Osborne's Look Research Articles

A Cultural Materialist Approach to Gender through Look Back in Anger

As John Osborne's Look Back in Anger illustrates, the Angry Young Men Movement centred mostly on male disaffection, reflecting the societal upheavals that occurred in Britain after World War II. Nevertheless, it mainly disregarded the particular challenges and cultural constraints that women encountered during that time. In addition to experiencing comparable psychological traumas from the war, women were compelled to return to constrictive domestic duties, which overshadowed their efforts and aspirations during the war. The movement's narratives ignored the complex difficulties women faced, such as the struggle for autonomy and the conflict with pre-war feminine norms, in favor of focusing on men's experiences, such as Jimmy Porter's existential problems. This omission draws attention to a critical weakness in the movement's analysis of post-World War II society and emphasizes the need for a gender-inclusive investigation of the psychological and cultural dynamics of this period. This paper attempts to examine Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in line with cultural materialist theory of Raymond Williams to analyze gendered power dynamics in the theater with a particular focus on the chosen play. The strategic portrayal of victimization within a gendered power system in the play is examined in this research. Using cultural artifacts and social conventions, it especially examines how the play's narrative and character interactions reflect and question the maintenance of gender hierarchies. The paper focuses on the interactions between male and female characters in order to dissect the intricate power struggles that are portrayed in the play.

Resentment in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger

Resentment is a personal and social phenomenon illustrated widely in John Osborne's masterpiece, Look Back in Anger. The central idea of Osborne's illustration of this phenomenon is to present the dissatisfaction of the English individual with the political, economic and the religious situation of the time. The study deals with the term, resentment and how it is presented through the major characters so as to concentrate on the main issues discussed in the play. The study consists of three sections and a conclusion. The first section introduces the term, resentment. It investigates its origin and definition with the intention of presenting a vivid picture of the term in particular and the events of the play in general. The second section is mainly concerned with John Osborne as a member of The Young Angry Men and his life which have a great impact on his literary career. Young Angry Men is a group of British playwrights who appeared during the 1950s and 1960s. This section also presents the playwrights' ideas of the current circumstances of the period that are presented in their dramatic works. The third section discusses resentment as a personal and social phenomenon in Osborne's Look Back in Anger. It shows how resentment is employed through the major characters of the play, especially Jimmy Porter over the society and the formal institutions in the play after being left wrecked and desolate in the period following the World War II. Finally, the conclusion sums up the results inferred from the investigation of resentment in the study.

The Back Room

The Back Room Gerald Dawe (bio) This extract from Looking Through You, poet Gerald Dawe's prequel to In Another World: Van Morrison and Belfast (2017), recalls the shock of reading the New Poetry of the sixties in pre-Troubles Belfast. Reading Sylvia Plath took me to Ted Hughes. The significance of his early poetry and his "presence" in Ireland is often overlooked, particularly on a generation of poets who as very young men and women (in fact, as teenagers) discovered poetry through Ted Hughes. I'm thinking here about how in the early and mid-sixties poetry started to be increasingly seen as a visible form of art practice available on a much wider scale than previously. The reasons for this opening cultural franchise are both large-scale political decisions that were made in the post–World War II United Kingdom. The democratization of education opportunities throughout Britain (and, of course, the knock-on effect in Northern Ireland) was hugely influential, alongside the local impact of widely used anthologies in the classroom that stretched beyond national traditions. There was also the engagement of literary critics in broadsheet newspapers, such as Al Alvarez, who promoted poetry at the same time as cultural institutions like the BBC dedicated educational programs exclusively to poetry. The impact of popular culture included the popularizing of "high" art that saw little distinction between poetry, theater and cinema, and jazz and "pop" music, as much as there was a new energy leading in the late fifties and early sixties into the rejuvenation of popular arts themselves. Writing such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), and Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving (1960) comes to mind. By this I mean that to a young generation in the mid-sixties, Ted Hughes and others of his generation were seen as realigning the traditional ideas and practice of poetry for those who were only beginning to be drawn to poetry as a form of expression and endeavor outside the classroom as much as within. In widening the scope and influence of poetry, what it "did," what it sounded like, the excitement of even making poetry, Hughes [End Page 9] introduced new directions while drawing attention to English poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and D. H. Lawrence. Hughes introduced city boys to the realities of nature, of the countryside and country life, of the animal world: "Nature" didn't exist, if you see what I mean. Hughes conveyed to a generation of cool yet avid literature students studying for their A levels a blast of serious physical encounters that tore into the perceived elusiveness, allusiveness, and high drama of what was considered the grand view of "English" literature. Hughes made us think about creatures and the force of nature not as climate, or cartoon, but as experience. I'm thinking of the tramp and drenched landscapes of "November" but also the hard-edged pitch of diction that opens a poem such as "Pibroch": The sea cries with its meaningless voiceTreating alike its dead and its living,Probably bored with the appearance of heavenAfter so many millions of nights without sleep, Without purpose, without self-deception.Stone likewise. There is a kind of inner ear that young readers bring to the reading of poetry when first it's new, and the un-implied terrain of the opening stanza of "Pibroch" remains as a tracing of something starkly new and exhilarating. "The sea cries" has the sort of rock-lyric echo most conducive to a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old starting out to manage different registers and forms of expression; the local availability of the phrasing, too, hopped off the page. And later phrasing in the poem, such as "probably bored," is one of a number that must have sounded familiar yet estranged in the existential pattern of Hughes's poem: "her mind's gone completely," "minute after minute," "tryout." We were encouraged to read these poems aloud in the classroom; preparing his class for examinations, teacher Sam McCready always stressed the spoken-ness of poetry, as much as what a poem could "mean...

