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AN OUTLINE OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DRAMA1

10 MEDIEVAL DRAMA The Miracle Play (also known as the Mystery Play) The earliest plays originated in the church and told stories from the Bible. Gradually they were expanded into great cycles covering the history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgement. The guilds of craftsmen produced the plays; for instance, the shipwrights and water-carriers would perform Noah, and the bakers, The Last Supper. The plays were performed in the open air, usually on moving wagons but sometimes in the market place. Worldly elements derived from popular festivities found their way into the plays. The miracle plays were performed from the thirteenth century onwards. Four complete cycles containing some 150 plays have survived. They are all in verse. The Morality Play In the early part of the fifteenth century a new type of play arose beside the miracle play; the morality play. Its two main themes are the struggle of good and evil powers for mans soul and mans spiritual pilgrimage to heaven. The characters are personified abstractions, that is, abstract ideas represented as persons such as Everyman, Good Deeds, Mercy, Anger, and so on. This enables the plot to be presented allegorically. By means of personified virtues and vices the author teaches his audience a moral lesson, inviting them to think. Whereas the majority of miracle plays provide mere show, the morality play contains thus signs of primitive intellect. A very important shift is from the biblical characters to man himself and his spiritual problems. Most moralities are religious, but some have worldly themes. The last miracle plays and moralities were performed in the sixteenth century. The most famous morality play is Everyman, which is almost certainly a translation of the Dutch morality, Elkerlyck. ELIZABETHAN DRAMA English drama reaches its peak of development in Elizabethan times. The three main types of drama are the histories (or chronicle plays), comedies and tragedies. The rise of the history play is connected with the increasing patriotic interest in the history of England. Many histories show the influence of the morality plays in their presentation of human qualities as personified abstractions. In about the middle of the sixteenth century, English drama begins to be clearly influenced by interest in the ancient Greek and Latin plays. The principle effect of classical influence on English drama is that playwrights begin to pay far more attention to form and construction. English plays come to be divided into acts and scenes, and the plots are better organised. A chorus is introduced and themes revolve around comedy or tragedy.

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Adapted from The Development of English Drama: An Anthology by Gerald Eades Bentley

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Christopher Marlowe ( 1564-1593) More than any other dramatist before Shakespeare, Marlowe may be said to have created Elizabethan tragedy. His impressive tragic heroes and his powerful, sonorous blank verse opened up new possibilities for drama and provided a stepping stone for Shakespeare. Nearly all of Marlowes tragedies are centred upon the character of the hero whose proud ambition and thirst for power or knowledge bring about his downfall. Before Marlowe, tragedy had been looked upon as the turn of the wheel of fortune, that is, as the outcome of circumstances beyond the control of man. Marlowe showed it to be the result of forces within man himself, or in other words, he was the first playwright to present the true tragic hero. The Tragical History of Dr Faustus (1588) is the best-known of Marlowe's tragedies. It tells the age-old legend of the man who sells his soul to the devil. Marlowe shows us how Dr Faustus is deceived by his thirst for superhuman knowledge and power into exchanging his immortal soul for the knowledge that devilish black magic is supposed to give. Bitter disillusionment follows when Faustus discovers that the devil cannot teach him anything worthwhile. He has sold his soul for nothing. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) William Shakespeare was born in a little town in England called Stratford-on-Avon, where his father was a prominent citizen. He probably received his education at the local grammar school. A few years after his marriage, Shakespeare, only just past twenty, went up to London to seek his fortune. He became an actor and joined a company of players called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which after the accession of James I, became known as the King's Men. He also owned a share in the Globe Theatre. Besides acting, he soon undertook the writing of plays. He must have been a rather good businessman, too. He invested his earnings in real estate in his native town, to which he returned after about twenty years to take up the life of a well-to-do gentleman. Not all the plays attributed to Shakespeare are undoubtedly and wholly his, but in most cases the evidence is amply sufficient. His work bears the unmistakable mark of his creative genius: a perfect command of language, great understanding of human nature, and an amazing range of thought and emotion and exquisite poetic sensitivity. During the twenty years in London he wrote about thirty-seven plays, a sequence of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets and five other poems. Classification of the plays We do not know the exact dates of the plays, but they can be arranged in four groups, which represent four successive periods in Shakespeare's career:

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First period: comedies characterised by youthful imagination, playful fantasy and exuberant sprits. The plots are very complicated. The best known of these comedies is probably the delightful fairy-tale, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Another well-known comedy, The Merchant of Venice is rather different because in the famous trial scene the villain of the piece, Shylock the Jew, becomes almost a tragic hero. In this period, Shakespeare also wrote his early romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Second period: history plays and romantic comedies. The plays of Henry IV show Shakespeare's interest in the problem of kingship. In the comedies, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, we find the typically Shakespearean heroine; humorous, witty, generous and great-hearted. These plays contain many lyric songs. The comic characters are highly individualised. The plots are centred on concealed
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identity and disguises. In addition to humour and entertainment, Shakespeare provides comments on certain fundamental aspects of human life, such as the nature of love and the importance of honesty, loyalty and courage. 110 Third period: bitter 'comedies' full of doubt and disillusion, and great tragedies. In the 'problem comedy', Measure for Measure, Shakespeare seems to doubt the dignity of man. Of the tragic plays on ancient history, the best-known is Julius Caesar, in which Shakespeare analyses the relation between the state and the individual. Greatest of all are the four tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear .The former two are tragedies of character. Hamlet shows us a noble, over-sensitive prince breaking down under the heavy task of revenge, which is laid on his young shoulders. Othello studies the terrible effects of jealousy and suspicion, and the struggle between naive innocence and cynical intellect. In Macbeth and King Lear, Shakespeare paints on a wider canvas: these cosmic tragedies deal with evil as an essential part of human existence. The dramatist shows us that there is evil not only in man himself, but everywhere in the world around him. If man is to survive he must wage a continuous battle against the forces of evil that threaten to wipe out culture and civilisation and plunge human society back into chaos. In Macbeth a brave general is tempted by supernatural evil powers onto a path of murder and cruelty which ultimately leads to his own destruction. In King Lear an old, childish and irresponsible, yet majestic king is driven mad by the ingratitude and cruelty of his daughters. Fourth period: plays characterised by a mood of serene tenderness and happy fulfilment. A Winters Tale and The Tempest are comedies full of warmth and forgiveness. These plays are often called romances. There is in them a return to the fantasy and playfulness of Shakespeare's early comedies, but the treatment is raised to a level of philosophic ripeness. The end of Shakespeares career shows a perfect balance of thought, perhaps most clearly seen in his last play, The Tempest. Ben Jonson (1573-1637) Next to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson was the leading dramatist of the Elizabethan period. Ben Jonson is mainly a writer of comedy. His comedies are essentially different from Shakespeares. He constructed his plots very carefully. This reflects his keen interest in classical drama. Jonson used drama to attack human follies and weaknesses. He ridiculed the foolish fashions and the vices of his time by means of comically exaggerated characters, situations and events. In brief: Jonson wrote satiric comedies in the classical manner. He took pains to picture the facts of everyday London life, thus producing comedies that were in a way more realistic than Shakespeare's romantic comedies. However, Jonson lacked Shakespeare's wide and deep understanding of human nature. He wrote his plays in accordance with the theory of 'humour'. According to this theory, each man has one particular quality that dominates him completely and makes him ridiculous. For example, in Every Man in his Humour, we meet the suspicious father, the jealous husband, the cowardly boaster, and so on. Jonsons characters are therefore types rather than living men or women. His comedies are often called comedies of humour. They are written in a mixture of prose and blank verse.

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DECLINE OF DRAMA After its great flowering in the Elizabethan period, drama went into a gradual decline. Moreover the theatres suffered from the hostility of the Puritans, who finally closed them in 1642. When in 1660 the theatres were reopened, an entirely new type of play became popular: the comedy of manners. It pictured the manners of a brilliant and witty but cynical and immoral upper-class society. The leading playwrights in Restoration comedy were Wycherley and Congreve. They wrote their plays in prose. In tragedy, the bombastic heroic drama, which told of great tragic historical events and characters, was greatly admired. John Dryden wrote both comedies of manners and heroic tragedies. For the latter, he used the increasingly popular heroic couplet. During the age of Alexander Pope (1700-1744), theatre-going was a popular pastime, but none of the plays, which took the form of sentimental comedy, has been really able to stand the test of time. The age of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) saw a reaction against the sentimental comedy. Oliver Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and Richard Sheridans The Rivals (1775) are comedies that brought back real humour to the stage. There was no important tragedy written during this period. In the Romantic Era (1798-1837), many poets tried their hand at drama, especially verse tragedy, but none of it was considered by critics to be very successful.

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The Victorian Age (1837-1901) produced drama that is considered to have little literary value, although large numbers of people went to the theatres to see the sentimental middle-class comedies and new, re-worked performances of the works of Shakespeare and other older dramatists. At the end of the 19th century, however, better playwrights began to appear, foreshadowing the twentieth-century revival of drama. Since the great flowering of Elizabethan drama, the English stage had never been able to equal the achievements of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The seventeenth century saw the birth of the superficial comedy of manners and the bombastic heroic tragedy; the eighteenth produced the sentimental comedy. With the exception of the plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan, English drama had nothing to show between 1700 and 1800. The plays of the early nineteenth century, the period of Romanticism, are generally considered to be unimportant as far as theatre is concerned. Romanticism is centred upon the individual, whereas drama is by nature a social art. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, there was a gradual rise in the level of the plays acted. T.W. Robertson, Arthur Wing Pinero, H.A. Jones and other dramatists succeeded in bringing bigger and better audiences to the theatre with their 'well-made plays'. These plays have carefully constructed plots. Later the well-made plays were criticised because their action and characters tended to be overly conventional rather than true to life. As a whole, these plays were not significant artistically and made no contribution to the criticism of life. The real revival of drama, which has led to a great flowering in the twentieth century, began with Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

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REVIVAL OF DRAMA Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) successfully revived the comedy of manners. His last play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is a brilliantly witty display of verbal fireworks in which Wilde turns established notions of morality inside out. Not since the days of Sheridan had anything so perfect been produced in the genre of artificial comedy. However, Wilde has been accused by some critics of superficiality and of having no deeper social meaning beneath the polished wit. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Ireland and migrated to London at the age of twenty. The first few years, during which he wrote unsuccessful novels, were difficult for him. He developed an interest in left-wing politics and gained a reputation as a street-orator and eventually as a drama critic. In contrast to Wilde, Shaw had plenty to say on the state of British society. He used the stage to advertise his political convictions and attack what he saw as social evils. A convinced socialist, he wrote realistic, witty plays in which he criticised abuses such as prostitution, usury, and so on. These propagandist plays were followed by satirical comedies in which Shaw ridiculed a great variety of established notions: patriotism, religion, hero-worship, hypocritical charity, prudishness in sexual matters, and many others. In bringing discussion of existing social problems into the drama, Shaw was following the example of the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Shaw also followed Ibsen in presenting life realistically, as it is really lived. As Shaw's plays were written with the express object of converting people to his opinions, they are usually called comedies of ideas or problem plays. Most of them have long prefaces, in which Shaw develops his background arguments. They show his attempt to produce a new form of literature, half essay and half drama. Although Shaw's ideas were not revolutionary in his own time and seem even less so to us, he was often successful in making people think by making them laugh. One of his favourite methods was to turn conventional situations upside down in order to force audiences to 'see the other half of the truth '. Dialogue is Shaw's strong point; the brilliant dialogue is a special feature of his plays. Characterisation is less strong. Very often his characters fail to come to life as individuals because they are used primarily as representatives of certain ideas. Shaw wrote 52 full-length comedies, including Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1895), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1912) and Heartbreak House (1917). His only tragedy is Saint Joan (1923). DRAMA SINCE SHAW

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250 Until the early twentieth century, the trend in the theatre was towards naturalism, or a realistic presentation of characters, action and setting. In the naturalistic theatre, the setting is supposed to represent a real interior; the characters talk and act as much as possible as they do in real life. There is no room for speeches in verse, for instance, or for soliloquies or asides, because that is not the way people really behave. In the twentieth century, there was a reaction against this naturalistic drama. Dramatists felt that naturalistic drama only reproduced the surface of life, and not its deeper meaning. The reaction consisted of two separate developments. The first was an attempt by T.S. Eliot and others to revive verse drama. The second, which has been more successful, was the Theatre of the Absurd. Absurdist drama, largely a post-World War II development, is an attempt to break through surface realism to a deeper, underlying reality.
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Meanwhile, in spite of this reaction against it, naturalistic drama has been revived in the work of the ' Angry Young Men' and their followers, including the writers of 'workingclass drama'. THE REVIVAL OF VERSE DRAMA

