Hall identifies as ‘piss-taking’:
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The only radio play to exceed the Appreciation Index average was
the arguably more conventional A Night Out (1 March 1960), which
recorded an audience of 0.2 per cent and a rating of 65. The accessi-
bility of its (albeit) ‘dreadful realism’ was highly rated, listeners able
this time to incorporate the ‘repetitive banalities and fatuities’ through
their relation to a recognised reality: ‘real people talking real language’
(A Clerk in Insurance). The identification of an accessible theme
underpins the play’s positive reception, eliciting an assimilation of the
work to the listener’s own circumstances: ‘After hearing this play I
made a vow never to nag my husband or son’ (A Housewife/Former
Civil Servant).
Meanwhile, what is most striking about much of the early unsolic-
ited correspondence relating to the 1960 television broadcast of The
Birthday Party and the staging of The Caretaker is the ease with which
audience members were able to identify with plays that still mystified
professional critics, and relate them to their own lives. If Pinter often
referenced his antagonistic designs in relation to the audience (‘I tend
to regard the audience as my enemy’21), many audience members
apparently responded to the challenge of this assault: ‘But I get it all
right – bang in the guts’ responded one viewer on 28 March 1960.
Others related their ease in incorporating apparently disconcerting
events to the quotidian (in a letter one audience member described
how ‘I saw an incident of this on our local bus’), or a willingness to
work to make independent sense of the plays: ‘I am writing to ask if
you will let me know if I have solved the riddle of The Caretaker’,
asked another spectator in a letter of 28 January 1961. Professional
hierarchies appear far from unassailable (‘Ken Tynan is incorrect . . .’,
Pinter was told in a letter dated 5 June 1960), and the contrast
between the glamour of West End openings and the reality of recep-
tion is encapsulated in one letter of thanks dated 27 March 1960
following the broadcast of The Birthday Party: ‘It gives middle-aged
housewives something to think about as they plod to school with the
children in the mornings.’
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The Homecoming
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herself, ordering the sons around, and dragging Joey upstairs to the
bedroom. Downstairs, Max and Lenny discuss a different kind of
homecoming, proposing that they invite Ruth to stay and ‘put her on
the game’ (p. 73).23 Teddy joins the conversation, acquiescing in the
proposal, as does Ruth, subject to closely negotiated ‘conditions of
employment’ (p. 78). As Teddy prepares to leave, Sam suddenly
collapses, revealing that Max’s widow, Jessie, had been unfaithful with
MacGregor in the back of his car. The play concludes with a tableau
vivant, and the family understands that Ruth appears to have gained
the upper hand: at the curtain, she remains seated, as if on a throne,
with Sam’s body still on the floor, Joey’s head in her lap, while Lenny
stands to one side, watching, and Max desperately beseeches her: ‘Kiss
me’ (p. 83).
In his Paris Review interview, Pinter explains that ‘the only play
that gets remotely near to a structural entity which satisfies me is The
Homecoming. The Birthday Party and The Caretaker have too much
writing. I want to iron it down, eliminate things.’24 The play can
therefore be seen as the culmination of Pinter’s project to write
through his earlier dramatic excesses to attain a structural unity that,
through rigorously maintained internal tensions, attains an almost
tragic conception. The clash of wills between all the characters is
dramatised in all its complexities – significantly, The Caretaker’s privi-
leging of contractual relationships is revived in Ruth’s insistence near
the end of the play that ‘all aspects of the agreement and conditions of
employment would have to be clarified to our mutual satisfaction
before we finalised the contract’ (p. 78) – but never fully resolved; in
this way, the play ends not with a violence that would overwhelm the
characters’ interrelationships, but with a horrific tableau that Pinter’s
French translator, Eric Kahane, glossed as the playwright’s acceptance
of his characters’ ‘fundamental and insoluble divergences’. The
Oedipal nature of the way the younger sons embrace Ruth as a substi-
tute mother-figure made to act the whore is matched by the overt
symbolism of Max’s walking stick, but we may feel that the true debt
owed to Greek tragedy is less psychological than aesthetic in its
unsparing structural unity, and rigorous maintenance of internal
tensions between the characters.
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January 1961 ‘the daily bastards’ led to it occupying the same role
in Pinter’s Parisian mythology as had the London failure of The
Birthday Party.39 The lead-up had referenced Samuel Beckett to an
extraordinary degree, and the presence of Roger Blin as Davies along-
side Jean Martin as Aston reunited Beckett’s original Pozzo–Lucky
(Godot) and Hamm–Clov (Endgame) pairing. Pre-opening expecta-
tion having led critics to assume that Pinter was consciously intending
to ape Beckett, first-night reviews either dismissed the author for
falling short, or the production for trying too hard. One critic
described characters ‘still looking like they’re waiting for Godot’,40
while Paul Morelle’s complaint was typical: ‘the clock has stopped at
Beckett. But Harold Pinter is not Beckett.’41 Whether Pinter was
trying to be Beckett was generally not considered, and this collective
confusion and distrust ensured Pinter’s failure to find an audience in
Paris for another four years.
When the double-bill of The Collection and The Lover (La
Collection and L’Amant) was announced in summer 1965, it was
therefore widely assumed to be Pinter’s Paris debut. The still unknown
Pinter again fitted neatly into critical expectations through the pairing
of his leading actors, but this time in the context of the star system.
Delphine Seyrig and Jean Rochefort had just completed an acclaimed
seven-month run of Gabriel Arout’s Cet Animal étrange, whose
director, Claude Régy, had discovered Pinter’s texts while looking for
opportunities to renew his collaboration with the two leading actors.
News of the revival of the Seyrig–Rochefort star billing dominated
pre-opening reporting, often accompanied by breathless photo-stories.
Reviewers subsequently praised the stars more than the plays, often
blurring the characters with the actors’ star profiles; referencing
Seyrig’s role in Alain Resnais’s 1961 film L’Année dernière à Marienbad,
La Croix mused on her character, Stella: ‘So you never went to Leeds?
Or to Marienbad?’42 The critical response also foregrounded what Le
Soir termed ‘the age-old theme of adultery’ in both plays,43 an under-
pinning that reassured Parisian audiences and reviewers: an earlier
critic of Le Gardien writing in La Croix was therefore able to reassure
his readers ‘it’s boulevard theatre’. Such narrative and ontological
surprises as were evident in the plays were thus reclaimed by the critics
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1967, and the premiere of The Homecoming at the Music Box Theatre,
for his first real Broadway triumph. New York critics emphasised the
unity of the play’s structure, making the same allusions to the tautness
of classical Greek tragedy as had their Parisian counterparts the
previous year. The Nation’s reviewer called the production ‘one of the
most complete I have seen on the English or American stage in some
years’, finding it less striking but ‘more organic’ than Peter Brook’s
Marat/Sade,45 and this perfection of construction obviated the kind of
criticism of a moral decrepitude that had been levelled at The
Caretaker in 1961. Perhaps not surprisingly, the US-based philosophy
professor, Teddy, received more critical attention in New York than in
London or Paris, and his indifference to violence and non-involvement
was seen by the more strident leftist critics in the context of the
urgency for intellectuals to ‘protest against the debasement of their
country and all humanity in Vietnam’.46 Although Walter Kerr in the
New York Times thought The Homecoming unable to justify its length
(‘the play comes to seem afflicted by an arthritic mind and tongue’),
the mostly undisputed approbation ensured the Best Play Tony
Award, and established Pinter as a major writer in New York; for the
critic of Newsweek, Pinter was ‘the most significant playwright now
writing in English’, and The Homecoming ‘an extraordinarily impres-
sive play, one whose equal we are not likely to see at all soon’.47
Censorship
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when Rumsey recalls Ellen as both a young girl, and later as his lover.
Whereas Rumsey’s memories of Ellen are suffused with descriptions of
the natural world – ‘on good evenings we walk through the hills to the
top of the hill past the dogs the clouds racing just before dark or as
dark is falling when the moon’ (p. 33)58 – Bates’s coarser language
involves more roughly recollected urban nights: ‘caught a bus to the
town . . . Showed her the bumping lights’ (p. 34). The reliability or
interrelatedness of the past is questioned early on by Ellen, who recalls
telling her drinking companion, in a line that recalls The Go-Between:
‘I’m old, I tell her, my youth was somewhere else’ (p. 36). This line
also subverts the reliability of the performed present, as the stage direc-
tions indicate that Ellen is ‘a girl in her twenties’, thus seemingly
locating these (non-)memories of the past in some future time.
Landscape, meanwhile, draws from a similarly elegiac melding of
past and presents, although it is set in the less de-localised environ-
ment of ‘the kitchen of a country house’, complete with reassuringly
naturalistic objects. The play’s two characters, Duff and his wife Beth
(the play was written in Stratford-upon-Avon when Vivien Merchant
was playing in Macbeth), sit on either end of a long kitchen table, and
trade memories of their life together working for the house’s former
owner, Mr Sykes. It is unclear if either character can hear the other,
and yet the two monologues operate in counterpoint, at times seem-
ingly even prompted by the other’s thoughts. As in Silence, the two
voices are easily distinguished: Beth’s dreams are elemental – of water,
light, shadow and birth – while Duff is more grounded in the concrete
trivia of ducks, dogs and bread, and in common with Bates in Silence,
his language is often earthier, and more aggressive. An uncertain
narrative emerges from the monologues, with two key events estab-
lished: the moment that Duff confessed an infidelity to Beth, and her
passionate response; and a paradisial moment on a beach recalled by
Beth, during which she asked her (unidentified) lover if he would
have a child with her. The play concludes with a delicate curtain line,
as Beth recalls:
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The two plays, and Night (in which a husband’s and wife’s differing
memories of their first meeting circle around each other), are typically
seen to draw deliberately from the pared-down simplicity of Beckett’s
short stage works; the economy of language is clearly comparable, and
the dislocated staging of Silence is instantly reminiscent of the three
urns of Beckett’s Play (1964). For the Lord Chamberlain’s Reader,
Pinter was getting ‘nearer to Beckett’, while the Observer identified ‘a
homage to Beckett’, referencing not only Play but also Happy Days
(1962) in relation to Landscape.59 Later academic criticism followed in
the same vein (e.g. Ronald Knowles’s comment that Silence ‘is the
most Beckettian of all of Pinter’s plays’, or Billington’s comparison to
Ohio Impromptu60), and this emphasis has tended to entomb the
reception of the plays within a Beckettian astringency. In his biog-
raphy, Billington cautions against accepting the beauty of Beth’s final
line in Landscape (quoted above) on its own terms, underlining the
fact that it concludes a dialogue of the deaf in which recollections of a
past happiness serve only to underline the characters’ present isola-
tion: ‘the final image . . . was as chilling as anything in Beckett’.61 For
Billington, this ‘petrified non-communication’ parallels the fractured
state of Pinter’s own marriage at the time of composition,62 and yet
the images that are recalled in all three works are of a powerful irides-
cence and salty sensuousness. It can in fact be argued that the works
present a less pessimistic vision than often understood, a vision that
draws as much from a Joycean as a Beckettian aesthetic in the way
that it loops back to a crucial image from Pinter’s own formative
reading of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In his review, titled ‘Paradise Lost’, Harold Hobson noted that ‘in
each case what is important is not the past, but the continuing
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influence that this past exercises on the present which is before our
eyes on the stage’.63 This ever-present past was to be explored by
Pinter in a number of works from the late 1960s onwards, and Clive
Barnes noted how this concern with memory and time marked not so
much a Beckettian homage as ‘Pinter’s debt to James Joyce’.64
Particular connections between Joyce and Pinter have been explored
by Knowles, who acknowledges the importance of Pinter’s acclaimed
revival of Joyce’s 1915 play Exiles in 1970, and its direct influence on
not only Pinter’s next original work Old Times (1971), but also the
clear correspondences of verbal detail and structure with Betrayal
(1978).65 We may, however, equally perceive a crucial Joycean
borrowing in the striking image that dominates and underpins
Landscape: Beth’s memory of standing alone in the water’s edge on a
beach. In one of the key epiphanic moments in A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, Stephen Daedalus observes:
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considered alongside not only Night, but also a much earlier radio
sketch, Dialogue for Three. Broadcast on the BBC in early 1964, in
this sketch two unnamed men recall an unnamed woman. In contrast
to the men’s sharper and more demotically expressed memories, the
core of the short piece is the woman’s memory of the first time she
met her lover/husband:
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Afterword
On the final page of the final scene of Harold Pinter’s final play,
Celebration (2000), the Waiter in the stylish London restaurant of the
type that Pinter both frequented and parodied, delivers his closing
monologue (or ‘interjection’), remembering that:
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The old man whose memories are telescoped into a single image of a
young boy looking far into the distance is an appropriate way to
conclude the oeuvre of one of the greatest theatre writers of the twen-
tieth century. His early plays famously chart a struggle for territory
that becomes increasingly complex as it extends from the perspective
of an isolated individual consciousness towards more fully realised
social groupings, and as part of this power play, characters begin
increasingly to lay claim to the past as an affirmation of strength, or a
weapon.
These two currents are developed by Pinter during his writing
throughout the four decades after the 1960s: local struggles between
two consciousnesses will form the root of Pinter’s later, more overtly
political work during the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Mountain Language,
1988, or One for the Road, 1984), while memory – the power its
command can bring, and sometimes even its absence (A Kind of
Alaska, 1982) – becomes ever more vital. These two themes will circle
around each other throughout much of Pinter’s later work, and are
most notably fused in what is often considered to be his late-period
masterpiece, Ashes to Ashes (1996).
