Post-War British Theatre (Routledge Revivals)

John Elsom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317557746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Since the Second World War, we have witnessed exciting, often confusing developments in the British theatre. This book, first published in 1976, presents an enlightening, objective history of the many facets of post-war British theatre and a fresh interpretation of theatre itself.

The remarkable and profound changes which have taken place during this period range from the style and content of plays, through methods of acting, to shapes of theatres and the organisational habits of managers. Two national theatres have been brought almost simultaneously into existence; while at the other end of the financial scale, the fringe and pub theatres have kicked their way into vigorous life.

The theatre in Britain has been one of the post-war success stories, to judge by its international renown and its mixture of experimental vitality and polished experience. In this book Elsom presents an approach to the problems of criticism and appreciation which range beyond those of literary analysis.

Chapter 1

Language and money

W. H. Auden once remarked that the prime duty of a poet was ‘to maintain the purity of the language’. My instinct (hunch or prejudice—as you will) tells me that a similar duty rests on the shoulders of those who belong, even indirectly, like critics, to the theatrical profession. Their first task is to maintain the purity of the theatrical language.

Auden was not suggesting that languages should be racially or ethnically ‘pure’, that British poets should only be permitted to use good British words. Nor was he implying that words should be kept in convent isolation until they can be properly mated with a true Master of Language. He did mean that the words chosen by poets should be pure in the sense of ‘authentic’, a term much employed by the German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, whose brand of existentialism greatly influenced Auden.

Language evolves from the human need to discover effective symbols which can correspond to and communicate experiences. They should reflect a vital response to life, not as a mirror flashes off the sun but as a token, given in love, reflects the feelings of the lover. These symbols, these tokens, contain a core of meaning which does not, or ought not to, fluctuate too wildly from individual to individual. Totally accurate communication is, of course, impossible. We experience life as individuals and our impressions are neither identical nor interchangeable. To one person, the taste of salt may be nauseating; to another invigorating. But when we use the word salt, we don’t mean pepper or the army. To that extent, communication is possible, and by using words with as much accuracy as we can muster, we are maintaining the purity of the language.

Languages can easily become defiled. Clichés are phrases which have lost some authenticity by being used too often and too carelessly. J argon is language which buries its meaning under a pile of other intentions, such as the desire to impress, seduce or otherwise falsely to persuade. Sometimes, languages are simply incapable of expressing certain experiences, perhaps because their vocabularies are limited in one direction or another. The quest for pure language also implies overcoming the deficiencies of an inherited language by borrowing, resurrecting or inventing words to convey experiences which would otherwise have been hard or impossible to express.

This is also the poet’s task, one which is often fraught with social and political implications, for societies, governments, ruling and non-ruling classes can restrict their languages deliberately in order to prevent people from thinking and communicating in inexpedient ways. George Orwell’s nightmare of governmentally restricted language, in his novel 1984, has never been too far from daylight reality. The Edwardian dramatist, Edward Garnett, had to use a French word, ‘enceinte’, to explain in 1909 that the heroine of his play, The Breaking Point, was pregnant, because the English word was considered vulgar and likely to inflame lascivious thoughts. The unofficial and sometimes unconscious restrictions can be worse than the official ones, expressed (say) through censorship. Class and racial loyalties, political and religious beliefs, can have the effect of outlawing those words (and through them those experiences) which do not seem to belong within their schemes of commitments. The poet who knowingly allows the language to be restricted like this has perpetrated the worst literary crime of all, ‘the treason of the clerks’, but avoiding this treachery can require moral, mental and sometimes physical courage of a high order.

A language is, of course, more than the sum of its words. It is also the organisation of these words, the formation of sentences and paragraphs, the general technique whereby one idea or impression is related to the next. The same test of authenticity can be applied here. Some syntactical rules are mere pedantry, providing contorted sentences if rigidly observed and more of an obstacle than a help to thought and expression. Other rules contain the origins of all logic. Without them we would have difticulty in thinking rationally at all, or at least through the medium of words.