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The first modern attempts to produce poetic drama were part of the 'Celtic Renaissance' in Ireland. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory wrote verse drama for the Abbey Theatre. Their goal was to revive traditional Irish culture, producing plays by Irish authors on Irish subjects. The plays of J.M. Synge in poetic prose (The Playboy of the Western World, 1907) were an offshoot of this movement. T .S. Eliot (1888-1965) started writing plays after he had already become famous as a poet and critic, because he wanted to reintroduce the poetic drama of the Elizabethans. Like Yeats, Eliot felt that the dramatist could not use his full powers of expression if he had to write language that reproduced colloquial speech. Therefore he abandoned the attempt to be realistic. He looked upon the language of drama as a musical pattern which intensifies thought and feeling. In Eliot's first, and perhaps, best, play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which deals with the murder of Thomas Becket, this musical pattern is provided by the Chorus, the Tempters, and the Priests, who are arranged round the central character of Thomas. The musical effect is achieved mainly by the Chorus. The Chorus, which Eliot adapted from classical Greek tragedy, comments on the action and creates certain moods with lyrical poetry. In this play, Eliot revives some of the conditions of the Elizabethan theatre, for instance, the close contact between actors and audience and the absence of stage effects and properties. Everything in this play depends upon the power of the spoken word. The play also has some of the characteristics of the medieval morality plays such as Everyman: the characters grouped around the central figure of Thomas Becket all represent abstract qualities or ideas rather than individual persons. Murder in the Cathedral was the most successful of Eliot's plays, perhaps because it was a commissioned play, written especially for performance at Canterbury Cathedral. In his later plays, The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1955) and The Elder Statesman (1958) Eliot attempts to combine poetic drama with the requirements of realistic drawing-room drama. The only later dramatist to achieve any degree of success in verse drama was Christopher Fry, whose verse plays (A Phoenix Too Frequent, (1946); The Lady's Not For Burning, (1948) held the stage for some time in the mid-twentieth century. However, some critics say that Fry's plays have more sound than meaning; their main virtue is in their lively, imaginative poetry. REALISTIC DRAMA SINCE WWII The presentation of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, started a strong revival of naturalistic drama, expressing the social discontent of a young generation of working-class or lower middle-class writers. This drama is new in subject matter, but makes use of the traditional techniques of realistic drama. In this it is very different from the other contemporary trend in drama, the Theatre of the Absurd, which is new in both subject matter and technique, and represents a more radical attempt to express the true nature of modern life.

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315 John Osborne (1929-1994) was an actor before becoming a playwright. He opened a new period in modern drama with his first play, Look Back in Anger (1956). Because of the success of this play, a group of young dramatists and novelists following in Osborne's footsteps became known as the 'Angry Young Men'. Jimmy Porter, the hero of Osborne's play, is a typical angry young man. Although he comes from a lower- class background, the welfare state has provided Jimmy Porter with a good education at a provincial university. But upon leaving school, such young men found themselves frustrated in their attempts to rise in the world. They found that they had to struggle against the Establishment, the older generation who continued to dominate the social and business world in which people were still judged by their birth and connections instead of their own merit. Because Jimmy Porter can find no proper outlet for his intellect and his energy, he bitterly taunts his higher-class wife and mocks the bourgeois values her people live by as phoney and worthless. Jimmy Porter is a new kind of hero, the unpleasant, frustrated young outsider. He says things that had not been said on the stage before. But, in technique, the play is oldfashioned; its setting, dialogue and situation are realistic. In this Osborne is typical of the Angry Young Men, who tended to express their new discontent in old forms. Later plays by Osborne are The Entertainer (1957), Luther (a historical play, 1960) and A Sense of Detachment (1972). Arnold Wesker (1932-) Was born in the Jewish East End of London. His parents were East-European refugees. He held a variety of jobs, including those of a pastry cook and a plumber's mate before his Chicken Soup with Barley was performed in 1958. This was the first play of his trilogy which also included Roots (1959) and I'm Talking About Jerusalem ( 1960). The working-class people in these plays have a sense of restlessness and frustration. Chips with Everything (1962) is about the class system as it works in the Royal Air Force. Other plays that could be classed as working-class drama are Shelagh Delaneys A Taste of Honey (1958), John Arden's Live Like Pigs (1958) and Brendan Behan's lrish play, The Hostage (1959).

