Look Back in Gender (Routledge Revivals)

Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British Drama

Michelene Wandor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317606147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In this challenging book, first published in 1987, Michelene Wandor looks at the best-known plays in the thirty years prior to publication, from Look Back in Anger onwards. Wandor investigates the representation of the family and different forms of sexuality in these plays and re-reviews them from a perspective that throws into sharp relief the function of gender as an important determinant of plot, setting and the portrayal of character. Juxtaposing the period before 1968, when statutory censorship was still in force, with the years following its abolition, Wandor scrutinises the key plays of, among others, Osborne, Pinter, Wesker, Arden, and Delaney. Each one is analysed in terms of its social context: the influence of World War II, the testing of gender roles, the development of the Welfare State and changes in family patterns, and the impact of feminist, Left-wing and gay politics. Throughout the period, two generations of playwrights and theatregoers transformed the theatre into a forum in which they could articulate and explore the interaction of their interpersonal relationships with the wider political sphere. These changes are explored in this title, which will allow readers to re-evaluate their view of post-war British drama.

Part One

After the War was Over

A Labour government came into power at the end of World War Two, followed by the establishment of the Welfare State, the National Health Service, and secondary education which was for the first time free to everyone. These changes, plus many others, directly and fundamentally affected the changing social roles of men and women, and the function of the family.

The concept of the family involved both parents: men returning from the war to build a new peacetime life as well as the women who were returning to the home to take up their conventional role as wives and mothers. Recent feminist social critiques have shown the ways in which emerging sociology, psychological theories, social policy and women’s magazines tried to return women to contented roles in the family after their involvement in the war economy.* After such a long period at war, with the entire population geared towards the war economy, with matters of survival, death, injury, hardship, regular accompaniments to daily life, and the absence of a large part of the country’s male population, this transition to a peacetime that was producing a new and more affluent world to live in was bound to be exciting, traumatic and to alter many of the landmarks of pre-war thinking and imagining. Adjustments were on the agenda for men as well as for women, and in the popular press it was seen as important to help men adjust to a domestic life of family and breadwinnerdom, while women adjusted to their new lives on the assumption that the man would now be the chief and ever-present breadwinner.

This attempt to rationalise familial roles for men and women did not always take full account of all the realities – such as the fact that large numbers of women continued to do paid work well into the 1950s, many of them in effect doing two jobs, at home and at work. The point is that new emphasis was put on the family as the cornerstone of social reconstruction. New housing was being built, the Education and Welfare State, and a Health Service promising better health for the children of the new families, producing new attitudes to class and sex. Certainly these material improvements in the conditions of people’s lives broadened people’s aspirations, giving rise to a Utopian possibility that the class and sex wars were over now that everyone had the same opportunities.

The 1950s was a decade in which many changes took place rapidly; the rebuilding of an entire society from a war economy to a relative affluence, and the beginnings of a new youth-directed culture; American films, rock and roll, and a mass consumerism began to match the earning power and expectations of young people. All this was the backdrop to a much higher and more explicit profile for sexuality:

… by the fifties sexual potency in men and sexual responsiveness in women began to be seen as explicitly desirable qualities, emphasised … in such opinion moulders as the problem pages of women’s magazines.

Elizabeth Wilson (Women and the Welfare State, p. 66)

In America, Playboy magazine, with its pneumatic female pinups, created a new image for the virile male. What is very interesting indeed about this period is that ideas of great importance were being conveyed to men which involved a fundamental change of image for them. To that of the military hero so prevalent during the war (and afterwards; in Britain two years of military National Service continued to be compulsory for men until the late 1950s), a new image was added of the new breadwinner male, the head of the family, a man who expected access to a fulfilled sexuality in reality, and a glamorous sexuality in fantasy life.

Inevitably with this more public profile for heroic and feminine sexuality and new images in the media, particularly in films, there were changes in the attitudes of ordinary people and of the state to familial and personal mores. Through the Fifties, divorce and sexual reform began to be matters that were widely debated:

The 1950s and 1960s witnesses the cumulative removal of customary and legal restraints on certain forms of sexual behaviour, and upon their public portrayal in print or by the visual arts or for commercial purposes. Legal restrictions on the freedom of married people to escape from the bonds which used to be defended as essential safeguards for the integrity of monogamous marriage have been relaxed, and the sexual freedom of men and women has been enlarged.

(Finer Report, Vol. 1, 1974: 7)

During the late 1960s a number of liberal legal reforms went through Parliament, relaxing restrictions on divorce, contraception and abortion, and with limited reforms for homosexuality.

In the Arts this liberalisation was evident in the debate about censorship. The censorship of books was tested in a number of cases: the best-known of these being the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, in 1960. Theatre censorship was finally abolished in 1968. Where books or films could be challenged by censorship post-publication, theatre censorship had been applied by the Lord Chamberlain before a play could be produced, and this inevitably meant before a play was published. It is probably difficult for anyone who has grown up with the theatre since 1968 to imagine what living with official censorship was like; it must have had a series of interesting, frustrating and contradictory effects on the imaginations of playwrights. Playwrights could not write without some awareness that certain kinds of subject matter and forms of expression would be taboo, knowing that if they did take risks they were likely at some point to come up against censorship or theatres who might be reluctant to do plays that would cause problems.

The brief on the basis of which censorship operated was vague, to say the least. Under the Theatres Act of 1843, the Lord Chamberlain operated pre-production censorship, and his approval was essential before any play could receive a public production. The guidelines were never really very clear, despite an attempt by a committee in 1909 to suggest some:

The committee said that the Lord Chamberlain should be able to refuse a licence only if a play submitted might reasonably be held: [a] to be indecent; [b] to contain offensive personalities; [c] to represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person or any person recently dead; [d] to do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence; [e] to be calculated to conduce to crime or violence; [f] to be calculated to impair friendly relations with any foreign power; [g] to be calculated to cause a breach of the peace.

(Terry Browne, Playwrights Theatre, Pitman, 1975, p. 56)

Such vagueness and ambiguity lent itself to the entirely unilateral situation that what was considered indecent and offensive was that which was likely to offend the Lord Chamberlain – see p. 73 for Kenneth Tynan’s brilliant analysis of the precise codes which operated behind censorship.

Until 1968, anything that referred to homosexuality had to be cut, there were heavy restrictions on the use of ‘bad language’, a lot of watchdogging on forms of dress, physical behaviour or any gesture which hinted too overtly at any kind of active heterosexuality. The representation of sexuality in any explicit sense was thus being seriously repressed in the imaginations of writers of the 1950s and 1960s who took any kind of radical perspective on society. They had to find solutions as to how to represent sexuality in their dialogue and stage action, and often did so in imaginatively exciting ways, as well as in indirect and oblique forms. Meanwhile, another part of the State was actually conceding to demands for a more permissive recognition of the possibilities of both heterosexual and homosexual choice, options within marriage, and the move to separate sexual pleasure from reproduction for women as well as for men, in order to make it easier for individuals to exercise wider personal, moral and sexual choices.

It is the tension between the social advances in the 1950s and 1960s with regard to sexual mores, and the theatrical repression which makes the plays of the period particularly interesting. In addition, the contrast between wartime and peacetime domesticity put new strains on the family. The war economy produced an ideology where men and women were united in their national efforts even though they had different gender roles, but in some ways war also broke down certain aspects of gender roles. Men in the army, for example, had to look after themselves, and although this is not a common image of heroic depictions of war, it is actually very important for the way in which men developed their own self image, learning by necessity how to darn socks, cook, wash clothes and perform the kinds of jobs that under peacetime conditions would be done by women. And at the same time, because men were off in the army, women at home had to take on not just responsibilities as heads of their families, but also many of the activities and functions that men would have performed during peacetime. After the war, there was, in theory, a re-jigging of public and private roles back to the way they had been before, and this produced an interesting tension and gender contradiction which had its effect on the way the next generation began to perceive the world.

