1956 and All That

The Making of Modern British Drama

Dan Rebellato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134657827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

It is said that British Drama was shockingly lifted out of the doldrums by the 'revolutionary' appearance of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in May 1956. But had the theatre been as ephemeral and effeminate as the Angry Young Men claimed? Was the era of Terence Rattigan and 'Binkie' Beaumont as repressed and closeted as it seems?
In this bold and fascinating challenge to the received wisdom of the last forty years of theatrical history, Dan Rebellato uncovers a different story altogether. It is one where Britain's declining Empire and increasing panic over the 'problem' of homosexuality played a crucial role in the construction of an enduring myth of the theatre. By going back to primary sources and rigorously questioning all assumptions, Rebellato has rewritten the history of the Making of Modern British Drama.

1
‘WHY SHOULD I CARE?’

The politics of vital theatre

Vitality!/It matters more than personality!

Originality, or topicality!/For it's vitality!

That made all those top-liners tops!

Vitality!/They each had individuality!

But in reality, their speciality/Was a vitality!

Enough to make hits out of flops!

(from Gay's the Word!, 1951, Ivor Novello and Alan Melville)¹

The politics of Look Back in Anger, have generally been characterised as, if not explicitly aligned to one movement or other, defiantly resistant. What it was resistant to, or where that resistance sprung from, has been far less easy to pin down.

The attitude of opposition was struck in Tynan's first review, which praised the play's ‘drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of “official” attitudes’ (1964, 42). There is already some confusion here in the uncomfortable yoking of three rather different statements. Since then, this confusion has, if anything, deepened. Some commentators fastened more on the sense of ‘instinctive leftishness’, as we shall see. Others praised the anarchically oppositional character of the new movement. Some, like Lindsay Anderson, felt the key interest of the new generation was simply in relating ‘directly to the political and social experience of its audience’ (Serjeant Musgrave at the Court 1990). Early on, a few figures believed the new movement to be marking the emergence of a specifically working-class British theatre. Raymond Williams criticised such claims (1968, 319), and Chambers and Prior insist that if Look Back in Anger tells us anything, it is that ‘Osborne had not the slightest knowledge of working-class life’ (1987, 36).

Several members of the New Wave claimed to be socialists and tried to define what it meant to them. Osborne wrote in Reynold's News that ‘socialism is about people living together’ (1994, 190). In his essay in the manifesto of the angry young men, Declaration, he suggested that ‘socialism is an experimental idea, not a dogma; an attitude to truth and liberty, the way people should live and treat each other’ (1957a, 83). Wesker announced that for him socialism meant ‘a definite and humane attitude to the world and people around me’ (Burton 1959, 24). Joan Littlewood declared herself in favour of ‘that dull working class quality, optimism’ (1959, 289). Osborne's grandfather once defined a socialist as ‘a man who doesn't believe in raising his hat’ (1957a, 83); Tynan commented approvingly, ‘Osborne has never found a better definition of his own Socialism’ (1964, 58). While these definitions are no doubt compatible with socialism, they hardly distinguish it from most other forms of political belief; but then, as Sinfield dryly observes, ‘the new drama was not characterized by coherent political thought’ (1983, 178).

Some were not clear that the New Wave was even broadly left-wing. Some believed, like John Whiting, that in Roots, Wesker was ‘speaking up good and clear against the working class’ (1960, 34). Whiting was no friend of the Court's work, but it is not enough to dismiss his remarks, as David Hare has recently done, as ‘cheesy phrase-making’ (1997, 10); several others believed Wesker to be hostile to his working-class characters; in a preface to Roots published in 1959 Bernard Levin wrote, ‘Mr Wesker, I take it, is a Socialist, not because he thinks working-class people are the best in the land, but because he does not’ (9–10). Here the same claim is repeated in milder form, and note the uncertainty that has prompted Levin's hesitant ‘I take it’ (see also Garforth 1963, 229). Christopher Hollis insisted that from reading Osborne's work, he had assumed him to be ‘a man of conservative opinions’ (1957, 504), a point of view which would hardly be modified by the next thirty years of Osborne's invective.

The politics of anger

The title of Osborne's play seems key to all this. Hence the much-repeated question, ‘what is he angry about?’. Hollis, again, writing with deliberate facetiousness, remarked,

I wish that I could understand who the angry young men are, how many of them there are and what they are angry about. […] Mr Colin Wilson had spent a weekend in my house and gone away again before I ever suspected that he was supposed to be angry, and then I only suspected it because I read it in a newspaper.

(1957, 504)

The play offers no clear answer to this question, since Jimmy Porter seems to be angry about everything, and arguably political targets (say, the H-Bomb, the prime minister and the middle classes) are intertwined with his attacks on friends and lovers. As Stephen Lacey has persuasively argued, Porter's opinions are not ‘directed out to the audience, or even naturalised as “political opinions,” but are part of Jimmy's psychological warfare with Alison (and occasionally Cliff)’ (1995, 30).