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THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD 350 Whereas the working-class drama continues the native English realistic drama tradition, the other new stream in the twentieth century, the Theatre of the Absurd is an international movement. Its headquarters is in Paris, where it began and where dramatists from many countries have gone to live and work. According to the theory behind Absurdist Drama, human existence is meaningless. There are no standards by which human behaviour, or anything else, can be measured. Therefore it is ridiculous to present life on the stage as if it were organised, or had any kind of meaning or pattern. Absurdist Drama does not try to make it clear why the characters act as they do, or to present any orderly pattern of cause and effect. Since the world no longer makes sense, a play should not make sense either, but simply reflect the absurdity of life. The relation of this drama to realistic drama is like that of abstract painting to traditional picture painting. The absurdist dramatist does not try to present a realistic picture of life, but to penetrate the surface of it to a deeper truth. Often this is done by means of symbolism. Many of these plays have a non-literary quality. This means that what is said on the stage is less important than what non-verbal action happens on it. When reading such plays, it is important to read the stage directions carefully and visualise the action. Of course it is even better to see the play performed. The most important English practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd are Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and N.F. Simpson. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irishman who lived for many years in France. He wrote most of his plays in French and then translated them into English himself. Waiting for Godot was produced in London in 1955. Like most Absurdist plays it is symbolic of the futility and meaninglessness of human life. The setting is a wasteland with a remnant of a tree. Two tramps try to kill time while waiting for a mysterious person called 'Godot', about whom they know nothing. They cannot go anywhere or do anything because they have to wait for Godot, who always promises to come but in fact never arrives. Although critics have attacked the play for its obscurity and meaninglessness, it has been remarkably successful on the stage. Even such an unlikely audience as prisoners at large American penitentiaries seem to appreciate the play and understand its symbolic message. Harold Pinter (1930- 2008) was the son of a Jewish tailor He began his dramatic career as an actor. His early plays, such as The Room (1957) and The Birthday Party (1957) are called. 'comedies of menace'. These plays take place in one room, which represents a kind of enclosed security. Then one or more intruders come into the room. The intruder represents a threat of some kind and the security is destroyed. Not much happens in a Pinter play. Why the characters act as they do does not become clear. The dialogue is realistic in that it is very colloquial, colourless, and repetitious and interrupted by long silences. The characters talk in circles, always returning to the same vague ideas. Pinter's dialogue represents the inability or even unwillingness of people to communicate with one another. In The Caretaker (1960) two brothers and a tramp engage in conversations which always seem to be leading somewhere but in fact never lead anywhere. The Dumb Waiter (1960) is about two gunmen waiting for instructions in a cellar. In The Homecoming (1964) all of the characters ask questions, but no one seems to have any answers. In No Man's Land (1975) there are four characters, but the relationship between them never becomes clear.
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OTHER TWENTIETH CENTURY DRAMATISTS 405 Noel Coward (1899-1969) Set the mode for sophisticated, amoral plays, appealing to an audience of the smart set. He followed the tradition of Oscar Wilde in writing brilliant comedies without much meaning. Most successful of his many plays were Private Lives, (1930) and Blithe Spirit (1941). Coward's successor on the London stage has been AIan Ayckbourn. Alan Ayckbourne(1939- ) His bitter comedies poke fun at the bourgeois way of life. Some of his recent plays have overtones of Absurdist Drama. Among his many successes are The Norman. Conquests (1974) and Bedroom Farce (1977). 415 John Arden (1930-) His plays are sometimes on the verge of the Absurd. The dialogue is usually colloquial, sometimes breaking out into verse. The theme of Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (1959) is violence. Other plays are Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964) . Tom Stoppard ( 1933- ) is the intellectual among the young playwrights. Although his plays have many elements of the Absurd, they are very carefully constructed. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) is his best-known play. It shows how Hamlet's two friends live, or fail to live, when they are offstage in Shakespeare's play. He has also written Dirty Linen, Professional Foul (1977), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Travesties and many shorter plays. David Storey ( 1933- ) A well-known novelist who from 1969 turned his attention to the theatre. He is an independent dramatist, although he may have been influenced by Pinter. His earlier plays, such as In Celebration (1969) and The Contractor (1970) are naturalistic, working-class drama; others including Home (1970), The Farm and Life Class are closer to the Absurd. Brendan Behan (1922-1964) An Irish playwright whose reputation is based partly on his eccentric public behaviour. Serving with the Irish Republican Army from 1937, Behan was sent to Borstal Reform School in 1939 and sentenced to fourteen years by a Dublin military court in 1942. His plays include The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958), which was produced in Gaelic and English. Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) His well-made plays have a continuing popularity on the London stage. Rattigan writes for the middle-class low-brow type of theatre-goer that he refers to as' Aunt Edna' .Plays include The Winslow Boy (1946), Separate Tables (1954) and Cause Clebre (1977).

