Fifty years of British theatre

Contemporary Review, August, 2002 by Tom Phillips

Whether it fully deserves this reputation is debatable. With the benefit of hindsight, the arrival in London of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot in 1955 now seems equally significant, and the changes which occurred in the wake of Anger were neither as sweeping nor as rapid as the '1956 myth' would have it. That said, Osborne's outspoken drama -- and the English Stage Company's willingness to stage it -- did open the way for a new generation of playwrights and, over the next few years, a remarkable number of plays appeared which are now regarded as modern classics. Osborne's third, The Entertainer, opened with Laurence Olivier playing a down-at-heels music hall turn in 1957 and the following year saw both Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup With Barley (the other two parts of his eponymous Wesker Trilogy appearing in 1959 and 1960) and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey (from Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop), with Harold Pinter weighing in with his first full-length drama, The Birthday Party, in 1959.

Since then, of course, successive generations of new playwrights have picked up the baton. In the 1960s, Joe Orton initially horrified and then delighted audiences with his irreverent but wildly witty dark comedies, Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot and the posthumously produced What The Butler Saw, while the very different Edward Bond became a cause celebre when his deeply troubling, politically outspoken plays were repeatedly banned or cut to pieces by the Lord Chamberlain. The infanticide scene in his 1965 play Saved inspired debate at the highest level and, somewhat ironically, the furore it generated led to the ultimate abolition of stage censorship in 1968, an occasion marked by the Royal Court with a special Edward Bond season. During the 1970s, Bond enjoyed an international reputation as a writer of astutely political drama, scoring popular and critical success with Lear and Bingo, and it was only in the 1980s that he started to fall out of favour - a process which was not helped by his legendarily spiky p ersonality.

As it happens, many of the figures who came to dominate British drama and theatre in the 1970s and 80s first emerged in the 1960s and, while it is true that the 1950s generation showed the way, they did not enjoy the long-lasting success of writers like 'intellectual gymnast' Tom Stoppard - whose Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead was an overnight sensation in 1966 - or the more populist Alan Ayckbourn, who scored his first West End hit with Relatively Speaking in 1967. Osborne's plays from the mid-1960s onwards are rarely performed, Delaney virtually disappeared after A Taste Of Honey, and after his 1962 masterpiece, Chips With Everything, Wesker's career was dogged by critical ill-will and simple misfortune. Only Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett (who was Irish rather than British, lived in France and wrote many of his most well-known works in French) survived beyond the mid-60s with their reputations intact: Pinter's on the strength of plays like The Homecoming, No Man's Land and Betrayal, and Beckett's largely thanks to increasingly experimental 'dramaticules' like Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby.