Post-war British Theatre Research Articles

In Interview: Key Features of Contemporary British Drama

In this interview on 22 March 2022 in London, Mesut Gunenc talks to theatre critic and historian Aleks Sierz about how his work has influenced contemporary British drama, why he chose the name ‘in-yer-face theatre’ for 1990s avant-garde plays, and why some writers have rejected the label. They also discuss the differences between experiential and experimental theatre, especially focusing on the work of Anthony Neilson, and finish by considering the key themes that characterize 1990s new writing in Britain.Aleks Sierz is author of the seminal In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001), as well as of other work about new writing and post-war British theatre history. His more recent books include Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (Methuen Drama, 2011), Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s (Methuen Drama, 2012), and Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre Since the Second World War (Methuen Drama, 2021). He has co-authored, with Lia Ghilardi, The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre: The First Four Hundred Years (Oberon, 2015). Mesut Gunenc is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Adnan Menderes University in Turkey. He is the author of Postdramatic Theatrical Signs in Contemporary British Playwrights (Lambert, 2017) and co-editor, with Enes Kavak, of New Readings in British Drama: From the Post-War Period to the Contemporary Era (Peter Lang, 2021). He is currently a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University in the UK.

“Sıradaki Ne Olacak?”: Edward Bond’un Eleven Vests/On Bir Atlet Oyununda ‘Dramatik Çocuk’un Yolculuğu

In this study, the concept of ‘Dramatic Child’ will be examined within the framework of the play, Eleven Vests written by Edward Bond, one of the prominent playwrights of post-war British theatre. The concept put forward by the playwright comes to the fore as a process that reveals the conflicts experienced by children as individuals in society − structured by adults − with their environment. The process, which is fictionalized through the main character’s (Student) experiences during his training at school and in the army, scrutinizes the situations in which children are isolated, marginalized and eventually become perpetrators/victims of violence in today's world which does not allow them to realize themselves. Reflecting the insensitive and hypocritical attitudes of adults, the playwright criticizes the social order which converts children into passive individuals and thus makes them part of an order dominated by unilateral consensus. Despite the fact that adults failing to fulfill their responsibilities, the playwright avoids presenting a hopeless message for the future. At the end of the play, Student, now an adult, reflects the need to create a new language of his own and an order in which the meaning of humanity can be sustained. In this study, it is aimed to analyze this creation process within the framework of ‘Dramatic Child’ conceptualized by the playwright.

‘Peter Brook’s Night of the Living Dead’: Horror, cinema and the post-war theatre

An examination of the relationship between theatre and film that focuses on the work of figures associated with the post-war British theatre but whose film work was often understood in terms of horror. In particular, it examines the ways in which their work was understood as shocking audiences through a confrontation with repressed materials and as narratively staging conflicts between protagonists that represent conflicting ideas. In other words, these stories were often understood as staging battles between characters that sought to assert domination and control over their adversaries, battles that often featured psychological cruelty and destructiveness.

Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Theatre: British Drama, Violence and Writing

Representations of violence have been at the heart of some key movements in post-war British theatre. In the twenty-first century, however, these representations have evolved in a new way, characterised both by an escalation of the scale and intensity of the violence, to a point one could call apocalyptic, coupled with specifically non-realist dramaturgical and theatrical modes of production. The essay explains these phenomena as two sides of an attempt to resist neoliberal capitalism’s totalising colonisation of our experience of the real and to imagine the unimaginable end of capitalism.

Devine Intervention: Collaboration and Conspiracy in the History of the Royal Court

Taryn Storey believes that a series of letters recently discovered in the archive of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) makes it important that we reassess the genesis of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Dating from November 1952, the correspondence between George Devine and William Emrys Williams, the Secretary General of the ACGB, offers an insight into a professional and personal relationship that was to have a profound influence on the emerging Arts Council policy for drama. Storey makes the case that in 1953 Devine not only shaped his Royal Court proposal to fit the priorities of the ACGB Drama Panel, but that Devine and senior members of the ACGB then collaborated to ensure that the proposal became a key part of Arts Council strategic planning. Furthermore, she puts forward the argument that the relationship between Devine and Williams was instrumental to new writing and innovation becoming central to the future rationale for state subsidy to the theatre. Taryn Storey is a doctoral student at the University of Reading. Her PhD thesis examines the relationship between practice and policy in the development of new writing in post-war British theatre, and forms part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Giving Voice to the Nation: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Development of Theatre and Performance in Britain 1945–1995’, a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Piecing Together the Lady Chatterley Puzzle: an Uncensored Investigation

