Part 1: the first 25.
1956 is
one of those big years in theatre in the UK Leicester
Square Royal
Court
Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne.
Look Back… is a play that is situated in and
rails against the inertia of the 1950s. Set in a dull midlands town, market stall
trader Jimmy is a cruel and violent man who spends much of the getting angry
about a whole heap of pet aversions. The form of the play was largely
conventional - three acts with contrived climaxes at the end of each - and the
setting, whilst it being a dilapidated flat, was hardly revolutionary (though
it did act as a brilliant parody counter-point to the country drawing room), it
was Osborne's voice, that of an angry young man/jobbing marginalised socialist
actor shouting in the face of the establishment and hugely prominent in the
writing, that made the play so remarkable.
Other
plays to check out here: A Sense of
Detachment - Osborne
A Taste of Honey (1958) by Shelagh Delaney, An Giall, or The Hostage, (1958) by Brendan Behan, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) by John Arden and Roots by Arnold Wesker (1959).
Coming
fast in the wake left by Osborne and Look
Back in Anger, theatres began producing this new socially aware work from
those who would be dubbed the Angry Young Men - although I want to start with a
woman
A Taste of Honey, written by Shelagh Delaney when
she was only nineteen, is one of the great defining and taboo-breaking
plays of the 1950s. When her mother Helen runs off with a car salesman, feisty
teenager Jo takes up with a black sailor who promises to marry her, before he
heads for the seas, leaving her pregnant and alone. Art student Geoff moves in
and assumes the role of surrogate parent until, misguidedly, he sends for Helen
and their unconventional setup unravels. Delaney wrote the play in response to
seeing a show and thinking she could do better then sending the draft script to
Joan Littlewood. It’s a brave and fresh play which in its final form marries
Delaney's original, touching narrative with Littlewood's politics and stage-craft.
An Giall, which Behan wrote in Irish
before translating it to The Hostage,
is another play nurtured by Littlewood, who directed its premiere. Behan and
Littlewood had previously worked together on The Quare Fellow in 1954 (therefore falling outside of the bounds
of this blog but it's great, you should read it) and came to work together
again here. The play documents the events leading up to the planned execution
of an 18-year-old IRA member accused of killing an Ulster Northern
Ireland
Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, an anti-war play, struck a
chord with a generation who had seen the Second World War erupt around them and
wanted to avoid further conflicts. When Musgrave and his three men, all of whom
are tired of fighting, return to their colliery hometown and are made to put
down a strike at the pit. It is an order they ignore and instead try to preach
pacifism to the men of the town; a decision which leaves two of them dead and
the other two in a cell to be hanged.
Roots focuses on Beatie Bryant as she
makes the transition from being an uneducated working-class woman obsessed with
Ronnie, her unseen liberal boyfriend, to a woman who can express herself and
the struggles of her time. Little happens, every act being staged around the
kitchen table, but Wesker has a lightness of touch that makes this drama one
which grabs you. Beatie too is a perfect portrayl of a young person –
questioning, even rebelling against, her roots – but she is also an individual,
whose warmth and spark cannot fail to shine through.
Other plays to check out here: Live Like Pigs
and The Workhouse Donkey - John
Arden, Chicken Soup with Barley, I'm Talking About Jerusalem, Chips With Everything, The Kitchen - all Wesker (so if you
liked Roots…), Dingo - Charles Wood.
The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter (both 1957) and The
Caretaker (1960) by Harold Pinter.
The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an
erstwhile piano player, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and
Petey Boles, in an South
Coast Stanley
One of
the great things about The Birthday Party
is that most people hated it when it came out and it was saved by a good
review in The Sunday Times from Harold Hobson. This except, for me, sums up
Pinter's style and influences the way I look at this cricket obsessed (like
myself) playwright:
"Mr
Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of
disaster. One sunny afternoon, whilst Peter May is making a century at Lord's
against Middlesex, and the shadows are creeping along the grass, and the old
men are dozing in the Long Room, a hydrogen bomb may explode."
The Dumb Waiter, a one-act play eerily
reminiscent of Waiting for Godot,
concerns two hired killers waiting around in a basement for their next
assignment whilst being bombarded with absurd orders from a dumb waiter
situated in the room, and The Caretaker,
where an old tramp inserts himself into the life of two young men and tries to
turn them against each other, both have this calculated menace coursing through
them.
Other plays to check out here: No Man's Land,
Betrayal, The Homecoming and, my personal favourites, A Kind of Alaska and Mountain
Language - all Pinter.
A Raisin in the Sun (1959) by Lorraine
A
personal favourite of Mufaro Makubika's, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is a must read.