Returning to the decade under review, after leaving the early
symbolism of The Room and The Birthday Party, Pinter’s work showed
a growing awareness of the past, a shift apparent before the commonly
acknowledged memory-cycle plays began with the broadcast of
Landscape in 1967. This shift is apparent in Pinter’s own revival of
The Birthday Party in 1964, in which he steered the play away from its
earlier strained symbolism towards a more realistic (and comic)
domestic environment, in which he ‘tried to make very detail as ordi-
nary as possible’, according to Bamber Gascoigne in an undated
review for the Observer.78 Pinter’s former teacher and lifelong mentor
Joseph Brearley interpreted this production as bringing the play closer
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ALAN AYCKBOURN
by Frances Babbage
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works on people’s minds without letting them know he’s doing it’.5
Such a view was by no means universally shared (and was very likely
unwelcomed by Ayckbourn, who has always maintained that he is an
apolitical writer); for some time his theatre continued to attract seem-
ingly contradictory descriptions, with those keen to defend its social
significance set against others, both supportive and more critical, who
regarded him ultimately as an exponent of amusingly reworked
comedy in a classical and ultimately conservative tradition. To an
extent, both perceptions are true. Like a great many writers,
Ayckbourn has avoided stating baldly what his plays are ‘about’, but
he has been perfectly forthcoming in interviews and willing to talk
about real-life observations and experiences that have inspired or
informed them. At the same time, Ayckbourn’s work provides neither
simple reflection nor overt critique of his contemporary society. In his
early plays, form sometimes dominates over content: this is not neces-
sarily a weakness – although at the time it put him at odds with leftist,
Brecht-influenced fellow authors like Edward Bond or John Arden –
but rather reflects the conscious attention to dramatic structure
which, as I discuss, was for him fundamental in developing a
profound understanding of craft.
Part of the larger difficulty facing critics seeking to assess
Ayckbourn’s contribution has been, somewhat paradoxically, his
extreme popularity. Once any work of art has thoroughly demon-
strated mass appeal, it becomes by definition part of the
‘establishment’; and once embedded there, it is generally no longer
considered to be truly critical or challenging. The director Peter Hall
commented in the mid-1980s on this ‘problem’ in Ayckbourn’s case,
emphatic in his own conviction that Ayckbourn’s plays have been, and
will continue to be, significant: ‘In 100 years’ time, when he’s been
forgiven for being successful, people will read his plays as an accurate
reflection of English life in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. They represent a
very important document.’6 In what follows I examine Ayckbourn’s
plays of the 1960s, showing how these stand both as social ‘docu-
ment’, in Hall’s terms, but also as the fascinating and sometimes
flawed experiments of an emerging writer, obsessed by the possibilities
of form and distinguished by an exceptional comic talent.
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The arrival of the seemingly innocent Mint throws the stately home
and its inhabitants into increasingly surreal chaos. He is drawn into a
tennis match, afternoon tea, billiards, dinner (mimed throughout) –
in short, the rituals of a ‘weekend in the country’ – and by the end of
it succeeds both in thoroughly exposing the absurdities of everyone
present and abducting Amanda, daughter of the house. The end of
the play initially appears to show this last action thwarted, as the last
scene opens with the weedy Cecil bringing Amanda, now his wife,
back to his flat. To her disappointment he suggests she head up to her
own room and just ‘bang on the floor’ if she wants anything. But once
in bed, two pairs of feet are visible sticking out of the end: she dives
under the covers, uttering the play’s final line: ‘(Ecstatic) Oh, Mr
Whatnot!!’17
Mr Whatnot is manifestly a play about snobbery and social class.
Although equally clearly parodic of this, it is not wholly removed
from reality; Ayckbourn remarked in a programme note for an
amateur production of the work at Leeds Civic Theatre, a few years
later, that the ‘people in it really do exist. Just buy a copy of the Tatler
and you’ll see where I pinched what dialogue there is.’ At the same
time he emphasised that he had no point to make with the play, ‘no
message’: it was ‘written purely for laughter’. Of his aristocratic char-
acters, he added: ‘[t]hey’re narrow, stuffy, unimaginative, boring and
I’m very fond of them.’18 Ayckbourn’s words are in tension with the
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insistence of the reviewer in The Times that the play had social princi-
ples and demonstrated the belief that ‘plebeian vigour, sincerity and
enterprise will conquer a decadent aristocracy’.19 Cordelia Oliver for
the Guardian (here referring to a 1976 production) seems closer to the
spirit of its author’s intentions in describing Mr Whatnot as ‘a
good-natured dig at the ineffably self-centred world of the stately
home set’.20 At this stage of his career, as in future years, Ayckbourn
represented himself more as humorous commentator upon society
than active critic, and in so doing distinguished himself implicitly
from the more overtly politically engaged of his contemporaries, for
example John Arden or Joan Littlewood, or indeed Mike Leigh, with
whose work Ayckbourn’s has occasionally been compared. Mr
Whatnot illustrates Ayckbourn’s particular slant perfectly, dramatising
– with great wit, verve and theatrical inventiveness – his ambition ‘not
[to] destroy’ but to ‘confuse a little, upset status quos’.21 How he
achieves this and the nature of the ‘order’ he upends will be examined
in detail in the next section of this chapter, in which I consider three
of Ayckbourn’s major and diversely ambitious plays: Relatively
Speaking, How the Other Half Loves and Family Circles.
While from the beginning of his career Ayckbourn wrote for a popular
audience, ‘popular’ here implied diversity – of class, interest, age
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I realised when I was quite young that girls were getting less of
a shout than men [. . .]. In many ways things have got better
for women over the past 40 years. The progress for women has
meant correspondingly increased confusion for men. That’s
what I have chronicled in my plays.25
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Relatively Speaking
Relatively Speaking was initially titled Meet My Father and first staged
at the Library Theatre in 1965.26 It was a great success and soon trans-
ferred to London, where it established Ayckbourn’s reputation almost
overnight. The comedy in this play is carefully built through a series
of complications derived from a single misunderstanding. Naive Greg
is persuaded by his girlfriend Ginny that she is going away for the
weekend to visit her parents, when in reality she plans to meet Philip,
her married ex-lover, to put a stop to the gifts with which he continues
to bombard her. Greg decides to surprise Ginny by going too, in fact
beating her to the address – ‘The Willows, Lower Pendon, Bucks’ –
that is scribbled on a cigarette packet he finds in her London flat and
taking with him the pair of men’s slippers that she has eventually
convinced him are her father’s. On his arrival in the country, Greg
proceeds on the assumption that Philip and his wife Sheila are Ginny’s
parents. Sheila, unshakably polite, does her best to accommodate this
unknown but seemingly harmless young man, hospitably plying him
with drinks suited to the hour whenever the conversation turns espe-
cially confusing; Philip, for his part, is sufficiently muddled by what
Greg says (when the latter is actually talking about Ginny) to imagine
him to be his own wife’s ‘bit on the side’, now convinced that Sheila
really does have the secret life she has always faked for her husband’s
benefit in retaliation against his actual infidelities. When Ginny
arrives, she in turn is obliged to maintain her fiction by posing for
Greg as the couple’s daughter and for Sheila as Greg’s girlfriend, while
Philip pretends to Greg that he is Ginny’s father and to his wife that
the young woman is his secretary. Towards the end of the play Philip
reluctantly consents to give his ‘daughter’ in marriage to Greg, yet
draws from him, and a furious Ginny, the agreement that she will first
accompany Philip on a ‘long business trip’ (p. 57), thus ‘[making] a
father very happy’.27 Just in time, Sheila grasps the real relationships
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between all those present and puts a stop to the plan. Deftly, she
converts Philip’s planned break with Ginny all to himself into a
six-week honeymoon for Ginny and Greg; furthermore, as it also
transpires that the pair of men’s slippers returned to their house by
Greg are not in fact Philip’s, a final twist sees Sheila reigniting her
husband’s old suspicion that she herself is having an affair. Vague as
she is, and throughout the most put upon, Sheila is nevertheless at the
end the only one fully in the picture.
Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1967,
directed by Nigel Patrick and with an impressive cast: Richard Briers
as Greg, Michael Hordern as Philip, Celia Johnson as Sheila and
Jennifer Hilary as Ginny.28 The title of the play was changed after the
West End impresario Peter Bridge had described the original as ‘very
vulgar and seaside’: the new choice of Relatively Speaking was a
self-conscious nod towards the plays of Noël Coward, perhaps most
obviously his 1951 comedy Relative Values.29 Patrick had also
produced (and starred in) Coward’s Present Laughter (1942) in 1965,
a highly successful revival which had prompted The Times reviewer to
observe with regret that ‘plays as funny as this [were] no longer being
written in England’.30 The validity of that assessment must remain a
matter of opinion, but if there was any truth in it then it is fitting that
Coward himself should have endorsed this new play’s contribution
towards reversing the decline. After the London opening, Ayckbourn
received a telegram at the BBC, where he was then working, that he
initially assumed to be a joke: ‘dear alan ayckbourn all my
congratulations on a beautifully constructed and very funny
play i enjoyed every minute of it. noel coward.’31 Relatively
Speaking had yet another link to Coward: Celia Johnson, playing
Sheila, was well known for her starring role in the romantic film Brief
Encounter (1945), written by Coward and directed by David Lean.
This concentration of connections no doubt furthered a trend that
quickly spread among reviewers to represent Ayckbourn as Coward’s
‘natural successor’.32 Certainly, the younger man acknowledged his
influence – although equally that of Rattigan and, casting further
back, of Chekhov, Pinero, Wilde and Congreve33 – and the two
dramatists shared an appreciation of well-crafted plot, humour
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The Pill was introduced to Britain in 1961, originally for the use of
married women only, but by 1967 (the same year as the London
premiere) that restriction had been lifted. Its use was integrally tied up
with women’s liberation, not necessarily because it enabled women to
‘sleep around’ but because it brought with it a new level of independ-
ence: uncoupling sex from the anxiety of pregnancy allowed a woman
to a far greater extent to plan when to have children, rather than find
herself economically dependent on her partner (if they married), or
alternatively faced with the stigma of single motherhood or the risks
of abortion, the latter at this time still illegal in Britain.40 Honey, a
popular monthly magazine of the period aimed at young women and
older teens, variously reflects this change in gender identities and rela-
tionships. Its August 1969 issue published a letter from a reader that
announced: ‘I’ve recently been told by a man that I’m unique!
Because, at the ripe old age of twenty, I’m still a virgin. Should this
revelation be emblazoned across the national newspapers?’41 Gillian
Cooke’s editorial for the issue addressed the same phenomenon from
a different angle, observing: ‘It may be some subtle balancing mecha-
nism at work as girls, enjoying their acquired social and sexual
freedoms, become more casual and resilient in their relationships, but
nowadays men seem to be the real romantics.’42 The relationship of
Greg and Ginny illustrates Cooke’s point precisely. When pushed,
Greg admits he has not ‘really known’ any girl before Ginny: far
worldlier than he, she considers him rash indeed to propose with no
basis for comparison (p. 13).
While Ginny seems to epitomise the liberated ‘Sixties girl’ the play
nevertheless ultimately shows her options to be limited, her desires
manipulated. While Greg tries to charm her into line, Philip’s
approach is directly predatory to a point that sits at times uneasily
within the genre of comedy:
Ginny All those flowers, the chocolates, the phone calls – it’s
not fair on me, Philip. Can’t you see that? (She turns to face him.)
Please leave me alone.
Philip Is that why you came all the way down here – to tell me
that?
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Ayckbourn’s next popular success was How the Other Half Loves.
Between this and Relatively Speaking he wrote another play, The
Sparrow (1967), a comedy set in Cockney London; this was well
enough received on its premiere at Scarborough but not taken up else-
where, dwarfed perhaps by the attention paid to those either side. As
had now become the pattern for Ayckbourn, How the Other Half
Loves was first staged at Scarborough and directed by the playwright
himself; this dual involvement allowed him to joke in the programme
note that for any confusion experienced watching the show, spectators
should ‘blame the director and not the author’.44 In contrast with the
still more structurally ambitious plays he came to write later, How the
Other Half Loves is reasonably straightforward, but at the time its
central premise was strikingly original. Where Relatively Speaking’s
meanings are produced in part through the contrast of Ginny’s messy
metropolitan bedsit with the chilly bourgeois domesticity of The
Willows, Lower Pendon – ‘I think you can safely allow me to arrange
my own morning . . .’ (p. 17) – How the Other Half Loves juxtaposes
two socially contrasting locations in a single theatrical space: the set
consists of the living rooms of Frank and Fiona Foster and that of Bob
and Teresa Philips, ‘smart period reproduction’ furniture alternating
with ‘modern, trendy and badly looked after’ respectively. The actors
inhabit this composite set throughout, while the focus regularly
switches between one house and the other: as the stage directions
explain, ‘[t]he characters in their different rooms will often pass
extremely close but without ever actually touching’.45
The comic potential of this innovative use of stage space is
exploited throughout the play, but above all in Act 1, scene 2, when a
third couple, William and Mary Featherstone, are shown attending
two dinner parties at once: we see them at the Fosters’ home on
Thursday night and simultaneously at the Philipses’ home on Friday
night. Ayckbourn has said that the inspiration behind the central
concept came from a period when he was living in a ‘soulless’ block of
flats, ‘identical boxes piled one on top of the other’:
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Teresa I mean considering the fact that you rolled in here at two
o’clock this morning stinking drunk and I haven’t said a word
about it . . .
Bob Till now . . .
Teresa Haven’t said a word about it, I think it’s really a bit of a
nerve to sit there complaining there isn’t any breakfast.