In this article, Poonam M. Ganglani investigates how the preserved manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's archives of John Hart's stage version of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1961 reflect the social and theatrical landscape of the times. The notion of the Lord Chamberlain as a custodian of morals, the dangerous power attributed to stage semiotics, and the response to sexual impropriety on stage are among the areas discussed. The Lord Chamberlain's correspondence files offer the only significant glimpse into this theatrical adaptation of Lawrence's novel, as into other unpublished plays of the time; this article also investigates the ways in which the Lord Chamberlain's archives in the British Library, London, serve as a unique and valuable tool for the post-war British theatre historiographer in research related to such unpublished plays. Poonam M. Ganglani is a postgraduate under the Mundus Masters ‘Crossways in European Humanities’ international study programme, having studied in three European universities over two years: the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia in France, the University of Sheffield in England, and the Università degli studi di Bergamo in Italy.

Staging the UK (review)

Reviewed by: Staging the UK Janelle Reinelt Jen Harvie . Staging the UK. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Pp. 244, illustrated. £50 (Hb); £15.99 (Pb). Jen Harvie is one of a fresh new generation of theatre and performance scholars who are reformulating the categories of history and scholarship associated with post–World War II British theatre. Along with different historiographical narratives for the period (see Rebellato), the familiar emphasis on text-based performance has been expanding to take account of physical theatre, performances and installations, site-specific work, and related forms of popular culture as well. Canadian scholar Sean Carney is rethinking the relationship between tragedy and political theatre in the work of David Edgar, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, and most recently Sarah Kane. As I write this, Royal Holloway, University of London is about to host a conference specific to this revisioning – 1956, 1968, 1979, 1995: British Theatre and Cultural Change – and the next issue of Theatre Survey will feature Melissa Gibson's upcoming "1979 and All That: Periodization in Postwar British Theatre History." Harvie's new book contributes to these new developments in British the-atre/performance scholarship and offers a fully packed volume of ideas and analyses that should provoke and please in equal measure. This study focuses explicitly on national identity and how various stagings reflect and construct a volatile, changeable sense of the British nation. Using Benedict Anderson as her touchstone, but moving beyond his various limitations (such as the emphasis on print culture), she asks readers to think about a series of topics she puts forward through "dialectical resonance" to trouble notions of cultural commodification, democracy, and hybridity in relation to British identity. Most of her chapters make use of at least two or three performances through which the topics unfold, often employed at cross-purposes in order to complicate [End Page 238] the presentation of issues. Chapter three, for example, on site-specific performance, discusses in detail the Welsh company Brith Gof's Gododdin, which originally took place in a disused car factory in Cardiff in the late 1980s, and the Northern Ireland company Tinderbox's convictions, which took place in the disused, if infamous, Crumlin Road Courthouse in 2000. This chapter's topic is ostensibly the use of memory and place to reconstitute national identities. In choosing Wales and Northern Ireland, Harvie is already pushing beyond traditional notions of British identity that excluded or played down these regions. In discussing the way that these productions interacted with economic events in Wales at the time and with the Good Friday Agreement and its effect on a changing public culture in Belfast, Harvie demonstrates convincingly that the match between performance and context created the power of the performances to invite spectators to identify with certain diverse articulations of national/regional identities. However, because Gododdin went on tour around Europe, while convictions had a very limited stage life of three weeks in a single site, Harvie is also able to analyse the strengths of the match between timely and socially specific performance interventions in a community and the inevitably different life that a performance takes once it is "on the road." This is a wonderful chapter, not least because Harvie develops a discussion of the architecture of the sites, using Henri Lefevbre's writings on repressive space and monumentality to provide a rich reading of why these sites were crucial to the performances but nevertheless allowed their audiences a variety of viewing perspectives. Other chapters highlight the debate about festivals and globalized touring, the attempts to represent Asia and Asian-British subjects through the use of the Bollywood phenomena, and the fraught relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe as experienced thorough performance. In each case, Harvie makes the case for a critical perspective that would dismiss much of this performance as commodified – often as Americanized capitulation to global culture – only to reverse her trajectory and argue the other side of the issue too: that the Edinburgh Festival is "robust" and "continues to provide […] a context in which Edinburgh and Scottish cultures are nurtured, productively challenged, developed, and distributed rather than demeaned and diminished" (102). In the instance of Bollywood musicals, she suggests that it...