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia , and: Sarah Kane's Blasted (review)

Reviewed by: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and: Sarah Kane's Blasted Luc Gilleman Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. By John Fleming. Modern Theatre Guides. London: Continuum, 2008; pp. 122. $16.95 paper. Sarah Kane's Blasted. By Helen Iball. Modern Theatre Guides. London: Continuum, 2008; pp. 121. $16.95 paper. The expanding series of Modern Theatre Guides from Continuum now counts ten volumes, each offering an approximately hundred-page discussion of a well-known play. The series includes Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, August Wilson's Fences, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, David Mamet's Oleanna, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Sarah Kane's Blasted, Patrick Marber's Closer, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The general preface refers to them as "key plays of modern times," although the series so far consists only of English-language works. Each volume starts with a detailed overview of the playwright's career, and the series includes only one play to represent each playwright's oeuvre. While one might argue the editors' choice of plays, these little theatre guides prove to be convenient sources for in-depth studies of single plays. Sections on the playwrights' backgrounds compensate in large measure for the representative-play approach, and the guides can only encourage readers to pursue additional plays. These are workmanlike productions, each volume uniformly divided into "Background and Context," "Analysis and Commentary," "Production History," and "Workshopping the Play." In the back is a useful timeline, situating the play among major political and cultural events, and several pages of "Further Reading," followed by references and a detailed index. The guides offer not just compilations of facts and summaries of other scholars' research, but also original insights from people who have already published extensively on the subject. The two studies of British plays I examined are for the most part engagingly written and equally informative. Unlike the socialist and feminist Caryl Churchill, to whom another volume in the series is devoted (see Theatre Topics, March 2009), Tom Stoppard is considered an apolitical (read conservative) playwright who writes "flashy" and "intellectualist" plays. Yet, as John Fleming points out, Stoppard was involved in humanist causes related to the former Soviet Union, and he never avoids important moral issues. The breadth and scope of his oeuvre are astonishing, from straightforward, realistic plays of epic dimensions (e.g., the trilogy The Coast of Utopia [2002]) to comedic and brainy plays of ideas like Arcadia (1993), probably one of the most discussed plays in recent theatre history. Widely referred to as the best science play, it has spawned a number of articles and websites that use the play to explain such arcane matters as Fermat's Last Theorem, thermodynamics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory, making it a particularly daunting subject for a brief study. Fleming wisely keeps science discussions to a minimum and does not dwell overly long on what is a far more difficult problem: the relationship between scientific content and theatrical form. Many will find his section on the play's production history of particular interest, because Arcadia is more challenging to produce than might be suggested by its limited cast and single set. Actors have to learn to bring out the humor and sexiness in lines that deal with complex theories. The play's popular success, Fleming argues, should be attributed to Stoppard's decision to switch directors from Peter Wood, who until then had directed all his major plays, to Trevor Nunn, known for his ability to tease out emotional subtexts, even in arcane material. Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) presents a very different kind of production challenge. Its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre was panned by critics, who were unable to look beyond the play's shocking imagery. Kane's suicide in 1999 led to another ill-considered critical approach—a stunned or awed reconsideration of her work as a sort of diary of depression. Since Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001) and Graham Saunders's "Love Me or Kill Me": Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002), Kane's work has been the subject...

Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T. S. Eliot's Tradition and The Elder Statesman

On a scale of bangs and whimpers, S. Eliot's dramas have been regarded as inclining toward the less explosive end. From The Rock in 1934 to The Elder Statesman in 1958, Eliot's attempts to rehabilitate verse drama in English theater have been seen as brave but inherently challenged, and ultimately unavailing. There have been honorable exceptions to this critical consensus, and most recently at the Donmar Warehouse in London, a creative, theatrical effort has been made, in the form of a T. S. Eliot to refute and even replace it. (1) This festival was refreshing not least because it did not seek to justify itself with explicit reference to any historical abacus of centenaries or other anniversaries. More compelling, though, was the extent of the dramatic offerings, as the festival not only staged The Family Reunion, but also theatricalized some of Eliot's more strictly poetic works, such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, as rehearsed readings. In its effort to promote Eliot's dramas, and others of his works, as dramatic, the festival had more history on its side than the received critical wisdom about these plays suggests. The Cocktail Party, also presented as a rehearsed reading at the Donmar, and The Confidential Clerk enjoyed some significant commercial success, as well as critical acknowledgment, when they were first produced in 1950 and 1953 respectively. There was one play, however, that garnered no such accolades at its premiere and that the Donmar's Festival did not include. (2) This play was The Elder Statesman, which nonetheless put in an isolated appearance in 2008 as a rehearsed reading at the King's Head, Islington, where it was performed by the theater group Primavera, as part of its series of Forgotten Classics. (3) Unlike the efforts at the Donmar, however, this brave attempt required the pretext of a fiftieth anniversary. As the fourth and final instance of the English drawing-room dramas that were Eliot's favored generic template, The Elder Statesman was singularly unfortunate in its timing: in 1956, just two years before its premiere, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had opened in London, triggering a revolution in British theater that probably served to obscure retrospectively even the mixed success of Eliot's drama. (4) The elder statesmen meet the angry young men. (5) But another historical intersection will be the subject of this essay, and it is one that Robin Grove has observed independently: For the close of the 1950s, the plot could hardly be more old-fashioned. Europe may have torn itself apart, Hungary be crushed, Soviet and American empires threaten each other with destruction, Suez heap humiliation on top of dishonour, and Macmillan (1957) have come to power in a year of unprecedented industrial non-cooperation, but not a tremor from public event disturbs the protected milieux of the play. (6) Against this backdrop, of course, Look Back in Anger itself looks not just parochial but also bathetic. Whereas Grove asserts a disjunction between this context and Eliot's play, I propose a conjunction. And the pressure to do so may well derive from our recent historical vantage. As the fiftieth anniversary of Suez impinged on the public consciousness, there were articles in the news media that took this opportunity to plot the vicissitudes of the special relationship between the UK and the USA. (7) My argument about the play will be that it articulates a vision of loving inclusion that extends beyond the characters into an allegory of how European, and more widely Western culture retains its historical and transatlantic integrity, specifically after the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This cultural tradition thus compensates for political division among those parties that share in the tradition and externalizes that division by emphasizing where this sharing ceases to apply, namely in the Second and Third Worlds. …

From Coward and Rattigan to Osborne: Or the Enduring Importance of Look Back in Anger

Critics such as Dan Rebellato and Dominic Shellard are questioning the seminal influence of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger on the development of post-war British drama. The result is a renewed appreciation for the plays of Noël Coward and Terrence Rattigan. The present article seeks to define the contribution of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger to contemporary British drama by comparing it with Coward's The Vortex and Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. It argues for Look Back in Anger's enduring importance, claiming that it assumes a more complex and troubling relationship between perception, cognition, and articulation.

