British Realist Theatre

The New Wave in its Context 1956 - 1965

Stephen Lacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134899814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The British `New Wave' of dramatists, actors and directors in the late 1950s and 1960s created a defining moment in post-war theatre. British Realist Theatre is an accessible introduction to the New Wave, providing the historical and cultural background which is essential for a true understanding of this influential and dynamic era.
Drawing upon contemporary sources as well as the plays themselves, Stephen Lacey considers the plays' influences, their impact and their critical receptions. The playwrights discussed include:
* Edward Bond
* John Osborne
* Shelagh Delaney * Harold Pinter

1: REPRESENTING CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN: Anger, affluence and hegemony

AFFLUENCE AND CONSENSUS

The 1950s and early 1960s was an age that was riven with paradox and contradiction, although this was not always apparent at the time. Given a unity at the national political level by three successive Conservative administrations (from 1951 to 1964), it seemed to be a time of unprecedented social stability and prosperity—especially when compared with the vicissitudes of the 1930s and 1940s, or when viewed with hindsight as ‘the last period of quiet before the storm’ (Bogdanor and Skidelsky 1970:7) of the 1960s and 1970s. It is characteristic of the era that many of the major indices of this stability were associated with conservative, even hierarchical, symbols and traditions; the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Harold Macmillan's effortless ‘Edwardian’ amateurism, the last vestiges of Reithian formality at the BBC. However, one of the central contradictions of the age is that this conservatism was most apparent when it appeared in response to another dominant theme in the decade, the sense of ‘newness’, of change, that was felt in all areas of social experience and which helped to mark off the pre-from the post-war worlds. Conservatism in this context is not simply to do with the Tory Party's electoral success (the battle between the major parties in the period was always much closer than the election results suggest) but is much wider, moving beyond the narrowly political into many areas of social and cultural life in the early 1950s, and providing the immediate context for the emergence of new, more progressive, forces in 1956 and after.

As is so often the case, the most profound changes were—at least initially—economic, and were associated with a perceived general increase in prosperity made possible by a boom in consumer goods brought about by the collapse in world commodity prices; the key term is ‘affluence’, which resonates throughout the decade, permeating the discourses of the popular media, national politics and academic sociology, both cataloguing and symbolising social and economic change.

The social and economic meaning of affluence can be registered in different ways. The statistics are certainly impressive: between 1951 and 1964 total production increased by 40 per cent; the number of cars increased from just over 2 million to 8 million and the number of TV sets from 1 million to 13 million. Average earnings in the period increased by 110 per cent and the average standard of living rose, in real terms, by 30 per cent. Consumer expenditure as a whole doubled in that time and share prices trebled in the 1950s alone. Expressing this in another way, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that by the early 1960s ‘91 per cent of British households had acquired electric irons, 82 per cent television sets, 72 per cent vacuum cleaners, 45 per cent washing-machines and 30 per cent refriger-ators’ (Hobsbawm 1969:263). In addition, full-employment was maintained (unemployment averaged 1.7 per cent throughout the country as a whole—although there were marked regional vari-ations). These changes were not simply conjured out of thin air, nor were they solely due to the economic policies of successive Conservative governments or even the peculiar circumstances of the British economy. The Tories certainly promoted the consumer boom, and reversed Labour's emphasis on controlled expansion of the home market in favour of exports, but these developments had their roots in the technological advances of the inter-war period, and were common to all the major industrialised nations.

In retrospect, the idea of a remorseless and universal affluence, carrying all before it, was disingenuous. Although it was certainly true that the general standard of living rose for the population as a whole in the decade, prosperity was most conspicuous where it could be most easily noticed, in the South of the country, and most selective where it could be ignored, in the North. In any case, Britain's economic performance was outstripped by many of its competitors, particularly on the export front. Significant though prosperity was, it did not herald the demise of systemic poverty. Indeed, poverty of a familiar and structural kind was ‘rediscovered’ on a large scale in the 1960s—a process in which the arts and media often assisted, Loach and Garnett's television play Cathy Come Home (1965) being a frequently cited example.