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display his own particular talents. As he was the principal ‘draw’ for
spectators, he was allowed to have his way; but as a result, the produc-
tion that resulted – although hugely successful in commercial terms
– grew ever more unbalanced.49 There may be ‘politics in every line’ as
Ayckbourn wrote it, but if six strong roles, socially diverse and care-
fully interbalanced to expose the vanities and vulnerabilities of each,
are allowed to become five supporting parts that are foils for one
pompous pillar of the establishment, the play as commentary loses
much of its bite and becomes nothing more substantial than ‘good
farcical, slapstick fun’.50
Like Relatively Speaking, How the Other Half Loves has maintained
its popularity over time but is now regularly regarded as a period
piece. This was evident in Peter Hall’s 2007 production for Bath
Theatre Royal, which incorporated a set by Paul Farnsworth that was
a ‘masterpiece of retro design: with the Phillipses’ vibrant orange,
brown and purple colour scheme, “Kerplunk” and Paul Newman
posters, spliced with the neat chintz, the fine bone china and the
many costume changes of the Foster household’.51 But design features
aside, it is above all the play’s representation of the female ‘half ’ of
each couple that dates it. Ayckbourn acknowledged this, explaining
that for his own 2009 revival of the work at Scarborough the decision
had been made to leave the play in the 1960s, given that ‘[o]bviously
the whole social scene has shifted somewhat. Men and women’s atti-
tudes have changed quite a lot. It’s interesting that in that period
when I was writing, none of the women worked. They were all
so-called housewives. [. . .] Audiences today sit and say, “Gosh, I
would never take that”.’52
How the Other Half Loves implicitly says much about what women
were and were not prepared to ‘take’ at the end of the 1960s. At one
end of the class scale, Fiona, bored and dissatisfied, passes the time
with affairs and ‘an awful lot of dashing around’: the phrase perfectly
captures the effort required to sustain the conspicuous leisure that
defines the fashionable woman about town (p. 2). At the other end,
the timid Mary has been pushed – ‘perhaps bullied [. . .], some might
say’ – by her socially aspirant husband into dressing differently,
cooking differently, thinking differently (p. 64). Caught in the
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wife? [. . .] Speak slowly to her or she misses the point.’54 The youngest
daughter, Deirdre, is the family ‘rebel’, bringing her new boyfriend –
the more or less passive James – to the party uninvited and dressed in
shorts, later having ‘banging and caterwauling’ sex with him in the
Grays’ spare room as if with the express intent of shocking her
conservative parents. The subsequent rotation of partners brings no
improvement but only variously pessimistic predictions of what each
alternative arrangement might bring. In writing the play, Ayckbourn
said he wanted to explore a question that most people will have asked
themselves: what life would have been like, what kind of person he or
she might have become, if married to someone else.55 The response of
the play seems summed up in Edward’s remark to Emma, made at the
very start: ‘Whoever you decide on to share your life with invariably
turns out to be the worst possible choice you could have made.’ He
adds, hastily: ‘present company excepted, of course’ (p. 2). Yet the
marriage of Edward and Emma may be no less precarious. The daugh-
ters have suspicions – well founded or not we are never sure – that
their father is trying to kill their mother, having learned that a neigh-
bour recently found Emma on her knees ‘gasping’ in the greenhouse,
its thermostat ‘set by someone at a dangerously high level’ (pp. 20–1).
Murderous intent may be directed the other way too: a plate of sand-
wiches prepared by Emma is discovered to be full of broken glass;
David chokes after drinking hot milk previously identified by Emma,
rather pointedly, as ‘Father’s’ (pp. 38, 46).
The title ultimately settled on, Family Circles, is more usefully
suggestive than those Ayckbourn previously gave to the play. Most
obviously, the phrase conjures mental images of intimacy and ‘togeth-
erness’, against which the drama, as it unfolds, produces a pointed
and painful contrast. Formally, the title gestures towards the play’s
complex partner-swapping, reminiscent of some kind of deadly dance;
we might find echoes here of the German playwright Arthur
Schnitzler’s La Ronde (1900), which employed the metaphor of a
round dance to explore sexual transgression and inter-class tension
(and which provoked outrage among Schnitzler’s contemporary audi-
ences). In suggesting motion without progress, Family Circles as a title
also recalls Emma’s account of past hiking trips with Edward: ‘He was
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hopeless with maps, you see. We usually went in huge circles. Round
and round. I could barely keep up with him. He refused to stop and
ask, you see’ (p. 35). Beyond this, and given the bleakness of the
overall picture, the play’s title might evoke the circles that shape
Dante’s vision of Hell, here suggesting that suburban marriage is regu-
larly if not invariably doomed. Indeed, if the ‘marriage in difficulties’
was an emergent theme in Ayckbourn’s plays of the 1960s, it became a
central motif for him in the 1970s. While autobiographical analyses
should always be undertaken cautiously, it is worth noting that this
period at the end of one decade and the beginning of another was
marked by considerable domestic and emotional upheaval: Ayckbourn
separated from Christine Roland in 1971 and moved in with the
actress Heather Stoney the same year (the two eventually married in
1997). Yet knowledge of Ayckbourn’s personal situation should be put
in a wider context: official government statistics show that the number
of remarriages in the UK rose from 57,000 in 1960 to 82,000 in
1970, with the divorce rate correspondingly climbing from 26,000 to
63,000 in the same period; these trends were reflected and to an
extent encouraged by legislative reform between 1969 and 1971 that
introduced a ‘no fault’ divorce law, which, among other effects, less-
ened the guilt associated with divorce and thus made the process
considerably easier.
Finally, Ayckbourn’s title, Family Circles, has still a further reso-
nance, as it plays linguistically upon Family Circle, the name of a
then-bestselling magazine in Britain aimed at ‘the modern family
woman’.56 Where Honey, like its American elder sister Cosmopolitan,
spoke to a female readership that was ‘young, gay and get-ahead’,57
Family Circle sat more comfortably on newsagent shelves beside
Woman and Woman’s Weekly, directed towards those already married,
or otherwise ‘settled’, typically with the added responsibility of chil-
dren. At the end of the 1960s, such magazines generally reflected a
tranquil, warm and whimsical image of family life, with the woman –
of course, the mainstay of this picture – preoccupied alternately with
keeping the house spotless (‘Letters on cleaning problems form a large
part of our postbag . . .’), knitting from currently fashionable patterns,
producing ‘delicious and economical’ meals, or – ironically, given the
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Evelyn Home’s reply treats this reader’s problem with startling prag-
matism: ‘During the week, when he’s a model spouse, can’t you make
your man see reason about his alarming weekend behaviour?’ If the
reader were to go out with her husband, Home adds, this would prob-
ably ‘[restrain] him from drunkenness, but of course this would mean
finding baby-sitters’. Her sign-off strikes a less optimistic note: ‘When
a man’s violence is really dangerous to his wife’s life, separation is
inevitable. Tell your husband this, and it may make him change his
habits.’60
In a way, perhaps Family Circle and Family Circles are not so far
apart. Magazine and stage comedy both offer the blandly, soothingly
bourgeois as their surface, but reveal this disrupted by an undercur-
rent of gender frustration, whether intellectual, emotional or sexual,
and by the reality of violence, threatened or immediate. Such indica-
tions of anxiety are subdued, buried even, within Family Circle, and
where they do come through they are met with compassion. In
Ayckbourn’s play, by contrast, bitterness is the dominant mood. It is
perhaps the most brittle and bleak of his early comedies: just about
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Afterword
214
Playwrights and Plays
him in the play to keep him occupied and demonstrate their support.
But as rehearsals progress, secrets emerge about past relations the three
women have had with Riley, and fractures widen in their current part-
nerships: it appears increasingly that Riley is manipulating his friends’
lives still, although perhaps ultimately for their benefit and by way of
a parting gift he hopes to make before he dies.
The play being rehearsed in Life of Riley is Ayckbourn’s first hit as a
young writer, Relatively Speaking. The dialogue of Philip and Sheila (‘I
can’t say I’m very taken with this marmalade’ – ‘They didn’t have our
sort’), which then comically exposed a relationship in stagnation, is
here embedded metatheatrically to a very similar end, at the same
time permitting Ayckbourn a nostalgic and gently mocking glance at
his own developing style. The inclusion of the early play within the
mature one is lightly self-referential, rather than a feature rooted deep
in the work, yet it remains a vivid illustration of the contrasting shades
of mood that have characterised Ayckbourn’s theatre over the decades.
Relatively Speaking is one of his brightest, most sparkling comedies;
Life of Riley is far from the most bleak – perhaps Just Between Ourselves
(1976) or the futuristic piece Henceforward (1987) might draw that
description – but in exploring the ripples that surround an imminent
death, we see Ayckbourn’s willingness, in evidence from the begin-
ning, to tackle the darkest of subjects.
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CHAPTER 4
DOCUMENTS
John Arden
216
Documents
said ‘This still isn’t satisfactory you know . . . you still haven’t
solved x’ . . . whatever problem it was . . . I can’t remember now
. . . and I said, ‘Oh for God’s sake Lindsay, I think it’s as good, as
clear, as it can be.’ And so he said very sharpishly, ‘Ah, I see, so I
am now holding the definitive text am I?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think
so. Because I don’t think there is such a thing as a definitive text.’
And he said, ‘Good! I’m glad to hear you say that. Some authors
would have thought there was.’ We messed about with it, and in
rehearsal we cut bits and so on. It’s a process that goes on really
with any play. But Lindsay was particularly sharp-eyed about it.
His view of the director was that a playwright requires a second
eye. If you just write a play and serve it up to the actors as it is,
there’s nearly always something wrong with it.
BM Did you ever revisit the Musgrave text after that first
production? Did that become the definitive text?
JA Well, I did revisit the text because there was a television
production by Granada a year or two later, produced by Stuart
Burge. And he was in difficulty because the play in the theatre
with intervals lasted two and a half hours, which is pretty long for
a stage play. Granada would only give him ninety minutes. And so
something like forty-five minutes of text had to be cut out. We
worked on very much the same lines as before – how much do we
need to know, how much detail do we need to have? . . . this
speech, will the play be wrecked if it’s not said, and so on and so
forth.
BM Did the cuts sharpen the text?
JA No. In fact I saw the television version last year when the
Town Hall Theatre in Galway offered me the stage for an eightieth
birthday little show . . . And we had some bits of film as well,
including a piece of the Granada production. Of course they sent
me all of it, and I looked at all of it, and I thought, well, it’s all
very well but really it’s a bit too peremptory. It suddenly came to a
conclusion. It was clear enough but it was kind of coarsened. They
had done a good job on shortening it but it was something I
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thought didn’t need to be done. And then there was another play
by the 7:84 theatre company in the early 1970s, shortly after
Bloody Sunday. John McGrath had the notion that Serjeant
Musgrave’s Dance, what had gone on in the back-story of that play,
sounded like Bloody Sunday. And could we rewrite it to suit the
Northern Ireland situation, in modern dress? And they did a
version. John McGrath did it, not me. It was done pretty well, but
it wasn’t what you might call a great artistic success, simply
because I don’t think you can do this with plays. For temporary
immediate effects you can do it, but once the topicality has faded,
you’re left with something that is neither one thing nor the other.
It was a legitimate point of view to be adopted at the time, but
reading it now it doesn’t necessarily reverberate.
BM In relation to that, John, the fact that Musgrave has been
revived during the Vietnam War, the Troubles, Iraq and so on,
points to its continuing relevance: Armstrong’s Last Goodnight
would have spoken powerfully to the Irish peace process, and to
the current attempts to disengage from Afghanistan and Iraq.
They go to the heart of certain historical continuities. Do you
think the same holds true of the Non-Stop Connolly Show or
Vandaleur’s Folly?
Margaretta D’Arcy Well, we did a version of Vandaleur’s Folly
which actually was a version of the Manchester Enthusiasts1 a
couple of years ago, and we did parts of the Non-Stop Connolly
Show in Galway. And of course they are very relevant still. The one
we haven’t done is the Ballygombeen or Little Grey Home in the
West, which would not be so relevant today . . . But I think that to
make plays relevant it needs other dimensions. When we did the
Non-Stop Connolly Show in Galway we were able to bring in
contemporary issues, and people came and spoke about what was
happening, and so it meant that the audience then had the choice
of becoming part of a struggle that was ongoing.
BM How do you see the Royal Court ‘revolution’ from the
vantage of fifty years? Was it really as significant in reshaping
British theatre as orthodoxy suggests it was?
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Richardson was anxious all the time for more commercial success,
and I think he got a bit fed up with George’s almost educational
policy there.
BM There must have been a great tension between being lauded
as Britain’s Brecht and a writer of Shakespearean quality on the
one hand, and then being rejected by the Court on the other? Was
the rejection a matter of politics?
MD I think you’ve got to understand that in that time neither of
us was aware of all the wonderful things that people were saying.
Because we did not live in London. After Musgrave’s Dance we lived
down in Bristol, and then we moved up to Kirbymoorside. So we
were never really aware of the stuff people were talking about. And
the feeling of rejection was many years later after Musgrave. The
first indication we had about this cooling off towards us was when
we put the Non-Stop Connolly show on at the Almost Free. And
Pauline Melville was in Live Like Pigs, and she was in the Non-Stop
Connolly Show, and she asked Bill [Gaskill] if he was coming along
to one of the episodes, and he said, ‘Oh, no, that’ll be one of the
boring ones!’ . . . At the beginning they were all madly excited
about Live Like Pigs . . . and then, when the reviews came out and
there was nobody sitting in the theatre, literally then, you were out
[. . .] It wasn’t as if the Court was writing you a letter saying ‘please
write us another play’. They did ask to do The Workhouse Donkey
but that got very messed up, and Lindsay wasn’t interested. But the
directors were not interested in John. I think part of the reason he
became isolated was that he didn’t have one director who was
pushing him. Arnold Wesker had John Dexter. And John Dexter
was very faithful to Arnold Wesker and was associated with
everything. If you’re not associated with a single director then
you’re just another playwright.
BM Was there a director who you would have liked to have
worked with consistently?
JA I enjoyed working with Bill Gaskill, I enjoyed working with
Lindsay Anderson, and I very much enjoyed working with Stuart
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Burge, who did The Workhouse Donkey. I did not have quarrels
with these people. But none of them was committed to me as
such, in the way that Dexter was to Wesker. One doesn’t
complain, but it was a fact. I’m not quite sure even now what
happened with The Workhouse Donkey. I wrote it, George Devine
said he liked it, and would put it on, and Lindsay would do it.
Lindsay then communicated with me for quite a while about
improving the script, which I accordingly did, and then I never
heard anything more from him. Until I got a letter from George
saying that if I was in London would I come and see him. And I
went to see him and he said that they were going to do the play
but not as a Court production: it was going to be passed on to
Larry Olivier to do at the Chichester Festival by what was the
early nucleus of the National Theatre. And a man came in and
said, ‘Hello George’, and George asked if he wanted a drink. I
didn’t know who he was. He looked as if he’d come to read the gas
meter . . . he had a moustache anyway. I suddenly realised when
George called him ‘Larry’ who he was. There was a play on in the
West End at the time about a middle-class man, an insurance clerk
or something of the sort, living in Birmingham, and Olivier was
carrying his character in appearance around with him.2
MD Of course all John’s plays were different. And the director
would only really take the play up if the subject matter of the play
interested them. If you take Arnold Wesker, all his plays have a
continuity of theme and interest [. . .] so the directors themselves
were on the lookout for areas or themes which would satisfy them.
George’s dream I think was to have a permanent group of
playwrights and directors and actors, and there would be this kind
of family feeling. But when George died that was the end of it
really.
