Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Author:Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199658770
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Salesmen, southerners, anger, and ennui

The 1940s and 1950s encompass some of the most famous events in modern drama: the staging of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), attaining a new kind of tragedy and a particularly American brand of realism; and the London premieres of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955; written in French in 1948–9 and first produced in French as En attendant Godot in Paris in 1953) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956)—introducing on the one hand the ‘theatre of the absurd’ and on the other hand a new linguistic and emotional brutality, inaugurating an era of ‘kitchen sink’ realism in the theatre. In radically different ways these various strains of drama expanded the subject matter of plays as well as their formal and linguistic properties; in particular, they changed the way language (and silence) worked on stage. This is the main area of overlap among the disparate dramatic forms explored in this chapter.

Directly or indirectly, many of the plays in this period were responses to World War II and its aftermath, the Cold War. Playwrights express despair at the cost in human lives and the destruction of cities across Europe and Asia; horror at the reality of the Holocaust and the introduction of weapons of mass destruction; yet also cautious optimism at the prospect of economic recovery and the signs of prosperity, including in Britain a new set of sweeping reforms that included universal health care and education. Playwrights become even bolder in their gestures than in previous periods in experimenting with new forms, language, and themes. In particular, plays reach new levels of violence, rethink the meaning of tragedy, and show a marked impatience with propriety and reticence. It is as if the war unleashed revolutionary forces in the theatre, none more pronounced than the continued attack on the audience and the attempts to break down the ‘fourth wall’ it represented.

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