Not all verbal organisation is so cerebral. The poet who chooses to write in verse organises the natural stresses and sounds of language into metrical patterns, thus in a sense dancing with words. Pattern can have many purposes. It may simply be a way of holding together many impressions in the mind: when the pattern is broken, an impression has been lost or deliberately dropped. Pattern can be useful in this way, or decorative, or establish musical rhythms with definite beats and pitches, or even mimic life after a fashion. When the Narrator in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (1954), a radio play afterwards staged, describes Llaregyb harbour at night, he talks about the ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crow-black, fishing-boat-bobbing sea’, a phrase which captures the sound of the lapping waves.

Patterns which shape entire works and may include subsidiary patterns change their characteristics. The actual meaning of a poem may be lost without that consecutiveness and order which an overall pattern can provide. We require another word, form. A leaf which is seen as part of a tree has pattern: the tree itself has form. If we examine the leaf by itself, plucked from the tree and placed on a sheet of white paper, then its overall shape is its form, whereas an intricate vein from this leaf has pattern. In literature, patterns can be closely linked with overall forms, as in French neo-classical drama; or, as in Jacobean drama, the relationship between the patterns and the forms can be a tenuous one. The form can be like a travelling bag into which all kinds of different objects, each with its own pattern, can be quickly, if not carelessly, thrown.

Vocabulary, syntax, pattern and form: these are the main attributes of language and the poet’s job is to maintain their authenticity. His work is life-enhancing in two respects. He is trying to maintain the close contact between the symbol and the experience, so that his transitory experience can be retained in symbolic shape and contemplated. He is thus affirming the value of his impressions of life by his efforts to hold on to them. By his choice of public rather than private symbols, he is also insisting that such experiences can and should be passed on to others, thus affirming the value of human relationships.

The theatre can be said both to have and to be a language. It obviously has a language in that ordinary words are used for dialogue. But it is also a language in itself, by providing a vocabulary of symbols which need not be verbal at all. The rising of a curtain tells us that the action is about to begin. The lowering of lights may indicate that a scene (but not an act) has ended. In theatres with open stages and no curtains, some other action may take place (a fanfare, the dimming of house lights) to tell us that something is about to happen, while the director who chooses not to provide us with such a signal, may be indicating that the theatrical action has no beginning, but springs from the infinite origins of life.

Traditional genres provide their own symbols. If the curtain rises on a box set, a living room with a couch and cocktail cabinet, the audience will probably guess that the play will be a ‘middle-class’ comedy or drama, ‘well-made’ and naturalistic’. If we see an open stage with a prop or two instead of a set, we anticipate a play with a looser structure, perhaps a documentary or an ‘epic’, with many changes of locale and not ‘naturalistic’.

The vocabulary of the theatre is, on one level, exceptionally precise and, on another, vast and cumbersome. A glance between two good actors on stage tells us more about their (fictional) relationship than a page of verbal description in a book. But there are almost too many ways in which information can be theatrically conveyed. The medium extends in all directions. A tune can be a theatrical symbol, as in Tennessee Williamss’ The Glass Menagerie (1944). The visual appearance of the stage can be symbolic, not only in such matters as sets and props but in the structure of the stage itself, the presence or otherwise of a proscenium arch, or a forestage, whether the audience looks up or down to the playing area, whether the stage is circled by seats, or half-circled, or kept separate from the audience by an orchestra pit. The nature of the theatre itself may be symbolic. We expect a different type of production from a basement fringe theatre than we do from the West End. A theatre may be, in Yeats’s phrase, just ‘a rug at the end of a room’, or it might be a Palace or an Alhambra. Before the curtain goes up on a first night, we have probably guessed something about the type of production we are going to see, except that we haven’t exactly guessed: we have been given information through a variety of conscious and unconscious symbols, from the atmosphere of the theatre to the style of the programmes.

