Contemporary Age

CONTEMPORARY DRAMA

The new achievements in physics and psychoanalysis and the brutality of two world

wars had an immediate impact on the English novel and poetry. No such

revolutionary change took place in the English theatre. The only contribution was in

the field of poetic verse drama with Eliot and Auden. They used verse in their plays

as an attempt at finding a new expressive means to explore the full range of human

experience, but their theatre remained elitist.

It was not until the 1950s that the effects of theatrical experimentation in Europe

began to affect the English theatrical scene.

There was a new kind of audience: mostly people in their 30s who had some degree

of culture and political awareness and were already children of the television age. It

was easier for these young people to identify with the characters and plots of tv

drama.

It is perhaps significant to remember that Look Back in Anger owed much of its

immediate popularity and financial success to the fact that part of the play's first

production was shown on television.

The new theatrical works can be divided according to 2 main distinct trends which-

however different they might appear- are indeed deeply inter-related.

THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN

The first trend is that of the “Angry Young Men”, also called “drama of commitment”

and “social protest”. The name is referred to John Osborne's play “Look Back in

Anger”.

One of the main characteristics of this group was the fierce criticism of the

establishment, that is to say, the British ruling classes.

These new authors were preoccupied with representing true social or personal

experiences, and that their heroes- or anti-heroes- differed from those of previous

works: they were young and often poor. What they express is a sense of general

disorganisation, restlessness, frustration, loss of direction.

The Angry Young Men's theatre injected new contents into the old dramatic

conventions, and it made an effort to reach beyond the resources of ordinary dialogue

by a wider use of songs, music, pauses and silences.

Osborne effected a revolution in the British theatre by his creation of the “angry

young man” who expresses his frustration against the hypocrisies of bourgeois British

life in rather squalid ordinary domestic settings whose realism was revolutionary in

that period. JOHN OSBORNE

His acting experience influenced his playwriting: many of his characters are actors,

and most of his heroes (or anti-heroes) “perform” their endless monologues from a

“metaphorical stage”.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

– It takes place in an anonymous Midland town in the mid-1950s, and revolves

around the lives of 3 young people: Jimmy, his wife and his friend Cliff.

In a squalid room the tensions underlying their relationships are expressed by Jimmy

with almost savage violence.

The play is divided into 3 acts. Jimmy is an intellectual who has married a wife from

an upper class. In his monologues he shows his anger and contempt towards

everybody and everything. In Act II Alison wants to leave Jimmy and go back to her

family without telling him about her pregnancy. In Act III Jimmy starts a relationship

with Helena, an old friend of Alison. When Alison comes back a few months later,

she has lost her baby and she can understand “ the pain of being alive”. Helena feels

guilty and leaves the couple to resume their difficult relationship.

– The structure of the play has nothing revolutionary: exposition, climax and

dénouement (resolution of the action). However, this traditional structure is

counterbalanced with violent language.

– The play seemed revolutionary because of the accurate realism of the setting

and the allusions to the current socio-historical context.

ABSURD DRAMA

The second trend is the absurd drama, founded by Samuel Beckett. It embodies

vigorous experimental research into new dramatic language.

While the theatre of the AYM represented a revival of the naturalistic drama, this

second group of dramatists makes a radical break with naturalism. Beckett and his

followers (Pinter and Stoppard) are deeply convinced that the surface of life is often

deceptive. They see man as a poor bewildered inarticulate creature, obliged to face a

reality dominated by blind, obscure, absurd, destructive forces and impulses. Their

plays represent an attempt at giving dramatic expression to such an outlook and at

destroying a belief in the coherence of language and the process of rational

communication.

The theatre of the absurd, meaningless place which can never be understood, there is

no God, which means that nothing has meaning, not even the statement that there is

no God. The production of this philosophy on stage is thus associated with feelings of

puzzlement, despair, boredom, aimlessness and loss. Thus audiences are perplexed by

repetitious and apparently meaningless dialogues, incomprehensible behaviour, lack

of logic, no apparent or realistic or even dramatic development, etc.

the spectacle of people totally unable to communicate with each other in words,

however, can produce comic results. The absurd's plays can be extremely funny.

The use of symbol si important because it can exist independently of the visual,

theatrical or syntactical context in which it is produced and so provide a pole of

meaning or apparent significance.

Incoherence in language develops into a silence which stands for the inability of

language to express anything.