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AMERICAN DRAMA Before 1900, American drama was practically non-existent. The first important development in drama took place during the war years 1914-18 and was intimately connected with the Little Theatre Movement. The Little Theatres, organised by groups of enthusiastic amateurs, set out to produce new plays by young dramatists. They aimed at simplicity, both in the plays themselves and in the scenery and properties. The foremost American dramatist, Eugene O'Neill, had his first plays performed in these little theatres. Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) Followed the trend that had dominated European drama since the 1890s in combining sober realism with bold experimentation, psychological insight and expressionist symbolism. The most famous play he wrote, Mourning becomes Electra (1931), was first performed at a moment when the Little Theatre movement had already come to influence American drama. It is based on Greek tragedy, the story of which O'Neill retells in a modern setting against the back- ground of the American Civil War. A much later tragedy, The Iceman Cometh (1946), pictures the seamy side of New York life through the nightmarish dreams and hopeless illusions of a group of alcoholics. O'Neill wrote a great number of plays, many of which were influential far outside his native country. He did more than any other playwright to raise the level of American drama. After 1930, in the years of the Great Depression, O'Neill's followers turned to moral and social rather than psychological themes. Many plays of this period show socialist tendencies combined with an interest in native American settings. A good example is Thornton Wilder's experimental play Our Town ( 1938), which is explained to the audience by a Director on the stage. It gives a panoramic picture of social conditions in the average medium-sized American town. Clifford Odets wrote what may be called morality plays on modern themes, among which Waiting for Lefty (1935) is perhaps the best. It attacks social injustice and the oppression of working people by capitalists. Lillian HeIlman ( 1905 -1984) wrote plays of psychological conflict and social protest. In Watch on the Rhine (1941) she tried to awaken the American conscience to the dangers of fascism. T .S. Eliot's revival of poetic drama has met with some response in the United States. The verse plays of Arcbibald MacLeish deal with the hopeless situation of modern man in a world that seems to be going to pieces. His most effective play is one with the significant title The Fall of the City (1937). MacLeish scored a popular success with his J.B. (1958), dealing with Job's trials in a modern setting. AMERICAN DRAMA SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR

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Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) His plays mark the revival of a new romanticism in American drama. They are strongly influenced by the ideas of the English novelist, D.H. Lawrence. Psychological abnormalities, violent emotions and high tensions are Williams' ingredients. Sex is the main theme of most of his plays. Best-known are The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire(1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Arthur MilIer (1915- 2005) Best known for his Death of a Salesman (1949) which mixes realism and symbolism in its picture of the tragic life of a commercial traveller who becomes the victim of the false
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standards of the modern world. In the autobiographical play After the Fall (1964). MilIer tried to apply the stream-of-consciousness technique to play- writing. Edward Albee (1928-) The Theatre of the Absurd has not been so prevalent in America as in Europe, probably because the American dream of the good life persisted far into the twentieth century. Americans were not so deeply disillusioned by the Second World War; to them life still had meaning and purpose. But Edward Albee attacks the foundations of American optimism in his absurdist plays Zoo Story (1959), The American Dream (1961) and Tiny Alice (1964). Albee, whose plays show some resemblance to those of the English dramatist Harold Pinter, presents a terrifying picture of the spiritual emptiness, hypocrisy and loneliness of modern man and the meaninglessness and absurdity of modern life. His Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) shows how difficult it is for people to establish satisfactory contacts with one another and how painful it is for them to face reality. One of the most striking aspects of American theatrical life in recent years has been the decline of Broadway, the street of theatres in New York City where the best plays used to be performed by the best actors. Broadway has become commercialised to the extent that with few exceptions, only musicals and light popular comedies are now produced there. Most serious and experimental drama is being produced off-Broadway or even 'off-off-Broadway'. One of the most striking of young dramatists is Sam Shepard, whose absurdist plays have been widely acclaimed in New York and London. They include Chicago (1967), The Tooth of Crime (1974), which is a play about a rock singer, and Suicide in B-flat (1976). The African-American theatre has become increasingly important. Dutchman, by the African-American playwright LeRoi Jones, created a sensation when it was produced off-Broadway in 1954. The novelist James Baldwin has also written excellent plays dramatising the problems of race relations: The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). The Vietnam War inspired David Rabe's Streamers and Sticks and Bones (1973), the bitter story of a soldier returning to America from the war.

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