Theatre in the 1950 - Theatrical Context

8/18/2019 Theatre in the 1950 - Theatrical Context

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Theatrical Context - Theatre in the 1950’s

The 8th of May 1956, a date that has now passed into theatrical history as the day that changed

British Theatre. The date marked the premiere of John Osborne’s production of Look Back In Anger

at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and the play marked a dramatic shift in the type and content of

work that British Theatre was creating:

‘The old era became exclusively characterised by the absence of anger, and the new era by its

presence’ . Rebellato quoted in Rabey, David Ian 'English Drama Since 1940' Pearson Eduction

Ltd, London (2003)

The period following the end of World War II in 1945, until 1956 saw British Theatre under threat.

Theatre’s such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre, which have been

leading artistic lights in the later half of the twentieth century, were not founded until the early

1960s, and The Crucible not until 1971. This left Britain’s mainstream theatrical scene in the early

1950s under the dominance of the financial concerns of a small number of commercial management

groups, who valued commercial success over artistic exploration, and a mainstream theatrical

culture that was a ‘hindrance to risk and experimentation’ and in Peter Brook’s terms, creatingdeadly theatre.

The theatrical scene, both within London and within many touring enterprises was dominated by

works that "represented the safe middle-class milieu and world-view aspirations of the audiences

that would come to see them" (Batty). The audience that attended these productions were not

challenged, nor did they want to be, as Pinter remembers below:

‘They didn’t want anything else, they were perfectly happy to put their feet up. That was what

going to the theatre was normally about, going and putting your feet up and just receive something,

received ideas of what drama was, going through various procedures which were known to theaudience. I think it was becoming a dead area.’ Batty (2005)

In addition to the deadly theatre that was being produced, the censorship and fear of prosecution

from the Lord Chamberlains office (which did not come to an end until 1968 ) and the

criminalisation of homosexuality in Britain (which would not be legalised until 1967) put both

pressure and restraint upon the content of work shown in British Theatres and the concerns of the

society in which it operated.

In 1952, both Rodney Ackland’s The Pink Room and Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea bore

the hallmarks of the censorship forced upon plays within the period, by both the social climate andcensorship from The Lord Chamberlain’s Officer. Both The Pink Room and The Deep Blue Sea had

strong homosexual themes, but homosexuality would not be legalised in Britain for another 15

years, and the negative public opinion towards open homosexuality, influenced both writers to take

the decision to ‘encode their concerns in order to avoid being censored’ and to maintain their

popular public image. In The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan altered the fated lover with an addictive

obsession for a wartime pilot, from a male persona to a female one (played by Peggy Ashcroft), but

the play still ‘exercised references to the homosexuality of a supporting character, Miller’ ; and in The Pink Room, Hugh, the struggling writer’s homosexual relationship was ‘rendered heterosexual’

.

The irony of course is that many of the writers, actors and directors that dominated the theatrical

scene in the early 1950s were in fact gay, but because of the social and commercial climate were

forced to produce and perform habitually straight characters.


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Theatre outside of London was not in a much better state than that being produced within it.

Although the Arts Council of Britain had been founded in 1946, and was providing increasing

amounts of funding to ‘promote resident companies, touring work and to assist established theatres

in improving production standards, it had little money to offer towards new work’ ; and without theinsurgence of new writing Britain’s Theatre was not reflecting the concerns or state of Britain’s

society, indeed in an edition of Encore, the radical theatrical magazine of the 1950s, Arthur Miller

bemoaned that ‘British Theatre is hermetically sealed against the way society moves’ .

Clearly the increasing gulf between the interests of British society and the work shown on stage was

serving to add to the rift between the public and the stage that was creating the decline of thepopularity of theatre. M. Batty claims that a third of the work being produced by Britain’s theatres

was not even plays but revue sketches and that the number of theatres with permanent repertory

companies dropped from 96 to 55 between the years1950 to1955.

In addition to the gap between the work being shown on stage and the state of British society during

this period, the decline in British theatre can be strongly linked to the popularisation of the

television during the 1950s, which had a direct effect upon the number of theatre goers. In 1953 the

number of people owning a television set doubled due to the broadcasting of Elizabeth II’scoronation; then in September 1955, ITV began broadcasting and with popular shows such asCoronation Street (started broadcasting in 1952) and Sunday Night at the Palladium (started

broadcasting in 1955) securing large audiences on a weekly basis.

Cinema had also become a well established form of popular entertainment, and many grandVictorian Theatre’s were converted into cinemas (a third by 1952). The cost of a cinema ticket

made it much more accessible than theatre, particularly to the lower classes and the draw of the

beauty and glamour from stars such as Doris Day, Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor and Marylyn

Monroe in the cinema was serious competition for the talent within British theatre, such as Peggy

Ashcroft, Noel Coward and Timothy West.