BM The one consistent feature of these three plays is their rich
dramaturgy. I am struck by the potent use of popular forms and
conventions, for example the ‘mansions’ in Armstrong’s Last
Goodnight. But I get the impression you didn’t see a vast amount
of theatre as a child. What was the source of your knowledge of
these forms?
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Edward Bond
In April 2011 I made contact with Edward Bond and asked if he would
be willing to respond to some questions about his early plays. He agreed,
and we engaged in email correspondence over several weeks. I suggested at
the start that he should feel free to choose which of my questions to answer,
but he replied to them all, always promptly and often in surprising detail.
He also went out of his way to be helpful – not least by sending me copies
of other unpublished material relevant to issues I had raised.
What follows is an edited selection of my questions and his answers.
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they were about. I was taken with Russian double titles: War and
Peace, Crime and Punishment. So I wanted Saved and ***. But I
couldn’t think what. The Court wanted to advertise the play and
gave me an urgent deadline. During my work lunch-break I went
to a park. I walked up and down thinking. I must have come up
with some ideas. I remember none of them. When I settled for
Saved I had a slightly surprised feeling of having entered the
modern world. Now when I am asked to explain the title I say, ‘It’s
what goal-keepers do.’ If in future I am pressed I shall say, ‘You
should enter the modern world.’
SN Do you still have any notes or first drafts of the 1960s plays
which it might be possible to look at?
EB My notes for a play are many times longer than the finished
play (I have over eighty large notebooks filled with minute
scribble) and I make many drafts of each play – sometimes ten or
fifteen. And there are as many theoretical notes and unpublished
poems. When the harvest is cut and in the winter cold mice leave
the fields and come into the house and eat some of them. But
unfortunately they are still far too many for me to ever search
through to find anything – so I have to be disobliging when I am
asked to do that. I’m sorry.
SN I noticed when I read the text of the ‘Teach-In’ that the
Royal Court held on Saved in 1965 that you said, ‘I think the play
is open to several interpretations.’ And David Hare says
somewhere that however much you think as a playwright that
you’re saying one thing, there will always be people in the
audience who think you’re saying the opposite. Do you think your
plays have explicit and specific meanings which it is the duty of a
production to communicate?
EB This is a misunderstanding. Texts are written in accordance
with certain techniques. These have to be understood and used if
the play is to confront its problems – and this means saying what a
solution would be. But that doesn’t say how a play is to be acted
– every performance has to be different. The aim of directing
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very little about writing the scripts that were filmed, but now you
have mentioned it I do remember writing the plane crash and the
shooting at the start of Walkabout. My wife asked me not to write
film scripts because when I did I grated my teeth in my sleep and
it kept her awake.
SN A few years ago Lear was staged at the Crucible Theatre and
one of my colleagues told me she was shocked by the sexism (or
anti-female) tone of the play. She cited in particular the speech
where Lear looks at the body parts of his dead daughter and says
that he would never have behaved as he did if he had known how
beautiful she was. Now I thought this was an unfair charge by my
colleague; Lear isn’t looking at her face or the exterior of her body,
but at the organs. But she did make me wonder whether the play
could be seen as anti-women. It could be argued, perhaps, that the
most vicious and cruel characters in the play are actually women,
and I wondered why?
EB If your colleague thought that Lear suddenly saw his
daughter was, in the conventional sense, beautiful, or noticed the
beauty of her external body now it was being cut up – then her
judgement is weird. Lear is having a Blake-ian vision of the
orderliness and structure of nature. Is it more pro-woman to make
Cordelia an ideal heroine because she never does anything, never
has to make any political decision – I thought it was more positive
to face her with the dilemmas of reality, of men politicians, and I
gave her a case which is reasonable. Shakespeare’s Cordelia seems
to have read Kant, but Kant never met Stalin – so I thought
Cordelia should. I suppose I could have made Goneril nice, in the
interest of all-round fairness – but then I would be escaping from,
and not trying to face, the problems Shakespeare sets.
SN I am aware that you had some bad experiences with the
National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company and that
you now prefer your new plays to be staged in very different
contexts. But if either of them asked to perform Lear (or another
of your ‘older’ plays) today would you give them permission?
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SN From your essays and letter you appear to have been very
consistent in terms of your ideas and beliefs right through your
career. I always warn students not to quote something Brecht said
in 1929 and assume he still believed the same thing in 1955,
because people’s views can change. But I don’t think I really do
perceive contradictions or changes of direction in your views.
Would you agree?
EB The origin of my understanding of human beings? It
occurred when I was four or perhaps three. I was evacuated when I
was five and it was certainly before then. In the Depression my
mother had moved to London from the Fens. Fen people went to
nonconformist chapel – it was serious, dissenting (which it
combined with conformity) and entertainment (in the way drama
should be). My mother wasn’t devout but in London it was
natural for her to seek out the comfort of the local Baptist church
– just as later West Indian immigrants sought out churches from
their own home culture. She and I were walking along a road in
Holloway. I was holding her hand. I was puzzled by what I’d heard
in the sermon. I said: ‘Why did God kill his son?’ She said:
‘Because he loved him – and us.’ I was a son. God the Father had
killed his son because he loved us? I had a sensation of dumb
horror. I can still feel it. (I think ‘physically’ as a dramatist must.)
And it was like a patch of thick brown fog in the road before us.
There was already what I would understand as an irreconcilable
contradiction between the psyche – the self and its psychology
– and the situation, the reality of the world. Later, when I was
caught in the Blitz, the contradiction was reinforced. The violence
came from the sky (God’s des-res) and it was as if the sky were
breaking. Much later I found a quote from Himmler: ‘I gas the
Jews out of love.’ It was obvious even to a child that ideological
explanations are false. Later I asked why the false explanations
were needed. It is obviously to maintain a distorted relation
between the psyche – the self and its psychology – and natural
reality: the community is always at this crossroads. The self is
taught to lie to itself. It has always been the purpose of drama – it
is in fact its species function – to inhabit that contradiction, to be
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Harold Pinter
In 2007, for the fiftieth anniversary of the first production of The Room,
the Theatre Archive Project1 undertook a series of interviews concentrating
on the background to the first performance of Harold Pinter’s first play.
What follows are edited extracts of the previously unpublished interviews
generated by the Theatre Archive Project in relation to Pinter’s early
work.2
Q Can you remember the first time that you were told that this
copy of a play called The Room had arrived?
Susan Engel [played Rose] Yes, I can remember it very, very
vividly. I was great friends with Henry Woolf anyway. And one
day he comes up to me: ‘I’ve got a friend’, he said, ‘who’s at
Bournemouth in rep, and he’s trying to put a play together. If
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you’re not doing anything next term . . .’ And I said, ‘Fine, that
would be terrific.’ And then I think time passed and Henry kept
on saying, ‘I can’t get him to finish it, to make it into a play.’ And
then came the day when Henry said, ‘Yes, he’s written the play.’
Q Now can you remember how much Harold had told you
about the play before he actually started to write it?
Henry Woolf [producer, director and played Mr Kidd] He
wrote it in two days, although he says four days.
Q Was it what you were expecting after having had that
conversation?
HW Yes and no. The broad outlines yes. The actual bones,
blood, veins, arteries, musculature of the play, no. And it’s sort of
marvellous – what this play had was a terrific structure. And it was
a wonderful step forward for playwriting. You should have seen
the audience on the first night. They awoke from their polite
cultural stupor into a real awareness that something new was
happening, that English theatre was never going to be the same
again really, because it was terribly funny, and terribly menacing.
Q You knew Harold, you obviously had some understanding of
the play before you even saw it because you had discussed it with
him. For everyone else in early rehearsals it would have been the
first time they’d read it. Can you remember what their reactions
were?
HW Yes. They were very, very puzzled, particularly by ‘pause’
– the word ‘pause’. What I was really trying to get out was the fact
that Harold’s plays in my opinion are tightly constructed, but the
pauses are inhabited and populated.
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hall. That was where the Hampstead Theatre Club was at that
time. And Harold Pinter himself was directing it – which of
course at the time one wasn’t aware of how lucky one was to be
being directed by Harold Pinter. Although one knew one was
lucky because it was the author and you know, one assumed that
he could give you all the best direction. I remember being very
impressed by his knowledge and intellect.
Audience’s reactions
HW They were a wonderful audience, and they laughed and
then were hushed – totally hushed – and attentive. One of the
best audiences one could have asked for . . . It would have been so
easy to have an audience for that play who said, ‘What on earth is
going on?’ They weren’t like that; they were generous, interested,
eager to be excited by a new play.
Q Looking at that first night – there were only two nights – can
you remember anything about the production, both how it went
for the actors who were more comfortable with the play by that
point, and how the audience reacted?
David Davies [played Mr Sands] Yes. Well my memory of it is
one of being received by gales of laughter at so much of what
Auriol and I were doing. Within the play itself there is farce, there
is tragedy, there is drama.
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setting, and rather ordinary characters, and then there were the
undertones, the political undertones of a sort of racism, and
women being not marginalised, but being rather dominated by
the men.
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Reaction
Tudor Williams [audience member] In the first year of the
Everyman Theatre, they put on Pinter’s play The Birthday Party
and he was in it under his stage name of David Baron. And I went
along to it – there wasn’t a big crowd there by any means. And I
do remember that the lady next to me fell asleep and the
gentleman sat on the other side didn’t return after the interval.
And I don’t think it was my influence, I think it was slightly more
Mr Pinter. I was very struck with it, but I don’t think it was
popular, not by any means.
Q Perhaps it was too challenging at that time?
Tudor Williams It was too big a change I suppose . . .
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Reaction
Richard Foster [audience member] But we went to see The
Chairs . . . and The Caretaker all in one night at the old Sheffield
Playhouse. And I couldn’t cope with it at all. It didn’t do a thing
for me then. It’s been on again, The Caretaker. Wonderful. I think
I’ve grown up now. I don’t know whether or not at that time I was
either too young for it or it was too far advanced for me.
Q What didn’t you respond to?
RF I just couldn’t cope with the setting of it or anything. It was
very wordy, which didn’t mean a lot to me at that time. Now it
does but it didn’t then.
Beginning to be recognised
Q The Birthday Party wasn’t a commercial success, but you kept
faith with Pinter, because two years later you had The Caretaker.
What was your motivation for sticking with him?
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Reaction
Philip Bramley [audience member] The Homecoming was
pretty badly received by a lot of people, they were shouting out
‘Animals!’ I thought the play was really to do with class – I wasn’t
particularly surprised by it, because I knew families that acted like
that, where people argued and fought for a position in the family,
the pecking order.
Recognition
Q Do you remember much about The Homecoming?
Sarah Detmer [audience member] Well, I can remember it
being very different. I hadn’t really seen a great deal of theatre
before then outside my home town and it was certainly different
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from plays that we’d read and done at school. It was very striking,
it was a bit violent in a way. I was quite bowled over by it.
Q Can you remember why you went to see it?
SD I think I chose to go and see it because Pinter was the
up-and-coming writer of the period, he was the person to go and
see.
Pinter’s style
Underlying menace
Q What are your memories of early Pinter?
Dorien Brook [theatregoer] What I remember about Pinter
particularly was his uncanny genius for picking up casual
conversation. The most trivial sort of conversations really, but
once again, they’re the essence of pithy. I’ve often been on a bus
and heard people behind me, and thought ‘My God, that’s
absolute Pinter!’
Q You don’t think Pinter was naturalistic?
Anne Piper [playwright] No. His voice is always so full of
hidden menace. It’s not to do with what’s happening every day, is
it? It’s really heavily stylised.
The silences
David Davies What I can remember is that I didn’t understand
the pauses. The play was littered with pauses, and yet I couldn’t
understand them. But gradually it began to evolve. In fact I’m not
even sure in the early stages whether I just didn’t run over some of
the pauses, instead of pausing, and just carried on. Of course,
they’re so important: whatever a character said before the pause
creates the pause, because of the reaction on the character that the
line’s been directed to. And it creates this feeling of unease and
uncomfortableness, which of course is the heart of Pinter’s work.
Terence Rigby No point analysing Pinter – the text is there. You
work out the text, you say the text, there is no point analysing, no
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benefit from analysing, you play what’s there, play the pauses,
you’ve got to play the silences.
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AFTERWORD
John Arden
by Bill McDonnell
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This theme is taken up again in scenes from Part Two of The Non-Stop
Connolly Show, where Lillie Connolly is shown not only helping shape
her husband’s prose, but also the clarity of his political thinking.3 In a
fascinating commentary on their very different creative approaches,
Arden wrote:
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audience to be sought for it. Only then will the idea of a story
. . . become uppermost. 4
The ascription of the plays reflected this dialectic, with one or the
other’s name given first. In the 1970s, as the authors’ attention
increasingly turned to the crisis in Ireland, it was D’Arcy’s name
which took precedence, as texts were developed which addressed the
Troubles, and the larger question of Ireland’s colonial history.
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writer of this tremendous range and power, the heir, some said, of
Shakespeare and Brecht, no longer felt he had a place in the British
theatre.
Edward Bond
Bond has been a prolific writer for more than fifty years and continues
to be so. He remains convinced of the need to create a just society to
ensure our survival as a species, and of theatre’s potential to contribute
to the process. Many of his recent plays have been staged in Britain by
youth groups rather than professional theatres, for he has long been
disenchanted with what these institutions offer and believes that
young people both need and are better equipped to perform them.