Methods of acting also contain symbols. To signify anger in Balinese dance drama, the actor must flicker his lower eyelids. European acting contains many styles, often jumbled together but still recognisable. They range from improvisation to ‘naturalism’ to ‘alienation’ to the shock tactics of Artaud and his school. Acting styles can be added to the theatrical vocabulary, together with directorial and writing styles. All these different symbolic ways of conveying impressions, thoughts and the logic connecting them would add up to a monstrous dictionary, if one could be compiled. But, of course, it can’t, despite John Russell Taylor’s brave attempt with the Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre. This is perhaps the first weakness of the theatrical language. Whilst the symbols exist, with their surrounding syntaxes, patterns and forms, many survive as remnants of long-lost traditions which have been built into the very processes of theatre-going. Some retain their original relevance, many do not. The theatre has a vast vocabulary and a wide range of organisational methods; but it has always lacked that continual, rigorous and patient assessment of aims and usages which characterises verbal (and often less complete) languages. There have been plenty of theatrical poets and demagogues, but very few grammarians and philologists. This was why Brecht, when formulating his own theories, felt the need to attack Aristotle first, which is rather like a twentieth-century astronomer having first to debunk Ptolemy.

These telling absences can be explained to some extent historically. For centuries the theatre was regarded either as a popular art or as a courtly indulgence, and as thus beyond the concern of academics—just as before Dr Johnson appeared, the vulgar English tongue was not considered worthy of a formal dictionary. Most people knew what the words meant and so why bother? ‘A play either works or doesn’t work’, one director said to me. ‘Why waste time on considering the structure of its language?’The answer to this rhetorical question is that without some academic discipline, the theatrical language has a tendency to spread, to become so loose and floppy that it is virtually unusable; at which point some theatrical fashion comes along which imposes a very rough discipline indeed, cutting out many effects which might otherwise seem naturally to belong to the theatre.

This pendulum swing, ‘anything goes’ followed by ‘only that is allowed’, has characterised the development of the theatre and it derives partly from the lack of study of the theatre as a language. The past thirty years have offered a classic illustration. In the early 1950s the theatre was afflicted by all kinds of inhibitions. There was an unhealthy concentration of theatrical power in the hands of a few impresarios, whose influence (though not necessarily philistine) helped to prevent other ideas from being expressed. The writing of plays was constricted by an unthinking dependence upon the ‘naturalistic well-made play’ formulae, popularised by Ibsen, Shaw, Rattigan and others. It could also be argued that these formalised techniques were directed towards a particular class outlook on the part of the audiences. The shapes of theatre buildings were constricting, the picture-frame stages, the rows of seats stretching backwards and upwards into the cavernous recesses of Edwardian auditoria, the too rigid endings to acts with quick or slow ‘curtains’, the gulf of the orchestra pits, the rows of formal lighting which never quite prevented unwelcome shadows, the fixed entrances and exits from the wings.

By the mid-1960s, much of this had changed, in that few people at all knowledgeable of the theatre assumed that theatres had to be built like this or plays written like that—or even that impresarios were necessarily fat men with cigars. A play could be a Happening, or a sensory experience along the lines of the Living Theatre or the Liquid Theatre, or a sustained Marxist polemic, or whatever. Although the majority of plays in the West End could still have been characterised as farces, comedies, musicals or Society Dramas, we could justifiably feel that the West End no longer dictated the standards to the theatre as a whole. A much greater variety of theatrical experiences had replaced the old uniformity.

With this diversity, however, there came a certain loss of precision. There was a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it seemed that anything could happen in the theatre, but nothing seemed quite right. Individual productions were marvellous, but they did not lead to a fruitful genre. There were many interesting new plays, at least in typescript, but few seemed actually to work in the theatre. Dramatists got bored with their incapacities to write satisfying plays consistently and drifted off in other directions. The re-organisation of the theatre as a profession had led to a strong repertory movement, a much weaker touring network, a mixed economy of subsidised and commercial theatre with the balance tilting year by year in favour of the subsidised, an active and sometimes positively anarchic fringe, a more forceful Equity (the actors’ trade union) and some very tentative managements, so frightened of getting their fingers burnt that they wouldn’t warm them by the fire.