A bleak picture has been painted of theatre in Britain during the early fifties, however during thisperiod there were already tremors occurring in the theatrical world and in the socio-political world

that signalled the way for John Osborne’s theatrical explosion in May 1956.

Public opinion had been strongly divided on the Suez crisis in 1956, it was felt that BritishImperialism had gone too far; in addition the Hungarian revolt , also in 1956, against the Soviet

powers damaged the Left's utopian vision of Communism. The weakness of both politicalideologies uncovered by the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolt added to the sense that national

identity and purpose of the everyday man in Britain was becoming less defined. The pre war

ideologies and roles were dead, ‘the old England was dead but there was not a convincing one toreplace it’.

The 1944 Education Act (the brain child of Rab Butler, the minister of Education in Winston

Churchill’s coalition government) raised the school-leaving age to 15 and provided universal free

schooling in three different types of schools; grammar, secondary modern and technical. The effect

of the act upon Britain’s theatrical society was beginning to be felt during this period; the Education

Act meant that a new generation of writers were emerging from a different social background with

different concerns. Bigsby’s comments on the effect of the Education Act (1944) demonstrate the

new possibilities that were occurring in terms of new writing:

‘Subjects, attitudes and writers were no longer being drawn almost exclusively from the narrowsocial stratum which has, in England, traditionally dictated the nature of social action and public

forms. Now new writers, whose experiences were profoundly different and whose subjects and


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methods were likely to be equally new had emerged.’ Batty 2005)

London not only saw it’s theatrical debuts of Beckett, Brecht, Genet and Ionesco productions,

notably Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, but also Joan Littlewood and her partner Ewan MacColl

moved their company Theatre Workshop to London in 1953. Theatre Workshop was a project thathad been initiated by Littlewood and MacColl during the two World Wars and was unique in that it

focussed on working class orientated drama; Theatre Workshop did this both by radical productionsof the classics and new writing. Theatre Workshop’s style of ‘actor-based, improvisationally-

developed working class orientated theatre’ was certainly a far cry from Noel Coward in an OscarWilde drawing room on the West End stage!

Then in 1956 The English Stage Company under the Artistic Direction of George Devine moved

into the Royal Court with the vision of creating theatre that staged ‘contemporary British and

international works and [to] create an environment that would encourage new writing’ . By April

1956 Devine had already began to achieve the first half of his vision by featuring Arthur Miller’s

Crucible and Bertolt Brecht’s A Good Women of Szechwan, plays that still resonate today. To

achieve the second half of his vision, in January 1956 Devine put an advert in The Stage calling for

plays from new writers, and received over 700 submissions. One of these plays had already been

rejected by Laurence Olivier, Terence Rattigan and Binkie Beaumont – this play was by a young

actor named John Osborne and the play called, Look Back in Anger .

Theatre in the early half of the 20th century had been dominated by well educated, well brought up

members of the upper/middle classes; the theatre produced was a reflection of their concerns,

interests and society. What Osborne’s Look Back In Anger did was place a work on a major London

stage whose entire focus was on the working class; it proved that a play could have a protagonist

(Jimmy Porter) with a ‘non-BBC accent with articulate intelligence’ that could dominate the action,

and indeed that the action did not have to take place in a middle class drawing room, but a ‘one

room flat in a large Midlands town’. The setting challenged traditional theatrical conventions, andthe content was radical. Look Back In Anger gave a voice to the cultural dislocation felt by Britain

in this period, ‘to a frustrated, disenfranchised constituency of lower-middleclass, first generationgraduates of post-war British education policies’, and what is more it opened the door for what

would be known as the ‘kitchen sink’ dramatists.

The ‘kitchen sink’ dramatis were a group of young, largely anti-establishment writers who became

very much associated with companies such as Theatre Workshop and The English Stage Company

at The Royal Court. The work of writers such as Arden, Bond, Delaney, Pinter, Jellicoe andOsbourne was pivotal to the ‘kitchen sink revolution’, producing works such as The Birthday Party

and A Taste of Honey.

The ‘kitchen sink’ dramatists saw their voices ‘representing the voice of the post-war discontent of

their generation’ ; their works moved away from the ‘sparkling wit, style and delicate naughtiness’

of Rattigan and Coward and instead of fantasy, realist drama took possession of the stage. Plays like

Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey with teenage pregnancies, mixed race relationships and

homosexual housemates and Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall with it’s ambiguous

debates over the morality of war, were now being produced. The theatrical earthquake hadhappened, the shift began, and the way made clear for the next decade of theatrical excellence.

Sarah Clough, Education Officer,Creative Development Programme

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Theatre in the 1950 - Theatrical Context