Elsewhere in Europe it is a different story, and in Germany, Italy and
particularly France Bond has long been recognised as a major
European playwright and widely performed. But at home he has
frequently refused permission for revivals, believing that previous
productions have misunderstood his texts or approached them
wrongly, and granting it only when confident they will be approached
in the correct way. In Bond’s view, most directors ask the wrong ques-
tions and rely on tricks and devices in order to ‘make things work’
instead of working out what the text needs. ‘Anyone with an elemen-
tary knowledge of theatre can make things work on stage’, says Bond;
it is ‘very easy’, but also ‘very shameful’. Too often ‘directors don’t ask
“what is this?” but “how do I make this work?”’2 He cites a recent
production of one of his plays in which a choreographer was brought
in to help devise movement and staging, without even reading the
text.3
In addition to some fifty plays, Bond also writes extensively about
his work, about theatre, about politics and about society. He does so
through prefaces and programme notes, but also in theoretical essays
– where he has constructed his own performance vocabulary – in
notebooks and – above all – in letters, many of which have been
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‘new’ plays it puts on are really old ones. ‘Of course, many contempo-
rary plays are not modern, and for them you will keep your door
open’, he wrote to Peter Hall in 1984; ‘You are closing it down to the
new drama.’13
Bond is sometimes accused of arrogance, but the truth is more
complicated than that. ‘I don’t know how to write plays and I am still
learning’, he said in 1983; ‘I think that when we write and direct we
should keep a very open mind.’ And he denies that he is overly
dogmatic: ‘I don’t object to sharing the direction of my plays’, he
insists; ‘On the contrary, I enjoy cooperation.’14 Nor does he look for
quarrels: ‘I don’t like confrontation (very much the opposite) and I’m
sorry if I’m abrasive’, he wrote to one director following a disagree-
ment. ‘I sometimes forget to bring olive branches. But I clutch the
seeds of olive trees in my hands.’15 Bond’s quarrel with directors is not
that he sees himself as an authority, or the actors as mere puppets: ‘I
wrote the play but that doesn’t mean that I know how it should work
on stage. We have to create that together.’16 What he does claim to
know is the right questions to ask of a text.
Bond has been no less prolific since the mid-1980s. In the
Company of Men was staged by the RSC in 1996 under Bond’s direc-
tion, though it had premiered four years earlier in France, and several
other plays had their first performances outside Britain. ‘At present
UK theatre is dead – and has no useful purpose or intelligent respon-
sibility’, he writes; ‘no doubt [it] will find its role again but it doesn’t
need me to help it do this.’17
If there is hope, then it is with the young, and Big Brum youth
theatre in Birmingham have so far staged the premieres of seven of his
texts. Bond maintains that he is liberated rather than confined by
writing for the group, since he is producing work for those who recog-
nise the relevance of his ideas.
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Harold Pinter
When Harold Pinter died in 2008, he had written around thirty plays
and nearly as many screenplays during a career lasting half a century.
He was also a poet, an uncompromising speaker and polemical
essayist, an accomplished director and a genuinely powerful performer
who in his last stage appearance acted Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last
Tape ‘with an unsentimental rigour that was poleaxing’.1 His many
awards included France’s highest civil honour, the Légion d’honneur,
the European Theatre Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the
last quarter of his life, he was heavily and publicly engaged in
campaigning against torture, dictatorship and injustice, and opposing
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the military actions carried out in the names of the British and
American peoples by their respective governments.
Pinter’s death provoked a stream of tributes. He was described as
‘the most influential, provocative and poetic dramatist of his genera-
tion’;2 ‘the last great playwright’;3 and ‘the most inspirational
playwright of the twentieth century’.4 Some even compared him to
Shakespeare. ‘Yesterday when you talked about Britain’s greatest living
playwright, everyone knew who you meant’, wrote David Hare; ‘today
they don’t.’5 Actors paid homage: ‘He was our God’, said Michael
Gambon; ‘the man who wrote the plays you wanted to be in.’6 His
abilities in the rehearsal room were similarly lauded; ‘the best director
I’ve ever known . . . all actors who’ve worked with him would say
that.’ Not that Pinter had always been an easy person to work with;
‘he was very quick to lose his temper’, said Kenneth Cranham; ‘he
could be quite frightening’.7 And Douglas Hodge recalled that while
‘there were constant jokes’, there was also ‘always the possibility of a
good fight’. Hodge summed up what made Pinter so distinctive: ‘It
was very rare to meet someone who might very quickly get into a
punch-up but also has the greatest vocabulary you’d ever come across.’
Pinter, he said, was ‘the most violent pacifist I ever met’.8
Pinter’s texts were perfectly nuanced and shaped for performance:
‘If you said the lines exactly as he wrote them – observing the pauses,
the commas and semi-colons – the rhythm would speak for itself.’9
But he always maintained that he wrote for himself. ‘I don’t give a
damn what other people think’, he said; ‘I’m not writing for other
people.’10 Certainly not for audiences: ‘I tend to regard the audience
as my enemy’, he declared; ‘they’re guilty until they’re proved inno-
cent.’11 And he once claimed that his final note to actors before they
went on stage was always ‘fuck the audience’; in a market-based
culture which increasingly sees the artist’s duty as being to please
customers, Pinter’s view becomes radical: ‘If you want the audience to
love you, you’re finished’, he insisted; ‘you’ve got to take a very strong
view, saying you’re going to get what we’re giving you, you’re not
going to get what you want.’12
Though not embarrassed about describing himself as an intellec-
tual (‘I’m part of a tradition which includes Joyce and Eliot . . . I read
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The Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to Pinter on the grounds that
his work exposes ‘the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry
into oppression’s closed rooms’.28 Yet there remained for Pinter a
conflict between the demands of Art and those of Politics. He began
his Nobel lecture by quoting a statement he had made in 1958: ‘There
are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor
between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either
true or false; it can be both true and false.’ Now, nearly fifty years
later, he offered an important rider: ‘I believe that these assertions still
make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art’,
he declared; then came the qualification: ‘As a writer I stand by them
but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is
false?’29 It is a tension which has no resolution.
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Alan Ayckbourn
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aim that each should work if seen in isolation, and that they could be
viewed in any order.
In Sisterly Feelings (1979) the script of the opening scene is fixed,
but the two succeeding scenes can be played in alternative versions
which take the narrative and relationships along different routes.
Decisions about which versions are played on each night are reached
actually during the performances, partly through the toss of a coin
and partly through choices made by the actors in the moment. It is as
perhaps as close as Ayckbourn – as a playwright – could go to the
dreams of his early mentor, Stephen Joseph, of improvising the script
in front of the audience. In this case, the script of the final scene is
fixed, but will carry different meanings and effects, depending which
versions of the middle scenes have been played. By contrast – and yet
building on this – Intimate Exchanges (1982) has sixteen different
possible endings.
In the case of Way Upstream (1981) it was the ambitious require-
ments of the staging which took the attention. The play is set on
board a boat, and the stage has to be filled with water. (When it was
performed at the National Theatre, parts of the building were acci-
dentally and seriously flooded.) In Woman in Mind (1985) the
narrative is told from inside the head of a woman gradually losing her
sanity, so that the borders between what is real and what is fantasy
become unclear. Perhaps most remarkably, House and Garden (1999)
consists of two plays staged at the same time in different auditoria
(and to different audiences) about the same characters, played by the
same actors who leave a scene in one theatre to enter the other one
almost immediately.
Though some of his plays have been adapted for radio, television
and film versions, Ayckbourn writes almost exclusively for the stage,
and, with a few exceptions, for performance in the round. He has
returned occasionally to producing texts for children (notably Mr A’s
Amazing Maze Plays in 1988), and has also ‘collaborated’ with dead
playwrights, including Chekhov (an adaptation of Uncle Vanya in
2011), Sheridan (A Trip to Scarborough, 1982) and Ostrovsky (The
Forest, 1999). In 1975 he created (with Andrew Lloyd Webber) an
unsuccessful musical based on P. G. Wodehouse stories (Jeeves), which
261
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
262
Afterword
least fresh slants – it’s necessary to find new ways to tell the stories.’8
Yet there is surely more to it than that. To show the ‘same’ situation or
narrative from different perspectives – without privileging one of
them – does raise questions about the possibility of objectivity, and
whether there can ever be a ‘true’ account of anything. And a script
containing alternative scenes and narratives selected through chance
and live choices invites us to consider the arbitrariness of what ‘really’
happens, and reminds us of the fact that at any given moment there
are multiple alternatives available to us.
One reason for Ayckbourn’s popularity is that his plays are genu-
inely funny, and he argues that comedy is too often looked down on:
‘I suspect we don’t really believe we’re seeing anything worthwhile
unless we’ve had a really miserable time.’ He suggests – probably only
half-jokingly – ‘that to be genuinely respectable as a so-called comic
writer, on a par with an equivalent “serious” writer, you need to have
been dead preferably for a century. By which time, of course, most of
the comedy is incomprehensible and can only be laughed at by
scholars.’9 But important though it is, comedy is far from the only
engine driving his plays. Michael Billington argues persuasively that
Ayckbourn ‘is not a reassuring writer’ but is adept at ‘using comedy to
say harsh, true things about our society’.10 Another critic, John Peter,
agrees: ‘when [he] is safely dead, things will change. He’ll be seen for
the domestic political dramatist he really is.’11
In fact, there is often a darkness within the comedy of Ayckbourn’s
plays which is more than satire. Much of his best work exposes the
cruelty people inflict on each other within supposedly close relation-
ships. ‘I don’t think people were meant to live with each other for too
long’, he has observed, and one of the recurring themes is the demon-
stration of ‘how we destroy ourselves and others through small daily
acts of indifference and casual cruelty’.12 This is more than comedy.
‘What I always try to do is to write a very serious play’, says
Ayckbourn; ‘Hopefully it has this veneer of fun on top of it, but it’s
only a veneer.’13 Even in 1972, one of the characters in Absurd Person
Singular is a woman who repeatedly tries to kill herself. Her failures
(and the failures of the other characters to realise – let alone under-
stand – what is going on) may become comic, but alongside it is
263
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
264
Afterword
suggests that they can resonate powerfully within other cultures and
societies.
In 2009, Ayckbourn ceased to be Artistic Director of the Stephen
Joseph Theatre, following a stroke three years earlier and after
thirty-seven years in charge. He continues to write new plays for
Scarborough.
265
NOTES
1. Much of the information included in this chapter is derived from two key works about
the decade, both written by Dominic Sandbrook: Never Had It So Good: A History of
Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006); and White Heat: A History of
Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2007). I have also drawn on other
books listed in the first section of the Select Bibliography, and on various newspapers
and magazines of the period. And a bit on memory . . .
2. ‘Annus Mirabilus’ in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London, Faber and Faber, 2003),
p. 146.
3. Observer, 1 April 1962, p. 13.
4. See, for example, Guardian, 9 April 1963, p. 6.
5. Leary seems to have coined the phrase in 1966 or 1967 and used it frequently –
including as the title of a record he released.
6. This was how the newspaper advertised its new section.
7. From ‘The Blood Donor’, first broadcast 23 June 1961.
8. For more details see Peter Oborne, Basil D’Oliveira. Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold
Story (London: Time Warner Books, 2005), pp. 186–95.
9. See, for example, Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of
the Sixties (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 162 and 214.
10. Marqusee, p. 244; and www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Mexico_1968.htm.
11. See Radio Times, 1 January 1960.
12. Roger Coleman, Introduction to Catalogue to the ‘Situation’ exhibition at RBA
Galleries, August 1960. See www.artcornwall.org/features/situation_roger_coleman.
htm. Also quoted in Chris Stephens and Katharine Stout (eds), Art & the 60s: This Was
Tomorrow (London: Tate Publishing, 2004).
13. See, for example, Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, pp. 373–77.
14. King made his speech as part of a Civil Rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, DC on 28 August 1963.
266
Notes
267
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
268
Notes
78. Cited by the theatre manager John Counsell in the programme for a production of
Frederick Lonsdale’s 1920s comedy On Approval at the Windsor Theatre Royal, June
1964.
79. ‘Dare you take your daughter to the theatre?’, Evening News, 2 July 1964, p. 8.
80. See The Times, 22 August 1964, p. 7.
81. The Times, 25 August 1964, p. 11.
82. See Daily Telegraph, 25 August 1964.
83. The Times, 26 August 1964, p. 9.
84. Daily Mail, 26 August 1964.
85. The Times, 28 August 1964, p. 11.
86. Op. cit., n. 80.
87. The Times, 27 August 1964, p. 11.
88. ‘A View from the Gods’, Encore, March/April 1965, pp. 6–7.
89. The Times, 22 December 1965, p. 11.
90. ‘A View from the Gods’, Encore, March/April 1965, pp. 6–7, op. cit.
91. Plays and Players, February 1966, pp. 46–7.
92. See Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Loot.
93. Joe Orton, Loot, in Orton, The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1980), pp.
193–275.
94. Op. cit., n. 92.
95. The Times, 28 September 1966, p. 14.
96. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Spring Awakening.
97. The Times, 18 August 1965, p. 11.
98. Observer, 15 August 1965, p. 17.
99. Sunday Times, 15 August 1965, p. 31.
100. Daily Mail, 11 August 1965, p. 12; Evening Standard, 13 August 1965.
101. Daily Mail, 10 August, 1965, p. 12.
102. www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/history-arts-council/1960s/.
103. Encore, July/August 1965, p. 47.
104. See www.belgrade.co.uk/take-part/theatre-in-education/.
105. ‘View from the Gods’, Plays and Players. December 1966, p. 74.
106. David Wright, ‘Documentary Theatre’, Plays and Players, December 1966, pp.
60–1.
107. See, for example, The Times, 7 September 1959, p. 3 and the Daily Telegraph, 8 July
1964, p. 16.
108. Wright, op. cit.
109. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Hang Down Your Head and Die.
110. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
111. Punch, 7 December 1966.
112. Daily Mail, 29 November 1966.
113. Quotations from published text: Peter Brook/RSC, US (London: Calder and Boyars,
1968).
269
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
270
Notes
147. Ellen Stewart programme note for London productions of Tom Paine and Futz.
148. Observer, 27 August 1967, p. 16.
149. The Times, 6 September 1967, p. 7.
150. 17 September 1967, p. 20.
151. 12 September 1967, p. 6.
152. 18 October 1967, p. 8.
153. Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archives Production File:
Tom Paine.
154. 18 October 1967.
155. Op. cit., n. 153.
156. ‘View from the Gods’, Plays and Players, August 1966, p. 74.
157. ‘A View from the Gods’, Encore, September/October 1963, pp. 6–8.
158. Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (London: Faber
and Faber, 2007), p. 162.
159. The Times, 21 July 1967, p. 6.
160. Bernard F. Dukore, Barnestorm: The Plays of Peter Barnes (London: Garland
Publishing, 1995), pp. 3–28.
161. Peter Barnes, ‘The Ruling Class’ in Barnes, Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1989),
pp. 7–118.
162. The Times, 22 September 1967, p. 7.
163. John Weightman writing in Encounter, July 1967; quoted in Malcolm Page, File on
Stoppard (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 19.