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.

Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights. By Michael Patterson. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 232. $70 cloth.

In this clear, concise, and accessible volume, Michael Patterson sets himself the task of examining “the work of nine talented and innovative British playwrights who shared a laudable but strange conviction: that by writing plays and having them performed they might help to change the way society is structured” (1). As if conscious of the inevitable charge that by focusing on Wesker, Arden, Griffiths, Barker, Brenton, McGrath, Hare, Bond, and Churchill he is perpetuating the damaging myth that political theatre in postwar Britain centers on these usual suspects, Patterson takes pains to define his terms. Political theatre for the purposes of his volume “implies the possibility of radical change on socialist lines: the removal of injustice and autocracy and their replacement by the fairer distribution of wealth and more democratic systems” (4). But as the Lord Chamberlain found in his increasingly desperate attempts in the 1960s to hold on to his power to censor British drama, the more you attempt to define, the more problematic the issues that arise. Theatre historians are now becoming increasingly aware of the power of “hidden theatre” in the evolution of postwar British theatre—that is, the large number of community-based and politically active groups that have been marginalized by a disproportionate focus on “representative” political playwrights and a few well-scrutinized collective organizations, such as 7:84, Monstrous Regiment, and Belt and Braces, who are all alluded to in this volume. In light of this fact, Patterson's interest in the phenomenon that saw a generation of playwrights flourish between the mid-fifties and the early eighties, who shared a desire to change society, now seems rather quaint. It is all the more to his credit, therefore, that he has produced a highly thought-provoking work.

English drama: a cultural history

Acknowledgements. User's Guide. 1. Medieval Theatre. 2. The Beginning of the Story of Drama. 3. Renaissance Drama. 4. The Image of Elizabethan Drama. 5. Restoration Comedy. 6. Bawdy, Manners and the English National Character. 7. Melodrama. 8. The Unacceptable Face of Drama. 9. Naturalism. 10. 'You Make Me Feel Mighty Real': Proper Drama. 11. Post-War British Theatre and the State. 12. Drama in the Age of Television. Chronological List of Plays. References. Index.

Book Reviews

Christopher Innes, Modern German Drama: A Study in Form, reviewed by John Fueoj Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde, reviewed by Bettina L. Knapp C.W.E. Bigsby ed., Contemporary English Drama, reviewed by June Schlueter Douglas Colby, As the Curtain Rises: On Contemporary British Drama 1966-1976, reviewed by June Schlueter Bernard F. Dukore, The Theatre of Peter Barnes, reviewed by Ian Todd John Elsom, Post-war British Theatre Criticism, reviewed by Susan Rusinko J.B. Priestly, A.A. Devitis And Albert E. Kalson, reviewed by Peter Brigg A.D. Choudhury, The Face of Illusion in American Drama, reviewed by Gerald D. Parker Samuel J . Bernstein, The Strands Entwined: A New Direction in American Drama, reviewed by Craig Werner, Judith Olauson, The American Woman Playwright: A View of Criticism and Characterization, reviewed by Janet Brown Samar Atiar, The Intruder in Modern Drama, reviewed by Lucina P. Gabbard Phyllis Zatlin Boring, Victor Ruiz Iriarte, reviewed by Robert Lima

Post-war British Theatre Criticism by John Elsom (review)

Post-war British Theatre Criticism by John Elsom (review)

Post-War British Theatre Criticism

Post-War British Theatre Criticism

Post-War British Theatre by John Elsom, and: Anger and Detachment: A Study of Arden, Osborne and Pinter by Michael Anderson (review)

Post-War British Theatre by John Elsom, and: Anger and Detachment: A Study of Arden, Osborne and Pinter by Michael Anderson (review)

Book Reviews

John Elsom, Post-War British Theatre, reviewed by Maclcolm Page Michael Andersen, Anger and Detachment: A Study of Arden, Osborne and Pinter, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Post-War British Theatre

Post-War British Theatre