When a substantial insurance payment could mean either financial salvation or
personal ruin for a poor black family in Harlem ,
New York America
Other plays to check out here: The Sign in
Sidney Brustein's Window and Les
Blancs - both Hansberry.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961) by Edward Albee.
Edward
Albee's dazzling work of dark comedy which presents perhaps the most memorable
of married couples - George and Martha, brilliantly played by Richard Burton
and Elizabeth Taylor in the 1965 film version - in a searing night of dangerous
fun and games with a pawnlike other couple who innocently become their weapons
in the savaging of each other and of their life together. Coming from a
tradition that includes Miller, Williams and O'Neill, it has brilliant dialogue
and believable characters, but Albee adds some of his absurd bent into the mix
as well making this a very special kind of play.
Other plays to check out here: The Zoo Story,
A Delicate Balance and Who is Sylvia - all Albee, August: Osage County by Tracey Letts.
The Knack (1962) by Anne Jellicoe.
An ironic
play about the male art of seduction where the utterly loathsome Tolen, a
narcissistic Don Juan type, tries to teach his landlord the art of seduction,
the knack, when a 17-year-old girl wanders into their flat, whilst The Painter
- the young man living downstairs - watches on providing a commentary. It has
aged as a play but is worth looking at as an early example of female
playwrights calling men at their own game and in an arena, like theatre, which
was totally dominated by them.
Other plays to check out here: The Sport of My
Mad Mother (which I haven't read) but Michael Billington claimed
"showed her [Ann Jellicoe] to be a radical theatrical pioneer."
Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963) by Joan Littlewood
and Theatre Workshop.
We've
come across Joan Littlewood before with Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney but Oh, What a Lovely War! has become the
piece she's most remembered for. Oh, What
a Lovely War! defies classification: agit-prop, epic theatre, musical,
music hall, vaudeville, mockumentary - all could apply. The show uses facts and
statistics, juxtaposed with reminiscences and versions of songs of the time, as
an ironic critique of the reality of the war. The cast wear pierrot clown
costumes whilst the harsh images of war and shocking statistics are projected
onto the backdrop, providing a contrast with the comedy of the action taking
place before it. Structurally, it's far from conventional and is written by
large group of theatre-makers through a devised process but can offer many
different ideas to a playwright that doesn't want to be constrained by a more
classic style.
Other plays to check out here: Fings Ain't Wot
They Used T'Be by Frank Norman, The
Accrington Pals by Peter Whelan (one of the better First World War plays
produced, if that's what you're after). Pre-1956: R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End and most of Brecht's back
catalogue for style.
Saved (1965), Lear (1971) and The Sea
(1973) by Edward Bond
Saved delves into the lives of a
selection of South London working class youths oppressed by a brutal economic
system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift eventually into
violence. It concerns Len and Pam and their relationship, its disintegration and
the terrible events that drive them back toward each other. The play shows the
social causes of violence and opposes them with individual freedom. The play
became infamous for one particular scene in which a baby is stoned to death by
a group of youths.
Lear, based
on Shakespeare's King Lear,
follows the decay of an aging tyrannical king. Betrayed by his two cynical
daughters; hounded as a political risk following military defeat; pursued by
the ghost of a man whose life he has destroyed and whose death he has caused;
imprisoned and tortured until enucleated; after a life of violence he finally
finds wisdom and peace in a radical opposition to power. The end of the play
shows him as a forced labourer in a camp setting an example for future
rebellion by sabotaging the wall he once built, which subsequent regimes keep
perpetuating.
The Sea is a more subdued Edwardian-set
comedy which shows a seaside community on England
I'm a big
fan of Bond (Edward and James) but in the case of the former he's a vicious and
acerbic writer who creates brilliant texts full of emotion and bite. He
remains, even now, highly controversial because of the violence shown in his
plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and
his theories on drama.
Other plays to check out here: The Pope's
Wedding, Narrow Road to the Deep
North, Black Mass, Fool and personal favourites Bingo and the surreal Early Morning - about an abusive
fictitious lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence
Nightingale!
The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Equus (1973) and Amadeus (1979) by
Peter Shaffer.
Peter
Shaffer is a fine playwright who often gets a little forgotten, people often
know the plays Equus and Amadeus, certainly the film version of
the latter, but not the man who wrote them. Shaffer is a writer of considerable
range whose work moves easily from farce to the portrayal of human anguish.
The Royal Hunt of the Sun dramatises the tragic
conquest of Peru Andes ".