Matters of national and social identity, the notion of heroism, and the nature of class also have their bearing on the function of gender, as does the role of the family and the way sexuality in its broadest possible sense is represented. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin with the play in which all these questions came together with a new and radical force – Look Back in Anger by John Osborne.

* See Women and the Welfare State, Elizabeth Wilson, Tavistock Publications.

Heroism, Crises of Manhood and the Kitchen Sink

Look Back in Anger and A Patriot For Me by John Osborne

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is a compelling and powerful play which helped initiate a new way of showing contemporary life in the theatre. In it gender functions centrally in the way the play is structured and conveys its social and sexual messages.

Stage directions tended to be fulsome in the social realist plays of the 1950s, crucial to establishing their social setting: Look Back in Anger is set in the Porters’ one-room flat in a large Midlands town. The one-room flat is significant, not just because it tells us that they can’t afford to live anywhere larger, but because it brings together in a real and symbolic way all the different living functions that the conventional family abode would have: the cluster of kitchen, eating, entertaining and sleeping areas suggests a hothouse of interpersonal relations. The school of theatre which this play helped to generate became known as ‘kitchen-sink theatre’, an ironic misnomer if ever there was one, since while the kitchen sink may sometimes have been on stage, it was very rarely the experience of the woman who would normally be at the kitchen sink which was the focus of the play. The sink itself, or any other kind of stage apparatus which represented the sink, functions more as an emblem of the male psyche in crisis.

The opening ‘domestic’ scene shows us Jimmy and Cliff – a kind of double act – reading the Sunday newspapers in comradely chaos. By contrast, Alison, Jimmy’s wife, is standing ironing. The stage directions say that she is ironing one of Jimmy’s shirts and wearing another. Thus she is servicing the domestic scene and demonstrating to the audience in an immediate visual way that she is Jimmy’s property. In visual terms she may dominate the action by standing, but the emotional attention is on Jimmy.

Jimmy is one of the generation who faced compulsory National Service, and he is obsessed by the past of the upper class. From the first, he is full of verbal energy, goading Alison:

I think I can understand how her Daddy must have felt when he came back from India … The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty tempting. All home-made cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms … What a romantic picture. Phoney, too, of course.

Jimmy and Alison have been married for three years and she tells Cliff that they hadn’t slept together before marriage:

… And, afterwards, he actually taunted me with my virginity. He was quite angry about it, as if I had deceived him in some strange way. He seemed to think an untouched woman would defile him.

Sexuality, overt and covert, are the stuff of the exchanges, not just between Jimmy and Alison but also between Alison and Cliff. Throughout the play it is interesting that the only apparently unfraught physical contact between characters (until the very end) is that between Jimmy and Cliff, who every so often rough-house together in an innocent, covertly homo-erotic way, and also between Cliff and Alison. Cliff is physical, cuddly and affectionate with Alison in a brotherly way and the contact between them is not sexual. By contrast, the contact between Alison and Jimmy is always fraught, sometimes violent, even when it may be playful. Although Jimmy describes Cliff as ‘a sexy little Welshman’ there is no evidence that Cliff has any sexual relationship of any kind with anyone at all, male or female. He is just there, asexual, necessary as a foil for the two sexual protagonists. At one point in this first scene, Jimmy and Cliff fight, and bump into Alison who burns her arm on the iron; her physical pain is an emblem of the psychological and emotional pain which Jimmy causes Alison, in which Cliff symbolically colludes.

Alison represents all that Jimmy despises in a ruling class which no longer conveys an old-style patriotism. But she is constantly attacked on the basis of her femaleness; she may be superior on the basis of her class, but Jimmy conveys the superiority of his gender, though this is never enough for him. The gender conflict is a battleground:

Have you ever noticed how noisy women are? … The way they kick the floor about simply walking over it? Or have you watched them sitting at their dressing tables, dropping their weapons and banging down their bits of boxes and brushes and lipsticks?

