Lacey - British Realist Theatre: New Wave in its Context, 1956-1965

The 1950s was a curious and idiosyncratic decade, which, from the viewpoint of the 1990s, is a reservoir of distant, yet familiar images, close enough to be relevant, yet far enough away to be the object of nostalgia. It was a period of full employment, of prosperity and social stability, of the birth of the age of television, of the New Elizabethan Age and the Coronation; it was also the decade of the teddy-boys, Elvis Presley and rock n roll, of CND and of the Angry Young Men. In effect, these two sets of images are associated with the two halves of the decade, with 1956 as the watershed, marking off a then from a now in cultural and political history.

Theatre's contribution to this cultural moment was the much-mythicised first performance of Look Back in Anger. Criticism of Look Back in Angerand what followed ithas a strong smell of the barricades about it. Taylor described it as a revolution (Taylor 1962:28) and military metaphors abound in most accounts of this proletarian upsurge of emancipated working-class writers in rebellion. Even writers with a more critical stance towards the plays and the theatrical and political values of the New Wave (as we shall call it) accept that this period was crucial and formative for what is now the mainstream of British theatre (McGrath 1981:9). David Edgar has written:

The date, 8 May 1956, was the last great U-turn in the British theatre. Certainly, whether Osborne likes it or not (and he probably doesn't) all the subsequent waves of the new British theatre follow the agenda he set.

(Edgar 1988:138)

This agenda is actually rather hard to specify, whether one looks for it in Osborne's work or in that of the New Wave generally; indeed, the term New Wave is itself highly problematic. Viewed in terms of the plays alone, the moment of the late fifties and early sixties is a difficult moment to map with any confidence: there are no manifestos, no obvious schools of writing (certainly no school of Osborne), and a diverse, if overlapping, set of concerns. This has not changed over the years; indeed, the sense of a defining contextual moment has lessened as traditional literary criteria have reasserted themselves, and independent authorial studies of key figures have become the dominant pattern.

It is also the case that the New Wave, and especially Look Back in Anger, no longer appears as seminal as it once did. It seems, quite simply, a different play that we see today from the one that so shocked and inspired its initial audiences. As one commentator recently wrote, stripped of its context it now looks like a feeble period piece, occasionally fuelled by Osborne's own rage [and] what looked like politically subversive polemic now looks like mere rudeness (French 1991). I first taught the play to undergraduates in the late 1970s, when a generation of more revolutionary play-wrightsincluding McGrath and Edgarhad altered the agenda significantly, leaving students bemused about the politics of this famously revolutionary play. A few years later, its politics had become an issue once moreonly this time it was the play's representation of sexuality and gender, its sexual politics, that surfaced, and what had seemed a leftish scream against the constraints of mid-fifties conformism, appeared as an unpleasant apology for misogyny (see ).

It is possible now to write a very different historyprobably several different historiesof this over-mythicised period. One such revisionist account would centre on Beckett and Peter Hall's production of Waiting for Godot (1955) as the crucial and defining theatrical event (and, perhaps, revalue the work of John Whiting). Such an account would emphasise aesthetically innovatory practices, both in writing and its theatrical articulation, and would not foreground questions of realism. In retrospect, there would clearly be a logic to this, given Beckett's subsequent reputation (notwithstanding the general bafflement that greeted