since theatre both reflects and critiques social morality; especially since the rise, a
hundred years ago, of the social-problem plays of Henrik Ibsen and the sexual-prob-
lem plays of August Strindberg. These Scandinavians continued a continental tradi-
tion which began after the French Revolution in the plays of Victor Hugo and Georg
Buchner, but did not reach England, which had avoided the revolutions of continen-
tal Europe. Shelley’s revolutionary play, The Cenci (1819), was not publicly
performed in England until 1922.
One post-war social change in the UK particularly, evident in the theatre, has
been the shake-up delivered to that securely integrated, educated middle class,
Edwardian in taste, who had subscribed to Punch and who appreciated Gilbert and
Sullivan. They provided the core audience for West End theatre in London and
outside it – much as, less formally dressed and with looser convictions, they still do.
Hard though it may be for the countrymen of Shakespeare to admit, theatre is now
for the comfortable and for those sufficiently educated to enjoy being made uncom-
fortable. Apart from pantomime and musicals, popular theatre and music-hall are
dead, killed by television. The larger British public is not in the pit or the gods but
on the sofa.
Since the 1960s, as was noticed at the time, there is less deference and reticence in
England, and there have been changes in what passes as acceptable in behaviour and
language. The polarization into conservative/progressive, or respectable/politically
correct, observed in Established Protest (p. 386) is still there in the theatre. The
ending of post-war social cohesion signalled by Anger and the Kitchen Sink led to
the disappearance of Terence Rattigan from the London stage for thirty years (p.
377). England then embraced theatre-as-protest, established in northern Europe
since Ibsen, and invigorated in the interwar years by the German poet, playwright
and producer Bertold Brecht (1898–1956). The swing of the pendulum of fashion
can be slow in theatreland.
This polarization has lasted, if always with exceptions. The experimental
modernist composer Igor Stravinsky, when in London, stayed at the Savoy Hotel so
that he could attend Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savoy Opera next door. The under-
stated Rattigan sponsored the outrageous Joe Orton. The committed Howard
Brenton’s Never So Goo d (2008) showed Harold Macmillan, the butt of popular
satirists during his Premiership, with understanding.
The British followers of the inventive Brecht wrote dogmatically reformist theatre
until the 1990s. Some established names, Edward Bond, David Edgar and Howard
Brenton, for example, continued strongly; the versatile David Hare has been
knighted. A theatre of resentment and confrontation, first at the Royal Court and
then in national theatres, focused on the injustice, alienation and pain in modern
life, often with a class edge. More radical drama often incorporates elements from
the non-naturalistic Theatre of Cruelty. Such a generalization omits some successful
and original recent plays which lie outside the polarized picture offered here. More
conventional, understated, gentle or genteel traditions also continued, of course, and
the wind stopped blowing all one way after a successful revival of Rattigan’s The
Deep Blue Seain 1992. Rattigan is now regularly revived. On the still polarized spec-
trum of contemporary drama, Harold Pinter may now seem closer to Rattigan than
to today’s less subtle radicals. The critic Mark Lawson wrote, after seeing a double
bill of Rattigan’s The Browning Version and David Hare’sSouth Downs,how differ-
ent these dramatists were: ‘the former analysing England through allusion and sub-
text, the latter via didactic declaration’.
CAN A LITERARY MEDIUM BE GLOBAL? 405Some playwrightsAlan Bennett (1934–)
Simon Gray (1936–2008)
Willy Russell (1947– )
David Edgar (1948– )
April de Angelis (1960– )
John Hodge (1964– )
Mark Ravenhill (1966– )
Jez Butterworth (1969– )
Simon Stephens (1971– )
Sarah Kane (1971–1999)
David Eldridge(1973– )
Zinnie Harris (1973–)