Osborne has himself claimed that wondering what Porter is actually angry about is to miss the point. In Déjàvu (1993), his sequel to Look Back in Anger, the middle-aged Porter reflects on his famous emotional state: ‘“What's he angry about?” they used to ask. Anger is not about […] It is mourning the unknown, the loss of what went before without you, it's the love another time but not this might have sprung on you’ (1993, 372).

Whether or not Osborne is within his rights to mount a personal redefinition of this everyday word, his persuasion that there is something ‘intransitive’ about his anger was shared by many of his first commentators. David Marquand, writing in Universities and Left Review, holds that ‘what these angry young men are most angry about is that they have nothing on which to focus their anger’ (1957, 57). This opinion receives its most decisive support in perhaps the most famous speech in Osborne's play. Porter is in full flood:

I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids […] There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you.

(1993, 83)

Two things are curious about this passage; firstly, as with Marquand's argument, it is hard to understand why someone should be angry about having nothing to be angry about. This would seem to situate the anger entirely in a prepolitical psychological realm, and remove it from political consideration at all. And secondly, looking back at the fifties, one can see a whole range of brave causes which could furnish material for any angry young man: the increasing brutality of Britain's attachment to Empire, the H-bomb, and the Cold War are just three. Given all this, it is tempting to agree with John Mander's comment that ‘the play simply does not add up to a significant statement about anything’ (1961, 22).

But it would be smugly retrospective to dismiss the New Wave's politics on this basis, for the reason that this sense of frustrated apathy reflected a more general feeling of paralysis experienced by many on the left. The 1930s and early 1940s saw a high watermark for the confidence of the left. After the disillusionment of the 1931 sterling crisis, and Ramsay MacDonald's acquiescence in a Tory-led National Government, the socialist analysis seemed more relevant than ever. The government's failure to support anti-fascist action, both at home and abroad, encouraged the development of a powerful extraparliamentary network of activists. The high unemployment and widespread poverty of the thirties was widely felt to be a product of Tory policies which lent legitimacy to the Soviet Union's model of collective planning. After Germany unexpectedly attacked the USSR in 1941, support for the Soviet Union became government policy. Growing support for Keynes's and Beveridge's redistributive, interventionist policies, coupled with the evident success of wartime's virtually command economy, was first shown in the two by-election victories for the collectivist Common Wealth party in 1943. This all culminated in the 1945 election, which saw enormous support for Labour's socialist policies, and, indeed, the election of two Communist MPs to parliament.

Much of the radicalism which had been directed towards the Labour Party during the war began to evaporate as the new government seemed blighted and compromised. Economically tied to the United States by the conversion of wartime Lend-Lease agreements into a loan, and by the provisions of the Marshall plan, Labour in office conducted a strongly anti-communist policy. New rules prevented communist organisations affiliating to the Labour Party, and in March 1947, communists were banned from public service. Furthermore, by refusing to repeal the wartime labour control orders, those strikes which took place between 1945 and 1951 were illegal ‘and many took place in an atmosphere of “red-baiting”’ (Chambers 1989, 301). In Unity's 1946 revue, an item called ‘Oklahokum’, a long parody of Oklahoma!, included the lines, ‘Cryptos and their friends'd better look out, / Morgan Phillips's got his little black book out’ (305). Morgan Phillips was general secretary of the Labour Party.

The freezing over of Anglo-Soviet relations partly worked to remove the legitimacy of the Soviet model that had proved so compelling in the thirties. But this change in attitude was not simply government-led. Reports about show-trials and mass purges, which had begun leaking out in the late thirties, now came in a flood. In 1950, The God That Failed gathered six prominent communists to recant their faith, a book that Wesker has described as giving rise to a shattering moment of political disillusionment (1994, 287). The indefensible interventions in East Germany, Yugoslavia and Hungary only confirmed this discomfort. As Perry Anderson wrote, by the mid fifties the Soviet Union's image had created ‘an ideological barrier which blocked the Labour movement's outward political advance and dried up its every inner impulse’ (1965, 4).

The economic policies of the new government have passed into socialist folklore, but it is not obvious that these represented an unambiguously decisive moment of socialist economic management. Despite fighting talk of bringing the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy under its control, nationalisation was piecemeal; the decision was made simply to create public corporations out of industries, which were already hugely loss-making, retaining their existing management structures and personnel. And as for what were by then the real commanding heights, apart from the mainly technical measure of nationalising the Bank of England, the City financial institutions were left pretty much alone (Hennessy 1993, 203).

The fifties broke the remembered link between Conservative administration and poverty. In 1951, despite gaining more votes, Labour lost a General Election, due to the familiar anomalies of Britain's boundary divisions. The opportunity to rethink and the exhaustion of figures on the left of the party like Nye Bevan allowed a group of revisionists to seize the agenda, urging the abandonment of socialist policy. Anthony Crosland in The Future of Socialism (1956) argued that Marx's ideas ‘relate to conditions that have long since passed away’ (21). Private monopolies of the means of production, the old unequal distribution of wealth, and with it class antagonism had all, he declared, been consigned to history (62–66). Thirty-five years before Tony Blair, Gaitskell attempted to abandon Labour's commitment to the common ownership of the means of production, enshrined in Clause IV of the party's constitution.