If we consider both the constricted theatre of the 1950s and the fruitful, diverse, but eventually dissatisfying, theatre of the late 1960s, we are confronted by one main question: how can we combine an exact use of the theatrical language with that wonderful comprehensiveness which is that language’s greatest asset?

This approach, however, may seem pedantic. It is all very well to talk idealistically about ‘maintaining the purity of the language’ but this is not much comfort to the actor or dramatist speaking this language superlatively well who cannot get a job. The theatre is an industry, as well as a language, and how the industry is run, who employs whom and why, occupies much of that money-grabbing time which nearly everyone in the Profession would prefer to be dedicated to Higher Matters.

After the Second World War, the theatre industry, notoriously unstable at best, was in a state of approaching chaos. About a fifth of the theatres in London had been destroyed or badly damaged by bombing; others were battered or just neglected. There was inevitably a shortage of actors, some still in the forces, others on ENSA tours. Comparatively wealthy pre-war managements had gone out of business. In 1942, the entire Stoll Theatres Corporation, which owned six London theatres, four regional ones, a music hall and a film company, was sold for only £140,000. Unlike the situation during the First World War, when soldiers returning on leave and families re-uniting kept the theatres thriving, the Second World War dealt a body blow to the theatre which (many feared) could have been followed by a total knock-out.

Even without the war, the theatre would have faced harsh problems. It had been confronted for thirty years by the challenge of the mass media. Many theatres had been converted into cinemas. Of seventeen live theatres owned by the Abrahams Group before the war, only four were functioning as theatres by 1949. Films were the challenge in the 1940s; radio indirectly helped the theatre by publicising its stars. The greatest challenge, however, was yet to come, that of television. The spectre of widespread television haunted everyone in the theatre, from impresarios to small-time rep managements alike, because it was assumed that post-war television (like the pre-war variety) would be run by the BBC, a national corporation. In the 1920s, theatre managements had protected themselves against the growing film industry by taking shares in film companies. They were not able, until commercial television was established in 1956, to hedge their bets similarly against the possibility of the small-screen taking over the drama industry.

The aftermath of war and the mass media, together with Entertainments Tax at 10 percent of gross receipts, provided a packaged nightmare to post-war theatre companies. They would chase the future down one blind alley, only to backtrack and run along another. They could have coped more successfully if the industry had been in a better shape initially. Since the 1920s, however, the theatre had undergone a tortuous transition from the many small, competing, independent managements of Edwardian theatre to a supposedly more streamlined industry, in which groups of companies controlled chains of theatres.

This ‘streamlining’ had half taken place when the war struck, so that sections of the theatre industry were in the hands of business combines, while other sections were still struggling along in the old ways. There had emerged an ‘absentee’ landlord class in British theatre, men who had bought a theatrical chain, then let individual theatres to managements who ran them and who in turn sub-let to producing managements. Through this process of letting and sub-letting, the costs of hiring West End theatres steeply escalated. Richard Findlater, in The Unholy Trade (1952), calculated that in the years which separated the heyday of the actor-managers (c. 1880) from 1949, theatre rents had increased by up to 1000 percent, production costs by 600 percent, while admission prices had risen by only 50 percent.

Sometimes nearly half the gross receipts from a West End production would disappear in rents, rates and taxation, before an independent impresario could start to pay off his production costs and, of course, his actors. Under these circumstances, the independents were naturally cautious: most would only risk cheap, ‘sure-fire’ productions, of mystery plays, light comedies and revues. Some paid for a limited theatrical ambitiousness through exceptionally careful housekeeping. Henry Sherek balanced the profits from intimate revues staged a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Introduction
• 1 Language and money
• 2 Actors, stars and changing styles
• 3 Well-made plays?
• 4 The search for self
• 5 Breaking out: the angry plays
• 6 How the West End was (nearly) won: the playwrights of the early 1960s
• 7 Brecht: cool ambiguity
• 8 The Arts Council and its influence
• 9 Fringe alternatives
• 10 National aspirations
• 11 Many roads, few maps
• 12 Climate and language
• Index