1979 and All That: Periodization in Postwar British Theatre History

Until recently, postwar British theatre history was shaped and bounded by a very stable periodization that located its origin in the premiere of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956. As the story goes, the new kind of theatre ushered in by the Revolution of 1956 at the Royal Court grew more politicized with a second revolution, the birth of the alternative, or Fringe, theatre in 1968. Ultimately that revolutionary fervor was crushed by the conservative cultural and economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, who was elected prime minister in 1979. Contained within this history are many elements not directly related to the 1956|1968|1979 period markers; however this revolution model and its tripartite division of the era affected the conceptualization and positioning of all events within postwar theatre history.

Making a Political Statement or Refusing to Grow Up—Reflections on the Situation of the Academic Youth in Postwar British Literature

The author attempts to apply the psychoanalytic concept of "prolonged adolescence" to two literary works, both of which are embedded in England's postwar social and political climate. The discussion of John Wain's Hurry on Down ([1953] 1979) and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger ([1956] 1989), by necessity, involves a look at those factors responsible for shaping the cultural "mood" in those days. However, the author's primary concern lies with how two particular (fictional) individuals, or antiheroes, deal with the frustration, which, although generally felt among contemporary academia, in their cases seems to hide a much deeper layer of mental insecurity and instability. In fact, we come to feel that the characters have not achieved a proper sense of identity ("self") and are, from the point of view of maturity, delayed and, hence, "unfitted" to cope adequately with the external world. Having long achieved formal adulthood, they seem to have gotten "stuck" somewhere along the passage of growing up. Essential papers by Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna, as well as a very early paper on the topic by Siegfried Bernfeld, are, among others, taken into account, as is the profound research done by Peter Blos on the subject in question.

Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama by Peter Buse (review)

MLR, 99.1, 2004 181 Ultimately, this close textual study raises major general questions. If Smith's ana? lysis carries conviction, then current attempts to displace the canon are (to use a Swiftean word) 'mad'. The canon is historically there 'like Teneriff or Atlas unremov 'd' (to use an allusion my own students no longer understand). Without those ancients you cannot understand our (post)moderns. But what does one mean by modern or postmodern anyway ? Ironic intertextuality? Ontological scepticism? If so, was this not always so? Read with these preoccupations, there are few more contempo? rary texts than Beowulf, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or even those t/r-textsof European culture, the Socratic dialogues as told by Plato. Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama. By Peter Buse. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2001. xi + 204 pp. ?40 (pbk ?11.99). ISBN 0-7190-5721-3 (pbk 0-7190-5722-1). Peter Buse takes nine plays since 1956 and pairs each with a particular theorist, indeed with a particular essay or work of a theorist. Because of the availability of feminist criticism he desists from that approach, and because of the vast range of theoretical writing on Beckett that dramatist is omitted. Though post-structuralist in emphasis, the book also omits Derrida since he is largely preoccupied with non-dramatic textuality . Buse's aim is to demonstrate how bringing play and critical text into direct dialogue with each other can be mutually illuminating. Buse does not dogmatically impose any theoretical reading but with diagnostic clarity he exploratively applies ideas, often equally critical of both play and text. Osborne's Look Back in Anger faces Lacan's 'The Significance of the Phallus'. Pinter's The Homecoming is linked with Freud's 'The "Uncanny"'. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is paired with The Postmodern Condition of Lyotard. Homosexual playwright confronts homosexual thinker with Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw seen through the beady eyes of Foucault's The History ofSexuality. Althusser's famous essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' is used to appraise Trevor Grifhths's Comedians. Anachronism and anti-historicism link Caryll Churchill's Top Girls and Walter Ben? jamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. Mass media bring together Hare and Brenton's Pravda and Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulacrum (with reference to further works). The ambiguous imperialism of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good is measured against the unambiguous critique of Edward Said's Cul? ture and Imperialism. Finally, fairlyrecent trauma theories, represented by Shoshana Felman's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, cope with Sarah Kane's Blasted. To illustrate the manifest variety of this study I turn to the discussions of Osborne and Churchill. In Jimmy Porter political protest is seen, in part, as thwarted desire for an au? thority which would compensate for the deficiency of the original symbolic order, a provisional compensation precluded by the substitutions of the Lacanian objet petit a . Thus Alison and Helena are doomed to fail the desiring subject, Jimmy,while the absent substitutes for the Other, Hugh, Webster, and Madeline, fulfilthe illu? sion of authenticity, thereby adding the seductions of nostalgia to the compulsions of anguish to fill the emptiness of self-consuming desire. Buse's approach certainly makes a change from the usual Angry Young Man 1950s realism angle (though in all chapters he is careful to supply informed bibliographical notes). Again with Top Girls the theoretical alignment offersa refreshing redirection from the now well-worn feminist rails. Churchill's drama exploits anachronism by bringing together female figures from iSz Reviews actual history,legend, painting, and literature to celebrate with the Thatcherite Marlene the triumph of women. Subsequent acts reverse chronology, going backwards into Marlene's ascent, and with the challenginghistoricismof dramatic presentation, undermining her progressivistview of linear history. In this Buse ably compares Ben? jamin's anti-historicist theory of discontinuity, which rejected conservative history as a history of victors over victims. Both Churchill and Benjamin resist the foreclosure of history, insisting on the dynamism of the past as open to permanent retroactive interpretation of a radical kind. A more conventionalkind of study subjectingplaywrights...