SAMUEL BECKETT

– Dublin, 1906, Protestant middle-class family → he is rigidly puritan education

come up in the biblical references that so often recur in his plays.

– He was sent to the Anglo-Irish Portora Royal School, where he first became

familiar with the French language and culture. The he attended Trinity College.

– Paris → he was in contact with the French and foreign avant-garde intellectuals

and artists of the 1930s, above all with Joyce and his circle.

– He also travels widely through other European countries, especially Germany

and Italy, with occasional trips back to Ireland.

– At the outbreak of WWII he did not hesitate to join the French Resistance and

in order to escape the Gestapo he worked under cover as a farm labourer in the

Avignon area for a while.

– He won European fame with his “En attendant Godot” (“Waiting for Godot”)

played for the first time in Paris in 1953.

– He spent the rest of his life with his wife in Paris writing novels and plays,

some for the cinema, radio and television.

– 1969 → Nobel Prize in literature.

– The novels of the so-called trilogy ( “Molloy”, “Malone Dies” and “The

Unnameable”) and two of his major plays (“ Waiting for Godot” and

“Endgame”) were originally written in French and translated into English by

Beckett himself. This was not only due to his involvement in French culture,

but to a deliberate choice: by writing in a foreign language he was forcing

himself to achieve greater discipline, economy of expression, as dictated by

his main objective- an attempt to explore and describe the human

condition.

– His works may be summed up in 3 key-words: poverty, stillness and

meaninglessness. In his world everything is reduced to the bare essentials,

from the characters' clothes to their material possessions, from their social

status to the setting itself.

– In Beckett's theatre we are confronted with a terribly static world. This is

emphasised not only by the characters' physical conditions- they are either

handicapped or moribund creatures, confined to their wheel-chairs or their

death-bed- but also by the absence of plot and by the circular structure of the

novels and plays, which end almost exactly as they begin. Also, the characters

seem to be confined, or imprisoned in a single place -often a room- which they

never leave.

– Waiting for Godot is set in the open air but Vladimir and Estragon continually

talk of leaving but they do not move.

As is typical of all absurd drama, Waiting for Godot has no real plot. It is a

play about two French tramps – Vladimir and Estragon- who spend their days

waiting for a mysterious Mr Godot who is expected to come and save them

from their miserable situation. In the meanwhile they try to pass the time by

talking about anything they happen to think of.

In act I they meet Pozzo, a rich middle-aged man, who drives his poor old

servant Lucky from behind with a rope and a whip. Pozzo is obsessed with

time and he continually looks at his watch.

In act II these characters reappear but they have changed: Pozzo has become

blind and Lucky is now dumb. Pozzo's arrogance has now turned into cynical

nihilistic despair.

At the end of each day the hopes of Vladimir and Estragon are revived by the

messenger Boy sent my Mr Godot, who invariably announces that “Mr. Godot

won't come today, but surely tomorrow”. There is nothing left for them but to

wait. Tehy occasionally talk about suicide as a solution and try to commit

suicide in act I and II but they fail. Every now and then Estragon suggests that

they should leave but it is here that the recurring leitmotiv of the play appears:

they cannot leave, they are “waiting for Godot”.

The final scene in Act I is typical of the play's philosophy and of the economy

of words characteristic of Beckett's plays. The arrogant Pozzo and Lucky have

just left the stage and Vladimir's comment is “Well, that passed the time”.

These words focus on one of the central themes of the play: that of time as a

void, a series of identical repetitive days, which the characters must fill

somehow as they are waiting for something or somebody to save them.

When asked about the identity of the mysterious Godot, Beckett answered: “ If

I had known, I would have said so in the play”.

Like many of Beckett's characters, Didi and Gogo are pathetic human begins,

trying to forget about the inescapable misery of their situation. They talk

incessantly to avoid thinking, “to give us the impression we exist”. They

probably know that Godot is never really going to keep his promise but, like

most men, they prefer to continue believing in him and wait for someone to

save them, rather than look for some kind of salvation in themselves.

Godot stands for all sorts of hopes, idealisms, false beliefs, ideologies.

– The impression of stillness in his works is reinforced by his concept of time:

while in the traditional plays one can speak of a chronological development of

the events, in Beckett's plays there seems to be no past or future, just a

repetitive present. We do not have a succession of different moments, hours or

days, but a series of repetitions, all exactly alike and without any purpose. It is

paradoxal that his characters are obsessed