Meanwhile, the Conservative governments of the fifties were able to preside over a fairly momentous upturn in the economy. While Labour, struggling to control an economy shattered by the costs of prosecuting a world war, had been forced to introduce further rationing of bread, eggs, meat, travel and clothing, the Tories were able to abolish rationing within three years of office. Average earnings doubled between 1951 and 1961 (Marwick 1990, 114) and throughout the decade consumption increased by 20 per cent (Bogdanor 1970, 95–96). William Hickey, writing in the Daily Express in 1955, declared: ‘this is an essentially satisfied country. The basic problems of sharing wealth in an industrial community have been solved’ (quoted, Laing 1986, 10).

Given the atrophied state of socialist activity in the mid fifties, it is not surprising that Jimmy Porter's generation see a lack of brave causes in the contemporary world. At the end of I'm Talking about Jerusalem (1960), Ronnie Kahn picks up a stone, throws it high in the air, and watches it fall back to the ground. The arc described by Ronnie's stone is emblematic of the political shape of the period covered by Wesker's trilogy, from the rising exhilaration of collective action at the beginning of Chicken Soup With Barley (1958), resisting the blackshirt rally on Cable Street, to 1959 and the gloom of a third successive Conservative victory in Jerusalem.

The same pattern informs the individual plays. Ronnie Kahn in Chicken Soup moves from being inspired and dazzled by the possibilities of communism to disillusionment. In Roots (1959) Beatie Bryant takes up some of his enthusiasm, but even her final elated outpouring plays out against the pessimistic contrast of her family ignoring her: ‘The murmur of the family sitting down to eat grows as Beatie's last cry is heard. Whatever she will do they will continue to live as before’ (1964, 148). Even this retreat from collective action into passionate individualism is dashed in I'm Talking about Jerusalem, as Ada and Dave Simmonds begin their experiment in rural nostalgia, setting up home in the countryside, trying to escape the ‘brutality’ of factory work in a rural Owenite Utopia. The political naivety of their position is indicated clearly in the ironic section where Ronnie returns from exploring the land:

Ronnie: […] Hey Addie—you know what I discovered by the well? You can shout! It's marvellous. You can shout and no one can hear you.

Ada: (triumphantly) Of course!

Sarah: (derisively) Of course.

Ronnie: Of course—listen. (Goes into garden and stands on a tea-chest and shouts). Down with capitalism! Long live the workers' revolution! You see? And long live Ronnie Kahn too! (Waits for a reply.) No one argues with you. No one says anything. Freedom!

(1964, 160)

And yet even this retreat fails; they are defeated by the need to engage economically in the society they are not challenging, and, listening to the report of the 1959 Tory election victory, they pack up and move back to a basement in London, like the one in which we first met the Kahns. As Stuart Hall worried in 1961, the end of the trilogy left Wesker in a ‘dramatic and intellectual […] impasse’ (216).

Many of these plays pour scorn on the potentiality of collective action in favour of a retreat into the self. In The Entertainer (1957), Archie Rice's son, Frank, makes this deterioration seem inevitable:

You'd better start thinking about number one, Jeannie, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Nobody else is going to do it for you because nobody believes in that stuff anymore. Oh, they may say they do, and may take a few bob out of your pay packet every week and stick some stamps on your card to prove it, but don't believe it—nobody will give you a second look.

(1998, 62)

For Frank, it seems, the collectivist ethos of the Welfare State is spitting in the wind. Jean's final speech explains,

Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only ourselves.

(79–80)

The same move is found in Doris Lessing's Each His Own Wilderness (1958). Tony returns home after National Service and ridicules his mother for her continued faith in ‘old-style’ socialist campaigning. In an echo of Jimmy Porter, he tells her, ‘You're so delightfully old-fashioned. Getting killed for something you believe in is surely a bit of a luxury these days? Something your generation enjoyed’ (1959, 15). Instead he advocates ‘inner emigration […] to escape the corruptions of modern life’ (28, 33). He eventually forms an attachment with a young woman, equally disillusioned, and in the final moments, they are left sitting together, pleading, ‘Leave us alone, we'll say. Leave us alone to live. Just leave us alone.’ (95).

It is interesting to observe how these plays use theatrical devices to evade making a direct political case. They characteristically resort to rhetorical questions to express their points, which raise questions that the plays seem unable to answer. Archie Rice's ‘Why should I care?’ (1998, 19), is an obvious example; but in the final moments of Wesker's The Kitchen (1959), we see the proprietor ask his mutinous staff, ‘I give work, I pay well, yes? They eat what they want, don't they? I don't know what more to give a man’ before intoning repeatedly, ‘what is there more? What is there more?’ (1960, 61). Wesker's stage direc...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: ‘WHY SHOULD I CARE?’
• 2: THE NEW ELIZABETHANS
• 3: A WRITER'S THEATRE
• 4: OH FOR EMPTY SEATS
• 5: SOMETHING ENGLISH
• 6: SOMETHING (UN)SPOKEN
• 7: SISTER MARY DISCIPLINE
• AFTERWORD
• NOTES
• REFERENCES