In this way, affluence was always partly an ideological term, registering not only the statistics of material advance but also certain kinds of explanations for its effects on social and political processes — explanations that consistently supported the idea of Britain as a nation moving inexorably towards a post-scarcity and conflict-free society. Such ideologies may be thought of as ‘myths’. Myth, in the sense in which it was used by Roland Barthes, suppresses ‘the historical nature and antagonistic content of what it signifies, the temporary conditions of its existence, the possibilities of its historical transcendence’ (Hall et al. 1978:232), transforming what is argu-mentative, contradictory and ideological about post-war changes into self-evident, incontrovertible ‘truth’. The experience of affluence, sustained full-employment and the Welfare State gave rise to a new mythology, a new symbolic landscape, which found expression at a number of levels. The cumulative effect of these myths was to present Britain as a unified society, which had successfully solved the major problems that were facing it, and that was essentially at one with itself, held within a self-image that supported, and was supported by, dominant traditional interests. This view of post-war Britain was most clearly articulated at the time of the Coronation of the new Queen Elizabeth in 1953, when the consumer boom had just begun to take off. The Observer caught the tone of the prevailing mood, proclaiming that ‘this country is today a more united and stabler society than it has been since the “Industrial Revolution” began’ (quoted in Laing 1973:370). The new prosperity and the Welfare State helped to create the conditions that made such explanations of social change possible, by appearing to remove some of the traditional means by which social conflicts have been generated, especially poverty. It was the contrast between before and after the Second World War, between a ‘then’ characterised by inequality, scarcity, unemployment and social division, and a ‘now’ presented in terms of full-employment, conspicuous consumption, social insur-ance and universal welfare (accepted as much by the post-war Conservative Party as by Labour) that allowed Macmillan to proclaim by the end of the decade that ‘The class-war is over and we have won.’ This was both triumphalist Conservative rhetoric and a statement of what was apparently obvious: that British society in the 1950s was essentially a consensual one, pluralist in the way that both wealth and power were distributed.

That Britain in the 1950s could be represented as a society unified by a profound consensus coloured in traditionalist terms was partly because, at the level of national politics, there was a consensus between the dominant political players about the broad outline of national and international policy—a consensus that was embodied in the programme of the 1945–51 Labour governments (see Addison 1975 and Kavanagh and Morris 1994). The main elements of this consensus were: the necessity for full employment; the desirability of a ‘mixed’ economy, with the State assuming a major role (this included nationalisation as a tool of government policy, and the major power utilities and the railways were nationalised at this time); the desirability of social welfare, universal education and a health service—the machinery of the Welfare State; and a commitment to the Western Alliance, dominated by the USA and NATO, as the contours of the Cold War began to harden. Nor did this consensus evaporate when the Conservatives were returned to power in 1951. It has become a truism to observe that there seemed to be a remarkable continuity between the policies of the Labour and Tory governments of the period (much to the surprise and chagrin of some of their supporters). The Conservatives adopted much of the social programme put in place by Labour, making a commitment to increase the number of council houses by 300,000 in the early fifties. There was also a general agreement within the Party leadership that the Empire should be gradually dismantled— although this was fiercely contested by the Tory right. The continuity between the two parties in government was particularly evident in the sphere of economic policy; The Economist coined the term ‘Butskellism’, conflating the names of two chancellors from opposing political parties, to denote the similarity between them.

We should, of course, be wary of over-stating the importance of this convergence around the middle-ground; the dissident voices of the Tory right and of Labour left were not silenced, and continued to influence the political agenda, particularly when issues such as immigration (for the right) and public ownership and the Welfare State (for the left) were concerned. However, there is little doubt that the idea of consensus is one that is central to an understanding of both the dominant mythology of the period, and the theatre's role in contesting it.