164. Quotations taken from Zigger Zagger in Peter Terson, ‘Zigger Zagger’ and ‘Mooney
and His Caravans’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 31–134.
165. Guardian, 20 March 1968, p. 9.
166. Margaret Croyden, ‘Peter Brook’s “Tempest”’, Drama Review, vol. 13, no. 3, Spring
1969, pp. 125–8. Reprinted in David Williams, Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook
(London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 137–41.
167. Plays and Players, November 1968, pp. 69–71.
168. Guardian, 19 July 1968, p. 6.
169. Croyden, op. cit.
170. Gerome Ragni and James Rado, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (New
York: Pocket Books, 1969).
171. The Times, 28 September 1968, p. 18.
172. Billington, op. cit., pp. 202–3.
173. ‘View from the Gods’, Plays and Players, November 1966, p. 4.
174. Guardian, 6 November 1968, p. 6.
175. Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Paradise Now (New York: Random Books, 1971).
176. Nicholas de Jongh, Guardian, 10 June 1969, p. 6.
177. Ibid.
178. 15 June 1969, p. 49.
179. Guardian, 10 June 1969, p. 6.
271
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
John Arden
1. All quotations this section from John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, Awkward Corners
(London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 71–2.
2. Ibid., p. 19.
3. Cited in Malcolm Page, Arden on File (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 7.
4. Cited in Charles Marowitz, Theatre at Work: Playwright and Productions (London:
Methuen, 1967), p. 38.
5. Arden and Darcy, op. cit., p. 55.
6. Francis Dillon, ‘Fossicking’, The Listener, 22 July 1971.
7. Simon Trussler, ‘The Book of the Play’, Tribune, 5 February 1965.
8. Albert Hunt, John Arden (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 36.
9. John Arden, ‘A Thoroughly Romantic View’, London Magazine, VII, July 1960, pp.
11–15.
10. Julius Novick, Beyond Broadway (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 52.
11. Simon Trussler, John Arden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 9.
12. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Live Like Pigs.
13. Hunt, op. cit., p. 51.
14. John Arden, ‘Introductory Note’, Plays Three (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p.
101.
15. Kenneth Tynan, ‘A World Fit for Eros’, Observer, 5 October 1958, p. 19.
16. Eric Keown, ‘At the Play’, Punch, 8 November 1958.
17. Ronald Hayman, John Arden (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 15.
18. Robert Hatch, ‘Arden’, Nation (New York), 21 June 1965.
19. Margaretta D’Arcy, Loose Theatre: In and Out of My Memory (Manchester: Trafford
Publishing, 2006), p. 265.
272
Notes
Edward Bond
1. Quoted in Philip Roberts, Bond on File (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 7.
2. Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts, Edward Bond: A Companion to the Plays (London:
TQ Publications, 1978), p. 7.
3. Interview with Bill Gaskill, Gambit, vol. 5, no. 17, 1970, pp. 38–43.
4. Edward Bond: Letters Volume I (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), p.
136.
5. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
6. Ian Stuart (ed.), Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond: Volume I: 1959–1980
(London: Methuen, 2000), pp. 38–70.
7. Bond, unpublished letter, 25 November 1982. See Royal Court Archive.
8. Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1962.
9. Daily Mail, 10 December 1962.
10. Guardian, 13 January 1966, p. 6.
11. Sunday Telegraph, 16 January 1966.
12. Sunday Times, 16 January 1966, p. 43.
13. The Times, 19 April 1967, p. 6.
14. Sunday Times, 23 April 1967, p. 49.
15. Quotations from Black Mass as published in Edward Bond, Plays: Two (London:
Methuen, 1978), pp. 225–36.
16. Quotation from Passion as published in Edward Bond, Plays: Two, pp. 237–53.
17. Guardian, 29 September 1971, p. 10.
Harold Pinter
1. Harold Pinter, The Caretaker (London: Methuen, 1960/1971), p. 73.
2. Henry Woolf, ‘My Sixty Years in Harold’s Gang’, Guardian, 12 July 2007.
3. ‘Theatrical world applauds life and art of our greatest modern playwright’, Guardian,
27 December 2008.
4. Woolf, op. cit.
5. Sunday Times, January 1958 (n.d.). Cited at www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_room.
shtml.
6. Sunday Times, 25 May 1958.
7. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Licensed Plays 1900–1968: The Dumb Waiter.
8. Cited in Malcolm Page (ed.), File on Pinter (London: Methuen, 1993), p. 13.
9. Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern Books), 1994, p. 71.
10. London Daily News, 19 June 1987. Quoted in Page, op. cit., p. 105.
11. Gussow, op. cit., p. 36.
12. Ian Smith, Pinter in the Theatre (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005), p. 45.
13. Ibid., p. 48.
14. Harold Pinter, ‘Introduction’, Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 9–16.
15. Gussow, op. cit., p. 70.
273
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
16. News Chronicle, 28 July 1960. Quoted in Page, op. cit., p. 101.
17. W. A. Darlington, Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1958. Quoted in Page, op. cit., p. 13.
18. Woolf, op. cit.
Alan Ayckbourn
1. http://biography.alanayckbourn.net/BiographyPinter.htm.
2. Michael Coveney, ‘Scarborough Fare’, Plays and Players, September 1975, p. 18.
3. Paul Allen, Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge (London: Methuen, 2001), pp.
72–4.
4. Ian Watson, Conversations with Ayckbourn (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp.
40–1.
5. Ibid., pp. 43–4. See also http://christmasvmastermind.alanayckbourn.net/CVM_
Quotes.htm.
6. Review by Benedict Nightingale, Guardian, 14 November 1963, p. 9. See also http://
mrwhatnot.alanayckbourn.net/MW_Reviews.htm.
1 Albert Hunt, Arden: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 143.
2. John Arden, To Present the Pretence (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), p. 158.
3. Ibid., p. 158.
4. The Times, 6 October 1959.
5. Hunt, op. cit., p. 58.
6. Ibid., p. 6.
7. Ibid., p. 37.
8. Asked why he reduced the number of injured by a factor of ten, from 250 to
twenty-five, Arden replied that he did not want the vengeance to seem excessive.
9. Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (London: Methuen, 1960, reprinted 1976), p. 7. All quota-
tions from this edition.
10. Harold Hobson, ‘Hardly a Silver Lining’, Sunday Times, 25 October 1959, p. 25.
11. Phillip Hope-Wallace, ‘Something Just Short of a Great Play’, Manchester Guardian,
24 October 1959.
12. Felix Barker,’A Slow Fuse, but What an Explosion!’, London Evening News, 23
October 1959.
13. Programme note, Royal Court revival of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, 1965.
14. Margaretta D’Arcy, Loose Theatre: In and Out of My Memory (Manchester: Trafford
Publishing, 2006), pp. 237 and 239.
15. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, Awkward Corners: Essays, Papers, Fragments
(London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 80 and 164.
16. John Arden, Introduction to The Workhouse Donkey (London: Methuen, 1964);
274
Notes
reprinted in Plays Two (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 3. All quotations are from this
edition.
17. Cited in Malcolm Page (ed.), Arden on File (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 30.
18. Frank Cox, ‘Arden of Chichester’, Plays and Players, August 1963, p. 16.
19. Philip French, ‘Led by Donkeys’, New Statesman, 74, 3 November 1967.
20. Introduction to The Workhouse Donkey, p. 4.
21. ‘On Comedy: John Arden talks to Albert Hunt’, Encore 57, vol. 12, no. 5, September–
October 1965, pp. 13–19, p. 15.
22. John Arden, ‘Correspondence’, Encore, May–June 1959, p. 42.
23. Hunt, op. cit., p. 89.
24. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations in this section are from the author’s intro-
duction, John Arden, Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (London: Methuen, 1965); reprinted
in Plays Two (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. 135–8. All play quotations are also from
this edition.
25. John Arden, ‘Letters’, Encore 51, September–October 1964, pp. 51–2; my emphasis.
26. ‘Building the play: an interview with the editors’, Encore 32, vol. 8, no. 4, July–August
1961, pp. 22–41.
27. Cited in Malcolm Page, John Arden (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1984), p. 83.
28. Ibid.
29. Penelope Gilliatt, ‘Adjusting the Focus of History’, Observer, 11 July 1965.
30. Harold Hobson, ‘One up from the Gorillas’, Sunday Times, London, 11 July 1965.
31. Tom Milne, ‘Armstrong’s Last Goodnight’, Encore 57, September–October 1965, p.
37.
32. All quotations from Gaskill in this section taken from: William Gaskill, ‘Producing
Arden’, Encore 57, vol. 12, no. 5, September–October 1965, pp. 20–6.
33. Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves, ‘Arden’s Stagecraft’, Encore 57, vol. 12, no. 5,
September–October 1965, pp. 9–12.
34. All quotations from Arden in this section taken from John Arden, ‘Telling a True Tale’,
Encore 25, vol. 7, no. 3, May–June 1960, pp. 22–6.
35. Plays One, p. xi.
36. To Present the Pretence, op. cit., p. 83.
37. Trish Dace, ‘Who Wrote John Arden’s Plays?’, in Jonathan Wike (ed.), John Arden and
Margaretta D’Arcy: A Casebook (London: Garland, 1994), pp. 199–221, p. 211.
275
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
5. ‘Author’s Note on Violence’, Edward Bond, Plays One (London: Methuen, 1977), pp.
9–17.
6. Edward Bond, ‘Censor in Mind’, Censorship, no. 4, August 1965, pp. 9–12.
7. ‘A Discussion with Edward Bond’, Gambit, vol. 5, no. 17, 1970, pp. 5–38.
8. ‘Bond in the English Style’, Politika, 19 September 1969 (Royal Court Archive).
9. Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on
Playwriting (London: Methuen, 1997), p. 131.
10. Edward Bond, Letters Volume IV (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998),
p. 190.
11. All quotations from text of Saved as published in Edward Bond, Plays: One (London,
Methuen, 1977).
12. Bond, quoted in Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts, Edward Bond: A Companion to His
Plays (London: TQ Publications, 1978), p. 9.
13. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Saved, op. cit.
14. Bond, email to author.
15. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Saved, op. cit.
16. See Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archives Production File:
Saved; and Teach-In on Saved.
17. Vecernje Novosti, Belgrade, 17 September 1969. See Royal Court Archive.
18. The Times, 8 February 1969, p. 19.
19. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Files: Saved.
20. Daily Express, 4 November 1965, p. 8. Cited in David Davis, ‘Commentary’ to the
student edition of Saved. See Edward Bond, Saved (London: Methuen, 2009), pp.
xviii–lxxxiv.
21. Guardian, 29 September 1971.
22. Gaskill in Royal Court programme for Saved season (Royal Court Archive).
23. Penelope Gilliat, ‘Despair in the Depths’, Observer, 7 November 1965, p. 24.
24. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Outrider Films Ltd, November 1982.
25. Edward Bond, Then, Now and To Be: A New Introduction for Saved. Written for the
programme of production at the Lyric Theatre, London, October 2011, www.edward-
bond.org/Comment/comment.html.
26. Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2011.
27. Teach-In on Saved, op. cit.
28. Leaflet advertising Teach-In on Saved (Royal Court Archive).
29. Edward Bond, ‘Author’s Note to Saved’, written for publication of text in 1966.
Published as appendix to Edward Bond, Plays One, pp. 309–12.
30. Bond, ‘Censor in Mind’, op. cit.
31. Teach-In on Saved, op. cit.
32. Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1965, p. 18.
33. Review of Royal Court production at Belgrade Festival, published in Borban, 18
September 1969. See Royal Court Archive.
34. Note by Gaskill in Royal Court Archive, 5 November 1968, and Edward Bond, Letters
Volume III (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 122.
276
Notes
35. Edward Bond, letter to theatre critics, 7 November 1965 (Royal Court Archive).
36. Daily Mail, 4 November 1965, p. 18.
37. Bond, ‘Censor in Mind’, op. cit.
38. Note by Gaskill in Royal Court Archive, 5 November 1968.
39. Bond, letter to theatre critics, op. cit.
40. Ian Stuart (ed.), Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond: Volume One: 1959 to
1980 (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 73.
41. Edward Bond, ‘Author’s Note to Saved’, op. cit.
42. Edward Bond, letter to Sunday Times critic, 7 November 1965 (Royal Court Archive).
43. Bond, ‘Author’s Note to Saved’, op. cit.
44. Bond, letter to theatre critics, op. cit.
45. Gilliatt, op. cit., p. 24.
46. Edward Bond, ‘Author’s Note to Saved’, op. cit.
47. Observer, 21 November 1965, p. 11.
48. Gaskill, speaking at Teach-In on Saved.
49. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to the composer Hans Werner Henze, 3 December
1986.
50. Edward Bond, ‘My play predicted the riots’, Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 2011.
51. All quotations from text of Early Morning as published in Edward Bond, Plays: One
(London, Methuen, 1977).
52. Gambit, op. cit.
53. In an email to the author.
54. Ian Stuart (ed.), op. cit., p. 92.
55. The Times, 8 April 1968, p. 6.
56. Gambit, op. cit.
57. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay, 3 December 1985.
58. Gambit, op. cit.
59. Edward Bond, letter 8 April 1968; quoted in Philip Roberts, Bond on File (London:
Methuen, 1985), p. 20.
60. Daily Telegraph, 8 April 1968, p. 15; Daily Mail, 8 April 1968, p. 10; The Times, 8
April 1968; Sunday Times 14 April 1968, p. 25; Financial Times, 8 April 1968;
Observer, 14 April 1968, p. 25. See Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and
Performance Archives Production File: Early Morning.
61. Evening Standard, 14 March 1969; Sunday Times, 16 March 1969, p. 57; Financial
Times (n.d.), Ibid.
62. ‘John Bird may play “lesbian” Victoria’, Daily Telegraph, 4 August 1967.
63. The Times, 14 March 1969.
64. Michael Patterson, Peter Stein: Germany’s Leading Theatre Director (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 31–5.
65. ‘Interview with William Gaskill’, Gambit, vol. 5, no. 17, 1970, pp. 38–43.
66. All quotations from text of Lear as published in Edward Bond, Plays: Two (London,
Methuen, 1978).
277
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
67. ‘Edward Bond: The Long Road to Lear’, Theatre Quarterly, January–March 1972, pp.