His better known Equus delves into the
mind of a 17-year-old stableboy who had plunged a spike into the eyes of six
horses. Told from the perspectives of Alan, the boy, and Dr. Martin Dysart, his
psychiatrist, it is a detective story where we try to understand the cause of
the violence whilst Dysart also contemplates more existential ideas when
working on Alan's case. Lastly, Amadeus -
the best known of the plays - looks at the relationship between Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Austrian court composer Antonio Salieri who,
overcome with jealousy at hearing the "voice of God" coming from an
"obscene child", sets out to destroy his rival.
Other plays to check out here: The White Liars,
Five Finger Exercise, The Private Ear and The Public
Eye and the hilarious Black
Comedy, where a party descends to the guests feeling their way around a
pitch black room with the conceit being the stage is actually flooded with
light - all P. Shaffer.
Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) and Loot (1965) by Joe Orton.
Entertaining Mr Sloane is the story of Kath, a
lonely middle-aged woman living in the London
Loot follows the fortunes of two
young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Together they rob the bank next to the funeral
parlour where Dennis works and return to Hal's home to hide the money. Hal's
mother has just died and the money is hidden in her coffin while her body keeps
on appearing around the house. Upon the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the plot
turns topsy-turvy as Hal and Dennis try to keep him off their trail, aided by
Nurse McMahon and to the despair of Hal's father, Mr McLeavy. As a play, it
satirises not only the issues of bereavement, but the public perspective of the
police force with regards to laws and corruption.
Both of
Orton's major plays are bitter black comedies, absurd
wild parodies of kitchen sink dramas or detective fiction. To
this he also adds his own dark, farcical cynicism and his difficulty of being
an openly gay man in the 1960s. Orton's career was cut short when he was
murdered by his partner in 1967.
Other plays to check out here: What the Butler
Saw and The Ruffians - Both
Orton, Confusions by Alan Ayckbourn, A Day In The Death of Joe Egg by Peter
Nichols.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead (1966),
Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974) and Arcadia
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead expands
upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. The action of Stoppard's play takes place mainly "in the
wings" of Shakespeare's, with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who
enact fragments of the original's scenes. Between these episodes the two
protagonists voice their confusion at the progress of events of which - occurring
onstage without them in Hamlet -
they have no direct knowledge. Tom Stoppard weaves this fabulously absurd version
of Hamlet together using a style that is more Beckett than
Shakespeare and is brilliantly playful is its wordplay and sense of humour.
Jumpers is Stoppard's take on farce. It explores,
and satirises, the field of academic philosophy, likening it to
a less-than skilful competitive gymnastics display. The play raises
questions such as "What do we know?" and "Where do values come
from?". Stoppard uses farce to undermine this philosophy, making what
could be could be a dry debate into a sparkling and funny allegory filled with
his trademark wit.
Travesties centres on the figure of Henry
Carr, an elderly man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the
First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he was
writing Ulysses, Tristan
Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian
Revolution, all of whom were living in Zurich at that time. It's a rich
intertextual play which plays fast and loose with the coincidence of the three
men being in Zurich
Often
revered as the greatest living playwright working in the English language, Tom
Stoppard is well worth looking into.
Other plays to check out here: The Real
Inspector Hound, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, The Real Thing and personal favourites Tango, adapted from Sławomir Mrożek's
play of the same name, and If You're Glad
I'll Be Frank - where bus driver Frank discovers his long lost wife Gladys
has become the talking clock.
Sleuth (1970) by Anthony
Shaffer
Sleuth is set in
the Wiltshire manor house of Andrew Wyke, an immensely successful
mystery writer. Wyke's home reflects his obsession with the inventions and
deceptions of fiction and his fascination with games and game-playing. He lures
his wife's lover, Milo Tindle, to the house and convinces him to stage a
robbery of her jewellery, a proposal that sets off a chain of events that
leaves the audience trying to decipher where Wyke's imagination ends and
reality begins. It's a brilliantly clever, slippery play and certainly the best
written by Anthony Shaffer, identical twin of Peter.
Other plays to check out here: Whodunnit
and Murderer - both A. Shaffer and Deathtrap by Ira Levin.
Hope
you've enjoyed this first instalment of our post-1956 list. I hope if
you're reading this as a writer, actor director or other theatre interested
person, that you might seek out some of the scripts mentioned here. If you want
to say anything about what we've written or suggest plays we've missed then
please tweet us - @act2playwriting or
find us on Facebook and write on our wall - Act 2.
PS: if
you think there are plays missing from the Other plays to check out here bits,
notably August Wilson's Fences, that's because they'll be in part 2 or 3!