Anger, Nostalgia, and the End of Empire: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger

Anger, Nostalgia, and the End of Empire: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger

1956 and all that: the making of modern British drama

It is said that British Drama was shockingly lifted out of the doldrums by the 'revolutionary' appearance of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in May 1956. But had the theatre been as ephemeral and effeminate as the Angry Young Men claimed? Was the era of Terence Rattigan and 'Binkie' Beaumont as repressed and closeted as it seems? In this bold and fascinating challenge to the received wisdom of the last forty years of theatrical history, Dan Rebellato uncovers a different story altogether. It is one where Britain's declining Empire and increasing panic over the 'problem' of homosexuality played a crucial role in the construction of an enduring myth of the theatre. By going back to primary sources and rigorously questioning all assumptions, Rebellato has rewritten the history of the Making of Modern British Drama.

Drama and the Media in Britain

The renaissance of play-writing in Britain, usually dated from the opening in May 1956 of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and the astonishing number of important dramatists it has brought to the fore, are among the most intriguing phenomena of the English-speaking world's recent cultural history. Undoubtedly the Education Act of 1945 was a contributing factor: it opened up the educational ladder for talented young people from social classes that had hitherto been barred from institutions of higher learning. But another, perhaps equally important, element that may have played a part in setting this "new wave" in motion was certainly the emergence of the electronic media, radio and television, and their availability as outlets for the production and diffusion of drama. By what was perhaps no more than an accident of history, Britain was spared, at least initially, the linkage between the mass media and advertising which has turned radio and television into cultural wastelands in the United States.

Sex and class in John Osborne's look back in anger

The article takes to task the established critical view of Look Back in Anger as an essentially radical play about our class-ridden society. Instead, I attempt to argue and demonstrate by close reference to the text that it is not class but sex that is really the main focus of Osborne's abusive attention in the play. I show that the play is, in fact, a blatant and particularly vicious attack on women. It seems to me that Osborne uses the insubstantial class element in the play not to attack the 1950s world of privilege and snobbery but to disguise in pseudo-social terms his fear and loathing of women.

Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson and John Pilling (review)

