Already by 1960, the theatre of Beckett and Pinter had triumphed. Yet The
Waste Land had already left the themes of the meaninglessness of life and the
impossibility of communication with limited scope for development. Pinter’s
Betrayal concerns a married couple and their best man, who has a love-affair with
the wife. The time-sequence of scenes is reversed, so that the consequences of
telling and living a lie become, as in a detective story, progressively more intelli-
gible and less comic. Imitated everywhere, Pinter remains an unsurpassed crafts-
man of spoken dialogue, and has adapted a number of texts for the cinema. His
later plays are less mysterious and far more political. In 2005 he won the Nobel
Prize, using his acceptance speech to attack Mr Blair’s support for the US inva-
sion of Iraq.Established protest
The theatrical revolution of 1956–60 established the stage as a platform for anti-
establishment attitudes, political and sexual-political. The Theatre of the Absurd
gave way to the Theatre of Cruelty, in which, in 1968, as I vividly recall, audiences
were spat at by actors and sprayed with pig’s blood. An admired production ofKing
Lear by Peter Brook omitted Cornwall’s servant and all other signs of hope from the
text. Sexual liberation was pursued with anarchic laughter by Joe Orton, more think-
ingly by Caryl Churchill; varieties of Marxist theatre by John Arden and more grimly
by Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Hare, David Edgar and Trevor Griffiths.
Their plays confronted the audience far more fiercely, and in some cases more
crudely, than the more thought-provoking and sometimes poetic work of Bertold
Brecht, the father of Marxist drama. The anti-capitalist attitudes of the student riots
in Paris in 1968 took up residence on state-subsidized stages. The most skilled
dramatists of the period were Alan Bennett (1934– ), Dennis Potter (1935–1997),
Tom Stoppard (1937– ), Caryl Churchill (1938– ) and Alan Ayckbourn (1939– ).
Among the best plays were Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad (BBC TV 1983),
Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and Travesties (1974),and Churchill’s
Top Girls (1982). It was a vigorous period in the theatre, often with a political point.
Ir ish English again made a contribution, with Brian Friel (1929– ), whose
Tr anslations (1980),Making History (1988) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) brought
language back to the English stage.386 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80
Other dramatists
Arnold Wesker, Chicken Soup with Barley
(1958)
Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow(1956),
The Hostage(1958).
N. F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle(1957).
John Arden, Live Like Pigs(1958), Serjeant
Musgrave’s Dance(1959).Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloane(1964),
Loot(1966), The Ruffian on the Stair, The
Erpingham Camp(1967), What the Butler Saw
(1969).
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are Dead(1966), The Real Inspector Hound
(1968), Jumpers(1972), Travesties(1974),
Arcadia(1993).