When Jimmy and Alison are finally alone, there is an awkward admission from Jimmy: ‘There’s hardly a moment when I’m not – watching or wanting you. I’ve got to hit out somehow.’ This encapsulates the way sexual desire and violence are scarcely differentiated from one another in Jimmy’s psyche – a very tortured state of mind for a young man. Jimmy’s search for a cause and his sadness that there is no more patriotism left, or at any rate no patriotism which he can be part of, leads him to give a nod of almost envy towards homosexuals:

Sometimes I almost envy old Gide and the Greek Chorus boys. Oh, I’m not saying that it mustn’t be hell for them a lot of the time. But at least they do seem to have a cause – not a particularly good one, it’s true. But plenty of them do seem to have a revolutionary fire about them, which is more than you can say for the rest of us.

During this first Act, sexuality is very much on the agenda of the play both in its text and in its sub-text. The climax of Act One is Jimmy’s speech about Alison’s sexuality and reproductive potential which, given that we know she is pregnant (she has told Cliff but not yet told Jimmy) carries a brutal irony:

If only something – something would happen to you to wake you out of your beauty sleep! (Coming in close to her.) If you could have a child and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little mass of indiarubber and wrinkles. (She retreats away from him.) Please, if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it. (She moves away stunned and leans on the gas stove, down left. He stands rather helplessly on his own.) Do you know, I have never known the great pleasure of lovemaking when I didn’t desire it myself. Oh, it’s not that she hasn’t her own kind of passion. She has the passion of a python. She just devours me whole every time as if I were some over-large rabbit. That’s me. That bulge round her navel – if you’re wondering what it is – it’s me. Me, buried alive down there and going mad, smothered in that peaceful looking coil. Not a sound, not a flicker from her – she doesn’t even rumble a little. You’d think that this indigestible mess would stir up some kind of tremor i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Imagine … The imperative of gender
• Part One
• After the War was Over
• Heroism, Crises of Manhood and the Kitchen Sink Look Back in Anger and A Patriot For Me by John Osborne
• The Jewish Family, Women and Politics The Wesker Trilogy
• The State, Communication and Gender Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett The Room and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
• Militarism and the Outside World Serjeant Musgrave's Dance by John Arden
• Motherhood and Masculinity A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney; The Sport of My Mad Mother and The Knack by Ann Jellicoe
• Women and Emancipation Each His (sic) Own Wilderness and Play with a Tiger by Doris Lessing
• Anarchy, the Family and Taboo Sexuality Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot by Joe Orton
• Urban Violence Saved by Edward Bond
• Homosexuality: Metaphor and Theme The Killing of Sister George by Frank Marcus and Staircase by Charles Dyer
• The Story So Far Part One
• Interval
• ‘The Royal Smut-Hound' by Kenneth Tynan
• Part Two
• The Changing Landscape The End of Censorship, New Politics and Imaginations
• Mother on a Pedestal – a Doubtful Chivalry The Mother by Bertolt Brecht
• Transitional Pioneers Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden Rites by Maureen Duffy
• Sex, Violence and the Psyche A CID C by Heathcote Williams Lay-By by Howard Brenton, Brian Clark, Trevor Griffiths, David Hare, Stephen Poliakoff, Hugh Stoddart, Snoo Wilson Occupations by Trevor Griffiths
• Satire, Creativity and Annihilation Slag and Teeth ‘n' Smiles by David Hare
• The Taboo as Metaphor The Romans in Britain by Howard Brenton
• Existential Women Owners and Top Girls by Caryl Churchill
• The British Left Destiny and Maydays by David Edgar
• Institutional Power and Male Sexuality Operation Bad Apple by G. F. Newman Tibetan Inroads by Stephen Lowe Bent by Martin Sherman
• Woman as Subject Once a Catholic by Mary O'Malley Piaf by Pam Gems Steaming by Nell Dunn
• The Story So Far Part Two
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography of Plays
• Index