Book Reviews 559 trying to define ideas, critical ideas about society and about human activity; trying to define those as precisely as possible, not necessarily in verbal terms but in pictures'" (p. 273). Hay and Roberts show how each play centers on amajor image and uses a series of minor images to enhance the major image (e.g., the wall in Lear enhanced by Lear's blinding and the ghost. among other images). Comments on parallels with and differences from Brecht are equally enlightening concerning Bond's dramatic method. For Bond, as for Brecht, "Characterisation is rooted in social rather than personal relationships" (p. 247), and "Like Brecht, Bond wants the audience to react analytically to the incidents he shows" (p. 280). Yet Bond breaks with the Brechtian tradition of epic theatre because, "instead of seeking to distance the audience from the events by interrupting the action, Bond talks ofthe need to involve the audience by surprising and shocking them with images which are part of the continuing action" (p. 280). IronicaUy, one of the book's strengths is also one of its weaknesses: sometimes the scholarship is overly fastidious. Even the most devoted reader of Bond learns more than he wants to know ofthe innumerable changes Bond made in his plays as he progressed from his notes, successive drafts, and rehearsals. The first third of Chapter Five. for example, focuses too much on the notes written in preparation for Lear, and we learn in Chapter Eight that Bond had many different ideas about how Shakespeare should die in the six drafts that Bond wrote for Bingo. This attention to detail does not always add to an understanding of the plays. In concluding their study, Hay and Roberts observe that Bond's theatre can be properly understood only in the context of his desire "'to make the analysis of politics partofthe aesthetic experience'" (p. 287). Bond:A Study ofHis Plays quite successfully shows how politics and art can be merged without sacrificing artistic merit. Moreover, the book leaves no doubt that the dramatic renaissance begun in British drama by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 continues to grow stronger as it remains faithful in its examination of society's ills. DANIEL R. JONES, EMBRY-RIDDLE AERONAUTICAL UNIVERSITY JAMES KNOWLSON AND JOHN PILLING. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama ofSamuel Beckett. London: John Calder [979; New York: Grove Press [980. pp.xx, 292. This study of the late prose and drama of Samuel Beckett actually begins with the early prose and drama of Samuel Beckett. Its plan may strike one at first as quirky if not contingent, since its authors pass over (deliberately) the "major" Beckett to focus on the before (the unpublished Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Eleutheria, and Beckett's early critical writing) and the after (the drama after Endgame and the prose after the trilogy). Further, the authors avoid merging either prose styles or critical approaches. The result is very different emphases in the prose and drama chapters. Pilling is more the schematizer, as he admits, than is Knowlson: "our love ofpattern," he confesses in the editorial third person, is "almost more pervasive than Beckett's." The fruit of such love is a lucid, systematic account of the late prose, from How it is on (and Book Reviews Pilling achieves similar results with Beckett's criticism in an appended essay. "A Poetics of Indigence"), Knowlson's interest may be as much theatre as drama, as much performance as text, and while he focuses less on Beckett's developing thought and aesthetics than does Pilling. he brings to bear on his analysis a mass of new information from what are fast becoming the author-ized productions: from major performances that all too few ofus have seen; from watching Beckett direct his own work; from interviews with performers and other theatre folk; from Beckett's annotated scripts and directorial notebooks which form an invaluable part of the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading Library. home ground for both these scholars; and from his personal correspondence with Beckett. Knowlson too shares Beckett's love ofpattern. Following Beckett's directorial lead, he focuses...

Bond, Shaffer, Stoppard, Storey: An International Checklist of Commentary

After the regenerating spark of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, the ensuing decade brought four English dramatists into world prominence: Osborne himself, Arnold Wesker, John Arden, and Harold Pinter. When their fortunes waned somewhat in the late sixties, a new cluster ofdramatists -John Russell Taylor dubbed them “the second wave” -coopted a large share of the limelight. Again, four major figures emerged: Edward Bond, Peter Shaffer, Tom Stoppard, and David Storey. The amount of critical attention given to this group, especially Bond and Stoppard, has escalated in recent years to the extent that more than half of the significant studies in print have been published since 1976. Ofthe eighty-plus that exist on Stoppard, for example, nearly fifty were issued in this period; of sixty-five on Bond, thirty-eight. A commendable bibliography that embraces these dramatists, Kimball King's Twenty Modern British Playwrights (New York: Garland, 1977), purports to cover international criticism through 1976, but it is already so out-of-date that it includes only a quarter of the noteworthy studies available by mid-198 I. A new bibliography is obviously needed.

No World of Its Own: Look Back in Anger Twenty Years Later

MOST CRITICS OF MODERN DRAMA affirm that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which opened twenty years ago on May 8, 1956, at the Royal Court, London, changed the direction of English drama. (Actually, it is more accurate to say that it changed the direction of drama written in English since its influence had been felt as much on this side of the Atlantic as on its own.) Allardyce Nicoll in English Drama: A Modern Viewpoint declares that with Look Back in Anger English drama was "reborn" (p. 126). It is a bold declaration, one that would be difficult to defend, but it does indicate the enthusiasm this play once generated.

The Young British Drama

IT IS SAID that some 120 dramatists are active in Britain today. Of these not more than thirty are likely to see one of their plays performed in the West End of London in anyone theatrical season of twelve months. Fifteen of these at the most can expect to earn as much as £500 a year. If you bear in mind that the dramatic author has to wait for months if not for years before a play of his reaches the stage-John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was rejected by every London theater director before it was finally accepted for production after two years of waiting by the Royal Court Theatre-you will see why so few English writers are attracted to the stage. Note, by contrast, that well over 4,000 novels were published in England last year!