language they use, is rich and living’ (his native Ireland?) to ‘the modern literature of
towns’ (Paris or London?), where we find ‘Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of
life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage, one must have reality, and one must
have joy.’ The English drawing-room of that day did not address a moral problem in
the language of joy.Sean O’Casey
If the language of Synge is too joyful to be true, except of the Aran islands,Sean
O’Casey(1880–1964) used incantatory rhythms in tragicomedies of the Dublin
slums such as Juno and the Paycock(1924) and The Plough and the Stars(1926), in
which old gunmen strut their political formulas and memories, and women take the
strain. After nationalist riots against this unfavourable portrayal, O’Casey left, like
Yeats, like Shaw, like J. M. Barrie, for London, where The Silver Tassiewas produced
in 1929.
Ifpacifism was unwelcome in Dublin, non-realistic expressionism was puzzling
in London. Auden helped found a Group Theatre, which in 1935 put on plays in
styles which combined German expressionist techniques with English music-hall
routines. Minority audiences saw their first drama by Bertold Brecht(1898–1956),
full of Marx and Freud; the joy was supplied by music-hallischsongs. Eliot’s verse-
drama was more radically experimental in approach than in effect. He had thought
‘to take a form of entertainment and subject it to a process which would leave it a
form of art. Perhaps the music hall comedian is the best material ....’ (‘The
Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, 1921). The ‘form of entertainment’ he opted for was
West End comedy, dressing Greek tragedy in lounge suits. First he had tried the
music hall comedian, in Sweeney Agonistes(1932), but this remained a fragment. The
exper iment he had proposed was performed in 1955 by Samuel Beckett in Waiting
for Godot. Christopher Fry had much success with plays such as The Lady’s Not for
Burning, written in a cleverly decorative verse. Rattigan has since been revived, but
not Fry.nFurther reading
Bergonzi, B.,Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978).
Brown, K. (ed.),Rethinking Lawrence(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990).
Cunningham,V.,British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Ellmann,R.,James J oyce,2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Innes, C.,Modern British Drama, 1880–1990(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Macmillan’s Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). A
useful series.
Moody, A. D. (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).378 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55