Tradition and Innovation in the London Theater, 1960-61

Abstract

THE REPERTOIRE of the London theatres during the 196CW>1 season has been remarkable for its range and quality. The London playgoer has had the opportunity of seeing Aeschylus's Choephori and Eumenides, the first production of the Wakefield miracle plays since the sixteenth century, the first production of Middleton's The Changeling since Restoration times, and the second production in 200 years of Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-Master as well as revivals of She Stoops to Conquer, Schiller's Marie Stuart, and half-a-dozen Shakespearean plays. He has also been able to see the first London production of Chekhov's Platonoo, revivals of Ibsen and Synge, and new plays by Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, John Whiting, Robert Bolt, Harold Pinter, Shelagh Delaney, and Alun Owen, together with an unprecedented number of plays by such French dramatists as Giraudoux, Anouilh, Genet, and Sartre. On the other hand, he has seen little of John Gielgud and nothing of Laurence Olivier or Edith Evans, and has not been able to extend his knowledge of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. In general, the best productions have been more notable for successful experiments in decor and stagecraft than for the quality of the acting, which has seldom risen above the competent, apart from the virtuosity and incisiveness of Alec Guinness in Rattigan's Ross, Donald Pleasence in Pinter's The Caretaker, and Alan Badel in Anouilh's The Rehearsal. The season has also been enlivened by sharp contrasts between the treatments of similar themes by older and more recent dramatists, by an attack by Noel Coward on the Method and the ‘dustbin' drama of the New Movement, and by an American playwright's criticisms of Joan Littlewood's methods of production at the Theatre Royal, London E.1S.