19th and early 20th century

• Drama historically started with the text, especially the single-author playwright configuration
• “the English theatre of the 20th century… is better than the English theatre of the 19th century” (Evans, 1948)
• The ‘bricks and mortar men’ were rich individuals who put on shows in large buildings that they owned, with a big star – and could sell the building on if the show failed
• Post-WW2: only one-third of performances were plays
• During WW2 the start time of plays was brought forward to a time directly after most finished work for the day, due to curfews being in place. This led to a shift in the social ettiquette of the theatre as you didn’t need to go home to change into ‘evening clothes’ in order to attend. This led to a change in audience composition.

 

After the Second World War: post-1945

• Terrance Rattigan peddled plays for the bourgeois about the middle classes and imagined his ideal theatre consumer: the dowager Aunt Edna, interested in art but in an uncomplex, unsophisticated way – representing a type of majority demographic which should be intertained but not overtly challenged
• The British theatre was insulated from the European avant garde movement (people such as Strindberg, Sartre)
• Kenneth Tynan was a famous theatre critic and provocateur of the time, as was the first person to say ‘fuck’ on television
• The Loamshire Play: “except when someone must sneeze, or be murdered, the sun invariably shines”

 

1950s

• George Devine, Artistic Director of the English Stage Company (1956-65) aimed to “present exciting, provocative and stimulating plays… [and] attract young people” – he was one of the first people to appreciate, synthesise and import European modes onto the British stage
• The Royal Court artistic policy gave the “right to fail”, commonly attributed to Tony Richardson. The standard of work was seen to be most important, and not everything had to be commercially successful.
• Royal Court known as “the writer’s theatre”
• 1956: Royal Court produced Look Back in Anger, a tipping point which changed the landscape of British theatre forever. Tynan said “I could not love someone who did not love Look Back in Anger” (in Ellis, 2003)
• Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop: Littlewood inherently understood Brecht and was the first person to properly stage Brecht in the UK
• The Berliner Ensemble visited London in 1956
• Waiting for Godot (1955) was written as a diversion and light relief from Beckett’s novel-writing

 

1960s

• The theatre censor was brought down between 1965-68, a system which had prevailed since 1737. Edward Bond responded to the censorship of his play Saved “I had never been so insulted in my life. I would not have changed one full stop.” The Royal Court and Bond exploited a loophole in the censorship laws, putting on a private club performance to invited guests. Plain clothes police officers attended the showing and the Crown prosecuted Bond and the Royal Court, which saw Lawrence Olivier testify about Saved‘s worth as a work of art. The Royal Court was fined 50 guineas.
• In 1968 Bond submitted a further play which returned from the censor with one note: “His Lordship would not allow it”. This was the moment which led to a general realisation about the ludicrousness of the censorship system, and the censor was brought down.
• Michael Billington spoke of theatre as “an oppositional force”, highlighting how theatre could question government and the structures that govern our lives.
• The National Theatre was finally realised in the 1960s after having been discussed for decades.

 

Late 20th century: 1980-2000

• The Long March of the 1980s: the Tory government cut theatre funding, leading to the middle-class theatre consumer – who was able to spend money – was targetted again. Theatre headed towards safer commercial ground.
• “There appeared to be a disengagement and dismantlement from recognisable forms of political engagement by the new generation of young dramatists” (Graham Saunders)
• In Yer Face theatre was a critical category assigned retrospectvely to theatre of the nineties, not used by anyone working at the time; it was an outwardly assigned category, not a movement or a school
• 1990s: ‘In Yer Face’ theatre – was kicked off by Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995, Royal Court Theatre). In Yer Face was a term coined by Aleks Sierz identifying the tendency in mid-to-late-1990s theatre of an experimental aesthetic in which the audience were put through ordeals of various sorted. This form of theatre was especially associated with young writers, characterised by the ‘trashy glamour’ of sexuality, drugs and violence.
• New writing: “distinctiveness of the author’s individual voice, the contemporary flavour of their language and themes, and sometimes by the provocative nature of its content” (Sierz, 2012, 54)
• New writing becomes prevalent determinant of play development processes which were designed to turn youth, rawness and up-to-the-minute social relevance into marketable commodities”
• The mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s were distinguished by a wholesale repivoting of the British theatrical ecology upon new play development and the discovery of new, specifically young, writers.

 

Where are we going?

• New writing
• The verbatim play
• Site-specific theatre and performance
• Bloggers versus broadsheet critics
• Devised and postdramatic theatre becomes more central

 

 

Works cited

Ellis, S. (2003) Look Back in Anger, May 1956. The Guardian. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/may/21/theatre.samanthaellis [accessed 6 November 2015].

Evans, B. Ifor (1948) A Short History of English Drama. London: Pelican.

Sierz, A. (2012) Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s. London: Methuen.