3–14.
68. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
69. Cited in interview with Edward Bond by John Tusa. See: www.bbc.co.uk/radi03/
johntusainterview/bond_transcript.shtml.
70. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
71. Gambit, op. cit.
72. Guardian, 29 September 1971.
73. Plays and Players, November 1971, pp. 42–6, 53; Sunday Telegraph (n.d.). See Victoria
and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archives Production File: Lear.
74. The Times, 30 September 1971, p. 11.
75. Guardian, 29 September 1971.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Email to author.
79. Edward Bond, unpublished letter, July 1980.
80. Bond, ‘My play predicted the riots’, op. cit.
81. Email to author.
82. Ibid.
83. Teach-In on Saved, op. cit.
84. Email to author.
1. Ian Smith, ‘Harold Pinter’s Recollections of His Career in the 1950s: An Interview
Conducted by Ian Smith at the British Library, 1997’, in Dominic Shellard (ed.),
British Theatre in the 1950s (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 2000), p. 72.
2. Daily Herald, 23 March 1960.
3. Richard Eyre, Talking Theatre: Interviews with Theatre People (London: Nick Hern,
2011), p. 173.
4. Observer, 1 May 1960.
5. Letter from Ted Hughes to Olwyn Hughes from the Olwyn Hughes archive, ADD.
88948, British Library, London.
6. The Caretaker (London: Methuen, 1960). All quotations from the play are from this
edition.
7. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd edn (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 237.
8. This version, submitted to the Lord Chamberlain prior to performance, also eschews
Petey’s plea ‘Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do’, retrospectively one of Pinter’s
most famous lines. See Lord Chamberlain’s Plays: The Birthday Party, p. 110.
9. Esslin, op. cit., p. 249.
278
Notes
10. Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Sixty Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2008 (London:
Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 177.
11. Larry Bensky, ‘Harold Pinter: The Art of Theater No. 3’, Paris Review, fall, 1966,
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4351/the-art-of-theater-no-3-harold-pinter.
12. Michael Billington, Harold Pinter (London: Faber and faber, 2007), p. 115.
13. Harold Pinter and Clive Donner, ‘Filming “The Caretaker”’, in Lois Gordon (ed.),
Harold Pinter: A Casebook (London: Garland Science, 1990), p. 130.
14. Bensky, op. cit.
15. Austin Quigley, ‘Pinter, Politics, and Post-Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Harold Pinter (ed. Peter Raby) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.
7–27.
16. Esslin, op. cit., p. 249.
17. Eyre, op. cit., p. 48.
18. Sunday Times, 14 August 1960.
19. Ibid., p. 174.
20. ‘Scrapbooks: UK and International Productions’ (Harold Pinter archive ADD. 88880/
8/1–8), British Library, London.
21. Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern, 1994), pp. 42–3.
22. Mark Batty, About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber and Faber,
2005), p. 165.
23. The Homecoming (London: Methuen, 1965). All quotations from the play are from
this edition.
24. Bensky, op. cit.
25. Peter Hall, ‘A Director’s Approach’, in Harold Pinter: A Casebook, op. cit., p. 20.
26. Ibid., p. 13.
27. Ibid., p. 14.
28. Sunday Times, 6 June 1965.
29. Observer, 6 June 1965.
30. Billington, op. cit., p. 175.
31. ‘Plays by Pinter for stage’ (Harold Pinter archive ADD. 88880/1/1–69), British Library,
London.
32. Gussow, op. cit., p. 23. In 1960, Pinter had also told Charles Marowitz in relation to
The Caretaker that ‘It’s about love’. Charles Marowitz, ‘A Kind of Masterpiece’, in
Harold Pinter: A Casebook, op. cit., p. 164.
33. Francis Gillen, ‘Pinter at Work: An Introduction to the First Draft of The Homecoming
and Its Relationship to the Completed Drama’, Pinter Review, vol. 9 (1997–98), pp.
51–66.
34. Billington, op. cit., p. 164.
35. Ibid.
36. Billington, ‘An Experience of Pinter: Address to the International Conference on
Harold Pinter’, Pinter Review, vol. 10 (1999–2000), pp. 41–51.
37. Ibid., p. 44.
38. Réforme, 1 June 1968.
279
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
280
Notes
who wears a blue blouse’, changed in the published version to ‘my girl who wears a
grey blouse’ (p. 33).
71. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, 2nd edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. 216.
72. Ellmann et al., ‘Epiphanies: Introduction’, in James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings,
ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz and John Whittier-Ferguson (London: Faber,
1991), p. 157.
73. ‘Special Personal Correspondence’, op. cit.
74. Billington, op. cit., p. 197.
75. ‘Scrapbooks: UK and International Productions’, op. cit.
76. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, op. cit., p. 247.
77. Celebration (London: Faber, 2005), p. 100.
78. For the critic of The Times (undated), this represented a ‘less dangerous Pinter’.
79. ‘Special Personal Correspondence’, op. cit.
80. Pinter, Various Voices, op. cit., p. 177.
81. Billington, op. cit., p. 6.
82. New York Times, 25 July 1969.
1. ‘Alan Ayckbourn: You Ask the Questions’, Independent on Sunday, 1 July 2003.
2. Mel Gussow, ‘Ayckbourn, Ex-Actor, Now Plays Singular Writer of Comedies’, New
York Times, 11 October 1974.
3. Ian Watson, Conversations with Ayckbourn (London and Boston, MA: Faber and
Faber, 1988), p. 86.
4. Hilary Spurling, ‘Farewell the Hairy Men’, Spectator, 7 April 1967.
5. Ronald Bryden, Plays and Players, August 1973, p. 39.
6. Michael Church, ‘Shakespeare of the South Bank’, Sunday Times, 1 June 1986.
7. Watson, op. cit., pp. 72–3.
8. Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
9. Sarah Lyall, ‘Ayckbourn the Juggler, in Triple Time’, New York Times, 21 April 2009.
Article written in connection with Matthew Warchus’s 2009 production on Broadway
of Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests. Hall has directed many of Ayckbourn’s
plays over the years, the first being Bedroom Farce at the National Theatre in 1977.
10. Joan McAlpine, ‘Is There a Manager to Drive This Bus to Shaftesbury Avenue?’,
Review of Standing Room Only at the Library Theatre, The Stage, July 1961. The force
of this very positive response to the play is somewhat undermined, however, by the
knowledge that Joan McAlpine was at the time stage manager at the Library Theatre;
evidently at this time The Stage accepted reviews submitted from various quarters, and
McAlpine’s name was not credited. Paul Allen, Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge
(London: Methuen, 2001), p. 85.
281
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
11. Simon Murgatroyd, ‘An In-Depth Background to Standing Room Only’, 2010, www.
alanayckbourn.net, accessed 6 June 2011.
12. Mr Whatnot was not the first play of Ayckbourn’s to make it into print, however; this
was Relatively Speaking, published by Evans Bros. in 1968.
13. Allen, op. cit., p. 93.
14. The actor Stanley Page, quoted ibid.
15. Cheeseman remained director of the Victoria Theatre until 1998, when he quit in
frustration at what he considered the persistent underfunding of the arts. During his
career, he established a reputation for commitment to theatre in the round, a reper-
toire that combined new writing with innovative productions of classics, and a
preoccupation with regional history and social issues. Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘Exit Stage
Left: the Big Cheese of People’s Theatre’, Independent, 25 February 1998. Cheeseman
died in 2010.
16. Ayckbourn, Mr Whatnot (London and New York: Samuel French, 1992), p. 2.
17. Mr Whatnot, op. cit., p. 47.
18. Acykbourn, programme note for Mr Whatnot at the Leeds Civic Theatre, 1968, www.
alanayckbourn.net, accessed 7 June 2011.
19. Anon., ‘Theatre of the Ridiculous’, The Times, 7 October 1964.
20. Cordelia Oliver, review of Mr Whatnot at Ochtertyre, Scotland, Guardian, October
1976 (n.d.).
21. Malcolm Page (ed.), File on Ayckbourn (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 15.
22. Ayckbourn, in Watson, op. cit., pp. 85–6.
23. Ibid., p. 86.
24. Michael Billington, ‘Controlling Our Shapes’, review of Body Language at the Stephen
Joseph Theatre, Country Life, 7 June 1990.
25. Brandreth, Gyles, ‘A Knight at the Theatre’, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2002.
26. This was the last of Ayckbourn’s plays to be directed by Joseph, who died prematurely
from cancer in 1967, aged forty-six.
27. All play quotations from Ayckbourn, Relatively Speaking (London: Samuel French,
1968).
28. Relatively Speaking undoubtedly helped Briers’s career to take off. He had had a degree
of success earlier in the 1960s with the television sitcom Marriage Lines (opposite
Prunella Scales), but his was not yet a household name. Hordern and Johnson were
established actors both with distinguished records in theatre and film; Hordern had
accepted the part after being persuaded to read the script by his wife, who had admired
Ayckbourn’s earlier Mr Whatnot. Hilary, by some way the youngest in the cast, had
begun her acting career at the Liverpool Playhouse and achieved critical success in
1964 as Milly Theale in the West End production of Henry James’s The Wings of the
Dove.
29. ‘Tea for Two’, with Alan Ayckbourn and Richard Derrington, Stephen Joseph Theatre,
24 July 2008, http://relativelyspeaking.alanayckbourn.net, accessed 10 June 2011.
30. Anon., review of Present Laughter, The Times, 22 April 1965.
31. Allen, op. cit., p. 113.
282
Notes
32. Billington, Alan Ayckbourn (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 19. Billington himself
suggested that the comparison of Ayckbourn with Coward was ‘misleading’.
33. Brian Connell, ‘Playing for Laughs to a Lady Typist: A Times Profile’, The Times, 5
January 1976.
34. Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (London: Faber and
Faber, 2007), p. 201.
35. Laura Barnett, ‘Portrait of the Artist: Alan Ayckbourn, Playwright’, Guardian, 5
October 2010.
36. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Leonard Smithers, 1898), pp.
17–18.
37. For a fuller impression of the Watermill’s production see www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/
review.php/31366/relatively-speaking, accessed 14 June 2011. Alan Strachan’s 2008
production for Bath Theatre Royal took a similar approach, with designer Paul
Farnsworth making Ginny’s flat redolent of ‘swinging’ London, with the setting for
‘The Willows’ the more blandly suburban by contrast. See www.britishtheatreguide.
info/reviews/relspeak-rev.htm, accessed 14 June 2011.
38. Holly Berry, review of Relatively Speaking at the Watermill, Marlborough People, 22
February 2011.
39. Simon Murgatroyd, Relatively Speaking (Alan Ayckbourn Guides), 2007, www.alanay-
ckbourn.net, accessed 14 June 2011.
40. The year also saw the passing of the Abortion Act in the UK, legislation that came into
force in April 1968. Like the introduction and then increased availability of the Pill,
the Act has been represented as an achievement of women’s liberation; while it can be
viewed in this context, the new legislation was at least as much a response to funda-
mental concerns over the public health risks attached to backstreet abortion practices.
41. Honey, August 1969, p. 96. Honey was launched in 1960 and continued until
September 1986.
42. Ibid., p. 3.
43. Ayckbourn, ‘Writing Relatively Speaking’, www.alanayckbourn.net, accessed 16 June
2011.
44. Ayckbourn, programme note for How the Other Half Loves at the Library Theatre,
Scarborough, 1969.
45. Ayckbourn, How the Other Half Loves (London and New York: Samuel French, 1972),
p. 1 (all quotations from this edition).
46. Ayckbourn, ‘Little Boxes’, programme note for How the Other Half Loves at the
Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, 1974.
47. Billington, State of the Nation, op. cit., p. 196.
48. Allen, ‘How the Other Half Fights’, programme note for the 1988 revival at the
Greenwich Theatre, London.
49. See for example Allen, Alan Ayckbourn, pp. 123–5; Watson, op. cit., pp. 58–9.
50. Anonymous review of How the Other Half Loves at the Derngate Theatre,
Northampton, www.bbc.co.uk/northamptonshire/stage/how_the_other_review.shtm
12003, accessed 21 June 2011.
283
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
51. Allison Vale, review of How the Other Half Loves at Bath Theatre Royal, 2007, www.
britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/otherhalfPH-rev.htm, accessed 20 June 2011.
52. Ayckbourn, The Sentinel, 4 September 2009.
53. Anon., ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Ayckbourn’, The Economist, 7 March 1998.
54. Ayckbourn, Family Circles (London and New York: Samuel French, 1997), p. 6. All
quotes from this edition.
55. Ayckbourn, programme note for the opening of The Story So Far . . . at the Library
Theatre, Scarborough, 1970.
56. Family Circle folded in 2006. Attempts were made to update its image, but it seemed
that the magazine failed to keep pace with contemporary women’s roles and the
changing character of families. Julia Day, ‘Declining Sales Force Family Circle to
Close’, Guardian, 9 August 2006.
57. This was Honey’s tagline by 1962, replacing the somewhat blander ‘for the teens and
twenties’, employed when launched two years previously.
58. Family Circle, vol. 23, no. 1, April 1969, p. 113.
59. Woman’s Weekly, 12 December 1970.
60. Woman, 1 November 1969, p. 68.
4 Documents
John Arden
1. A radio play which revisited the themes of Vandaleur’s Folly and was broadcast in June
1984.
2. The play Olivier was in would have been Semi-Detached by David Turner.
3. Sir David Lyndsay.
Harold Pinter
1. The AHRC-funded Theatre Archive Project, established by the British Library in
partnership with the University of Sheffield and subsequently De Montfort University,
explores British theatre history from 1945 to 1968, from the perspectives of both the
theatregoer and the practitioner. It constitutes a unique oral history with over 200
interviews whose recordings and written transcripts can be freely accessed on the
British Library website (sounds.bl.uk).
2. The material presented here was edited by Célia Charpentier, an independent
researcher.
284
Notes
Afterword
John Arden
1. Tish Dace, ‘Who Wrote John Arden’s Plays?’, in Jonathan Wike (ed.), John Arden and
Margaretta D’Arcy: A Casebook (London: Garland, 1994), pp. 199–221.
2. John Arden, To Present the Pretence (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), pp. 106, 110.
Subsequent quotation from Vandaleur’s Folly: Plays One (London: Methuen Drama,
1991).
3. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, Non-Stop Connolly Show (London, Pluto Press,
1977–78), five vols, vol. 2, pp. 44–7.
4. To Present the Pretence, pp. 11–12.
5. Michael Anderson, ‘Edinburgh 72’, Plays and Players, November 1972, p. 51.
6. To Present the Pretence, pp. 155–6.
7. Michael Billington, ‘Serjeant Musgrave Rides Again’, Guardian, 23 September 2003.
8. D. A. N. Jones, ‘Reviews’, The Listener, 18 February 1982.
9. John Arden, ‘Plays in the Theatre of the Mind’, Sunday Times, 22 August 1982.
Edward Bond
1. Edward Bond, ‘Four Little Essays on Drama’ (2010/2011). See www.edwardbond.org/
Theory/theory.html.
2. Edward Bond, Letters Volume III (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 10.
3. Edward Bond, ‘On the State of British Theatre’, unpublished letter to Tom Erhardt,
23 March 2011. See www.edwardbond.org/Letters/230311.doc.
4. Michael Mangan, Edward Bond (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 1998),
p. 44.
5. Bond, Letters Volume III, p. 57.
6. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
7. ‘I still get letters written in blood’, BBC interview with Edward Bond, 20 October
2010. See www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11534846.
8. Bond, ‘On the State of British Theatre’.
9. ‘Playwright Blasts Royal Court’, Standard, 22 March 2006. See Royal Court Archive.
10. Bond, Letters Volume III, p. 85.
11. Ibid., p. 8.
12. Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
13. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to Peter Hall.
14. Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
15. Bond, unpublished letter to Peter Hall.
16. Bond, unpublished letter to Peggy Ramsay.
17. Edward Bond, unpublished letter to the author, February 2005.
18. Edward Bond, interview with John Tusa. See www.bbc.co.uk/radi03/johntusainter-
view/bond_transcript.shtml.
285
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Harold Pinter
1. Michael Billington, quoted in Esther Addley, ‘Theatrical World Applauds Life and Art
of Our Greatest Modern Playwright’, Guardian, 27 December 2008.
2. Michael Billington, ‘Obituary: Harold Pinter’, Guardian, 27 December 2008.
3. Joe Penhall, quoted in Addley, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. (David Hare).
6. Ibid. (Michael Gambon).
7. ‘Old Times: Actors Remember Harold Pinter’, Guardian, 8 January 2009.
8. Ibid. (Douglas Hodge).
9. Ibid. (Thomas Baptiste).
10. Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994), p. 20.
11. Ibid., pp. 42–3.
12. Ibid., p. 149.
13. Ibid., p. 115.
14. www.bl.uk/projects/theatrearchive/goldengenconf.html.
15. Harold Pinter: Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2005: ‘Art, Truth and Politics’. See www.
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.pdf.
16. Gussow, op. cit., p. 53.
17. Ibid., p. 16.
18. See www.haroldpinter.org/films/films_theproust.shtml.
19. Gussow, op. cit., p. 73.
20. See Harold Pinter archive.
21. Edward Bond: Letters Volume III (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1.
22. Pinter: Nobel Lecture.
23. Harold Pinter, ‘Radical Departures’, The Listener, 27 October 1988; quoted in
Malcolm Page, File on Pinter (London: Methuen, 1993), p. 88.
24. Gussow, op. cit., p. 102.
25. Michael Billington, ‘Obituary: Harold Pinter’.
26. Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times, 29 June 2001.
27. Pinter: Nobel Lecture.
28. See www.haroldpinter.org/home/index.shtml.
29. Harold Pinter: Nobel Lecture.
Alan Ayckbourn
1. http://biography.alanayckbourn.net/BiographyFAQPopularity.htm.
2. See, for example, Paul Allen, Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge (London: Methuen,
286
Notes
2002), pp. 25, 43; and Michael Billington, Alan Ayckbourn (London: Macmillan
Education, 1983/1990), pp. 151, 211.
3. Allen, op. cit., p. lx.
4. Michael Gambon, interviewed for ‘Alan Ayckbourn – Greetings from Scarborough’, a
BBC television arts documentary in the series Imagine, first broadcast 16 November
2011.
5. Billington, op. cit. p. 1.
6. Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. ix.
7. Ian Watson, Conversations with Ayckbourn (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 84.
8. Ibid., p. 72.
9. Ayckbourn, op. cit., pp. 3–4.
10. Allen, op. cit., p. 240.
11. Ibid., p. 250.
12. Billington, op. cit., p. 210.
13. ‘Greetings from Scarborough’, op. cit.
14. Albert-Reiner Glaap and Nicholas Quaintmere (eds), A Guided Tour Through
Ayckbourn Country (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999), p. 5.
15. Ibid., p. 12.
16. Allen, op. cit., p. 191.
17. Watson, op. cit., p. 90.
18. Allen, op. cit., p. 223.
19. Watson, op. cit., p. 90.
20. ‘Greetings from Scarborough’, op. cit.
287
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caute, David, Sixty-eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Paladin, 1988).
Cooper, R., S. Fielding and N. Tiratsoo, The Wilson Governments 1964–1970 (London:
Pinter Publishers, 1993).
Green, Jonathon, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London: Pimlico,
1999).
Hewison, Robert, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–1975 (London: Methuen,
1986).
Marr, Andrew, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007).
Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Moorhouse, Geoffrey, Britain in the Sixties: The Other England (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1964).
Morgan, Kenneth O., The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
Sampson, Anthony, Anatomy of Britain Today (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965).
Sandbrook, Dominic, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles
(London: Abacus, 2006)
——, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties: 1964–1970 (London:
Abacus, 2007).
Sinfield, Alan, Society and Literature 1945–1970 (London: Methuen, 1983).
——, Literature, Culture and Politics in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
The focus of many of these books extends beyond a single decade, but
they all contain substantial and valuable material which is directly
relevant to the 1960s.
Acheson, James (ed.), British and Irish Drama Since 1960 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993).
Ansorge, Peter, Disrupting the Spectacle (London: Pitman, 1975).
Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and Its Double (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970).
Aston, Elaine and Janelle Reinelt (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British
Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
288
Select Bibliography
289
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Lacey, Stephen, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context 1956–1995 (London:
Routledge, 1995.
Leach, Robert, Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre
(Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006).
Little, Ruth and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out (London: Oberon
Books, 2007).
Littlewood, Joan, Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History as She Tells it (London:
Methuen, 1994)
Marowitz, Charles and Simon Trussler, Theatre at Work: Playwrights and Productions in the
Modern British Theatre (London: Methuen, 1967).
Marowitz, Charles, Tom Milne and Owen Hale, The Encore Reader: A Chronicle of the New
Drama (London: Methuen, 1965).
——, New Theatre Voices of the Fifties and Sixties: Selections from Encore Magazine 1956–
1963 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981).
Patterson, Michael, Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Peacock, Keith D., Radical Stages: Alternative History in Modern British Drama (London:
Greenwood Press, 1991).
Rabey, David Ian, British and Irish Political Drama in the Twentieth Century: Implicating
the Audience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).
——, English Drama Since 1940 (London: Longman, 2003).
Rees, Roland, Pioneers of Fringe Theatre on Record (London: Oberon Books, 1992).
Roberts, Philip, The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
Shellard, Dominic, British Theatre Since the War (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 1999).
Shellard, Dominic, Steve Nicholson and Miriam Handley, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets:
A History of British Theatre Censorship (London: British Library, 2004).
Sinfield, Alan, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
Taylor, John Russell, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1977).
——, The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978).
Tynan, Ken, A View of the English Stage 1944–1965 (London: Methuen, 1984).
Tytell, John, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage (London: Methuen, 1997).
Wandor, Michelene, Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British
Drama (London: Methuen, 1987).
Wardle, Irving, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).
Williams, David (ed.), Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook (London: Methuen, 1988).
Worth, Katharine J., Revolutions in Modern English Drama (London: G. Bell, 1972).
Forthcoming:
Nicholson, Steve, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968: Volume Four – The Sixties
(Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2013).
290
Select Bibliography
The playwrights
John Arden
Plays
Arden, John, Plays One (London: Methuen, 1977).
——, Plays Two (London: Methuen, 2002).
Recommended books
Arden, John, To Present the Pretence: Essays on the Theatre and Its Public (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1977).
D’Arcy, Margaretta, Loose Theatre: In and Out of My Memory (Manchester: Trafford
Publishing, 2006).
Gray, Frances, John Arden (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Hayman, Ronald, John Arden (London: Heinemann, 1968).
Hunt, Albert, Arden: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 1974).
Leach, Robert, Partners of the Imagination: The Lives, Art and Struggles of John Arden and
Margaretta D’Arcy (Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire: Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2012).
Leeming, Glenda, John Arden (London: Longman, 1974).
Page, Malcolm, John Arden (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).
—— (ed.), Arden on File (London: Methuen, 1985).
Trussler, Simon, John Arden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
Wike, Jonathan (ed.),. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy: A Casebook (London: Garland,
1994).
Edward Bond
Plays
Bond, Edward, Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1977).
——, Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1978).
Recommended books
Bond, Edward, The Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State (London: Methuen, 1999).
Coult, Tony, The Plays of Edward Bond: A Study (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978).
Hay, Malcolm and Philip Roberts, Bond: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 1980).
Hirst, David L., Edward Bond (London: Macmillan, 1985).
Mangan, Michael, Edward Bond (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998).
Roberts, Philip, Bond on File (London: Methuen, 1985).
Stuart, Ian (ed.), Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond: Volume One: 1959 to 1980
(London: Methuen, 2000).
—— (ed.), Edward Bond: Letters Volume IV (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1998).
291
Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s
Recommended website
www.edwardbond.org.
Harold Pinter
Plays
Pinter, Harold, Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
——, Plays 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
——, Plays 3 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
——, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2005 (London: Faber, 2005).
Recommended books
Batty, Mark, About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2005).
Billington, Michael, Harold Pinter (2nd edn, London: Faber, 2007).
Fraser, Antonia, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (London: Weidenfeld, 2010).
Gussow, Mel, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern, 1994).
Naismith, Bill, Harold Pinter: Faber Critical Guides – The Caretaker, The Birthday Party
and The Homecoming (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).
Page, Malcolm, File on Pinter (London: Methuen, 1993).
Raby, Peter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 2009.
Smith, Ian, Pinter in the Theatre (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005).
Recommended journal
The Pinter Review (Vol. 1 1987–date).
Recommended website
www.haroldpinter.org.
Alan Ayckbourn
Plays
Alan Ayckbourn, Relatively Speaking (London: Evans Plays, 1968).
——, How the Other Half Loves (London: French, 1972).
——, Mr Whatnot (London: French, 1992).
——, Family Circles (London: French, 1997).
Some (though by no means all) of Ayckbourn’s other plays are published in several collec-
tions by Faber.
Recommended books
Allen, Paul, Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge (London: Methuen, 2001).
——, A Pocket Guide to Alan Ayckbourn’s Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).
292
Select Bibliography
Ayckbourn, Alan, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Billington, Michael, Alan Ayckbourn (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Glaap, Albert-Reiner and Nicholas Quaintmere (eds), A Guided Tour Through Ayckbourn
Country (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999).
Holt, Michael, Alan Ayckbourn (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999).
Page, Malcolm (ed.), File on Ayckbourn (London: Methuen, 1989).
Watson, Ian, Conversations with Ayckbourn (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988).
Recommended website
www.alanayckbourn.net.
Web resources
‘TheatreVoice’: www.theatrevoice.com.
293
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INDEX
Note: Play titles are entered in the index under authors’ names, if
known. Page references in bold type denote main references to topics.
295
Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s
296
Index
297
Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s
298
Index
299
Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s
300
Index
301
Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s
302
Index
Times, The 19, 36, 41, 42, 45, 49, 54, 56, Wars of the Roses, The 46
57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 68, 70, 73, 75, Watermill Theatre (Newbury) 201
76, 80, 110, 153, 199 Wax, Jimmy 236
on The Black and White Minstrels 56, Wedekind, Frank
67–8 Spring Awakening 60
Town Hall Theatre (Galway) 217–18 Weiss, Peter
Trades Union Congress 32–3 The Investigation 59, 63
travel 8, 18 Marat/Sade 54–5
Turkey 258 Welfare State company 79
Tynan, Kenneth 4, 29, 50, 51, 53, 88, Welles, Orson 162
90, 167 Wells, John
Mrs Wilson’s Diary 75–6
Unity Theatre 135 Wesker, Arnold 29, 32–4, 51, 220,
US 64–6 221
The Kitchen 36, 62
Vallins, Gordon 61 Roots 32
van Itallie, Jean-Claude West, Timothy 236–7, 238
America Hurrah 72 Whitehouse, Mary 22, 157–8
Victoria Palace 67 Whiting, John
Victoria Theatre (Stoke) 62, 194 The Devils 49
Vietnam 14, 20, 22. 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, Saint’s Day 35
64–6, 76, 177 Wilde, Oscar
in staged productions 64–6, 76 The Importance of Being Earnest 200
Vietnam Action Group 66, 67 Williams, Tudor 237
violence Wilson, Harold 8, 22, 23, 24, 25
crimes 3–4 in drama 76
‘The Hidden Face of Violence’ 35–6 Wolfit, Sir Donald 91, 98, 103
staged 35–7, 46–8, 49, 50, 57–8, 83, women
89–90, 213, 247 in Ayckbourn’s plays 197–8, 201–4,
in Arden 114–18, 129–32, 136 210–11
in Ayckbourn 207–8 women’s liberation 7, 197–8, 202
in Bond 94, 96–7, 137–8, 142–7, women’s magazines 212–13
154–9 Wood, Charles
in Pinter 164, 168, 173, 257 Dingo 47–8
Theatre of Cruelty 35, 36, 37, 54, 57, Woodstock Festival 9–10, 11
155, 180 Woolf, Henry 97, 98, 102, 233–4, 235
Vitrac, Roger working class 11, 17, 29, 32–3, 77, 86
Victor 55 Ayckbourn and 197
in Bond’s plays 140–1, 149, 225, 251
Walkabout (film) 95, 229, 230 Wyndham’s Theatre 44, 58
Wardle, Irving 73, 153
Warhol, Andy 17 Zeffirelli, Franco 37
303
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
304