CONSENSUS AND HEGEMONY

The way that consensus operates to unify a society around certain dominant ideologies has been analysed by the Italian Marxist and cultural theoretician Antonio Gramsci, and the key term that he used to describe these processes was hegemony. Hegemony is often used as if it were synonymous with the exercise of any form of dominating influence over a given sphere of action. However, in the sense in which Gramsci used it, hegemony applies to a particular way in which power (and especially class power) is exercised ideologically in a particular historical period and is only possible under certain historical conditions. If we term it ideological, then we must recognise that it is so in a complex sense; it is not reducible to a set of ideas or polemics (although it may also be that), nor to physical and political coercion, but is rather a ‘concrete phantasy, which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will’ (Gramsci 1971:126). Hegemony is, as Raymond Williams has argued, ‘a whole body of practices and expectations: our assignments of energy…a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciproc-ally confirming’ (Williams 1975:26).

Ideologies may be described as hegemonic to the degree to which they all appear to move along the same path, constituting a form of ideological ‘common sense’ within a society, a sense of reality, beyond which it is often difficult to move. Seen in terms of the distribution of power in a society, hegemony is the way in which subordinate groups come to understand their relationship to, and position within, that society through the definitions of dominant groups. This applies to the way that all ideologies, particularly the central ideologies of an age, are organised, but what gives hegemony its distinctive character is the way that it is structured around the managing of consent, and this is why the term is so relevant to the discussion of Britain in the 1950s (see Hall and Jefferson 1976).

Such a process is essentially cultural, in that it can be traced not only in what is normally thought of as ‘political’ activity (the discourses of party politics, or the rhetoric of electioneering) but also in a range of other public (and private) arenas, saturating the discourses, values and practices of social institutions and private relationships alike. At one level, the idea that Britain was a society that had succeeded in removing structural inequalities lay at the heart of the debates around the nature of social class throughout the decade and into the 1960s; affluence, it was argued, had removed the root causes of poverty, which was seen to lie at the heart of the political identity of the working class, and had also dissolved its cultural distinctiveness by opening up new patterns of consumption and leisure. At another level, a crucial part of the post-war settlement was the attempt to persuade women to return to traditional roles in the family, establishing a kind of ‘domestic consensus’, once their presence in the labour market was apparently no longer ‘necessary’ for the national economy; both of these themes will be returned to in subsequent chapters.

1953 AND 1956: A COMPARISON OF TWO CULTURAL MOMENTS

We noted earlier that hegemony was associated with attempts to interpret ‘new’ social experiences in terms of ‘traditional’ values, and that this was a project that sought to embrace the political and the everyday. A key moment in this process, as we also noted, was the moment of 1953, the ‘moment’ of the Coronation and the signification of the New Elizabethan Age. The year 1953 might be usefully contrasted with 1956, which, as a moment when cultural and political energies were released and focused towards change, was also a pivotal point in the decade—and, indeed, in the post-war period as a whole; however, if 1953 was a moment when a traditionalist hegemony and the consensus seemed at its most secure, 1956 saw the hegemonic project begin to falter.

In 1953, a number of events occurred which contributed to a new optimism; a British athlete, Roger Bannister, ran the first four-minute mile; a team led by a British mountaineer, Sir John Hunt, became the first to scale Mount Everest (although the two people who actually made the final assault on the summit were Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, and Sherpa Tensing, his Tibetan guide); and the English cricket team regained the Ashes. Above all, it was the year of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, who gave her name to the new age. None of these events were related, yet because they were independent of each other they confirmed a general impression— accentuated by the generally increasing prosperity— that Britain was advancing on all fronts. In 1956, too, a series of distinct events occurred, which were also related to each other to suggest a larger pattern and a different explanation. This was the year of Look Back in Anger, of Colin Wilson's The Outsider, and of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow, in another area of culture, it was also the year in which rock ‘n’ roll, Elvis Presley, James Dean and the teddy-boys appeared on the public stage, and in which cinema seats were ripped during showings of Rock Around the Clock. At the level of national and international politics, 1956 was the year of the Suez adventure and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. As Robert Hewison has observed, ‘Retrospectively, 1956 has become an annus mirabilis…crudely, Suez and Look Back in Anger seem part of the same event’ (Hewison 1981:127).

The key symbolic event of 1953 was undoubtedly the Coronation. In certain important respects this Coronation was like no other, for, as Marwick noted, ‘the new twist was that almost twenty-and-a-half million people, 56 per cent of the adult population, could watch, and did watch, the entire proceedings on television; a further 32 per cent, 11.7 million, listened on radio’ (Marwick 1982:109). The Coronation was the first modern media ‘happening’; it helped to stimulate the sale of television sets and simultaneously helped to present television as the symbol of the new age. At the beginning of 1953 the number of licence holders stood at 693,000; a year later, it stood at 1,110,439. It was, therefore, not simply a family ritual that was being enacted, but rather a massive public spectacle, and the focus not just of traditionalist royalist sentiment but also of much speculation as to the current ‘state of the nation’.

The new reign was presented both as a renewal of British traditions and as the dawning of a new age. The phrase ‘The New Elizabethan Age’, much in evidence in the decade, captures this fusion exactly. Britain's success, both at war and in creating the Welfare State, figured as the latest in a line of triumphant moments of ‘national unity’, its ‘newness’—the rising tide of affluence, full employment and all that was distinctive about contemporary social experience—whilst being admitted and celebrated, was inserted into a view of history that emphasised a reassuring continuity and stability, which could keep the chaos of material advance at bay. The Coronation also occasioned speculation about Britain's position in relation to the rest of the world in the post-Imperial era. The concept of Britain as the head of the Commonwealth and the diplomatic—if not the military—centre of the Western Alliance, was of particular importance. The predominant image was that of the nation as family, with the royal family at its symbolic centre. As Shils and Young pointed out ‘one family was knit together with another in one great national family through identification with the monarchy’ (Shils and Young 1963:73).

The key political event of 1956 was the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal, which assumed considerable symbolic importance, both at the time and since. Furious at the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company by Egypt's President Nasser in July 1956 (which meant that effective control over the strategically important canal passed into Egyptian hands), the French and British governments engineered an invasion of the canal zone with the assistance of the Israelis, and seemed determined to stand firm against international unease. With only a week to go before the American presidential elections, however, Eisenhower engineered a con-demnation of the invasion at the United Nations; Eden was exhausted and becoming ill; and there were rumours of Soviet intervention. The crucial factor, however, was a run on the pound necessitating an IMF loan, which needed American agreement; British compliance with the cease-fire arrangements was the price that Eisenhower extracted.

The Suez crisis had considerable effects on Britain's international standing; in particular, it exposed the delicate fiction that Britain was really ‘running’ the Western Alliance and had a foreign policy that could survive the displeasure of the USA. Of more concern in the present context, however, were its effects on the internal political geography of the country. After an initially uniform hostility to Nasser's nationalisation of the canal (at which time he was likened to Hitler and Mussolini by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell), opinion, particularly over the use of force, became divided. On the one hand, the feeling of those who favoured the invasion was summed up by a headline in the Daily Express—‘It's GREAT Britain Again!’. On the other, there were large public meetings (including an unexpectedly huge one in Trafalgar Square) held to protest against the action; ‘Eden must go!’ became a popular slogan.

The moment of 1953 offered images of coherence and stability, of a nation emerging from the vicissitudes of post-war recovery and pre-war class-struggle with its traditions intact. The moment of 1956, however, offered images of dissent, instability, fracture and powerlessness. It is not so much that the familiar landscape of early-fifties Britain was obliterated—indeed, it was towards the end of the decade that many of the ideologies that were discussed earlier assumed their most coherent expression—but rather that the contradictions and tensions that conservative explanations of change suppressed came to the surface; and for the first time in the decade, these emerged in the political as well as the cultural arenas, with implications both for the left generally (which, in the late fifties was advancing after a decade or more in retreat) and for a contemporary theatre.

A CONTEMPORARY THEATRE: LOOKING BACK AT ‘ANGER’

The break in intellectual and artistic culture that was signalled in 1956, however, d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• British Realist Theatre
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Representing Contemporary Britain: Anger, Affluence and Hegemony
• 2: Institutions and Audiences
• 3: Realism, Class and Culture
• 4: ‘Beyond Naturalism Pure’: Realism, Naturalism and the New Wave
• 5: Redefining Realism
• 6: The Two New Waves: Realism in Theatre and Film
• IN CONCLUSION: The 1960S—new definitions of ‘What Britain is Like’
• Bibliography