The Politics of Anxiety: Contemporary Socialist Theatre in England

The Politics of Anxiety: Contemporary Socialist Theatre in England C.W.E. BIGSBY This year has seen a number of somewhat subdued celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre in its present form, and of John Osborne's play LookBack in Anger. Celebration is not without its ironies, since in many ways the mood and style of the fifties are staging a come-back. History repeats itself, this time, perhaps, as farce. Whereas Sir Harold Macmillan had told the British that they had never had it so good, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher now tells them that they have had it far too good for far too long. But both periods are characterised by the disintegration of old models of behaviour and national purpose. There is a sense now as then of cultural crisis. Then it was Suez; now it is economic decline. And for twenty-five years we have had a theatre which has acknowledged this sense of unease, instability, usually in social or political terms, but in the case of writers like Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard, at least, in terms which raise ontological and epistemological questions. Indeed, even those writers initially hailed as representing some kind of breakthrough on a social or political level were in fact responding to a more profound sense ofdislocation than could be contained by such an analysis. The late fifties have for long been presented as a breakthrough for a new socially committed drama which engaged the problems of the working class and entertained the novel thought that life survived outside London. This mythicising was from the start an acknowledgement of the fact that the English theatre had traditionally reflected, in its writers, directors and plays, the values of a particular section of English society, most major writers sharing an educational and class background which to some degree shaped or influenced their work. In this context the new theatre in Britain seemed socially revolutionary, if in some ways theatrically regressive. The emergence of a number of writers whose class origins were different from those of their predecessors created the impression of a radical disjunction, of a theatre 394 concerned with addressing itself to social realities, to the experiences of those displaced from theatrical no less than political concern. Their plays were seen as parallels to such novels as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and This Sporting Life. But in fact Osborne's plays, for example, are addressed to more than the collapse of imperial pretensions and shifts in the social system. Stoppard may have sought to intensify the metaphysical implications of Archie Rice's line in Osborne's second play, The Entertainer ("Don't clap, it's a very old building"), by having one of his characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead remark, "Don't clap, it's a very old world," yet actually that metaphysical dimension was always there. The social order, character, language, are all shown in a state of disrepair. The familiar structures no longer locate the individual in a reassuring world. The stage (here the music-hall stage, as for Stoppard, later, it would be the Shakespearian stage) becomes an image not only of the desperate fictions acted out with diminishing confidence by the politicians of late-fifties Britain, but ofthe role-playing of individuals cut adrift from the history they had assumed to be the origin of their private significance. The Anglo-French invasion of Suez was not merely a political watershed; it was one more evidence of a collapse which went beyond the social, and which surfaces in Osborne's work as a generalised sense of bafflement, in particular, in the image ofthe disintegrating figure ofArchie Rice, no longer able to sustain his role, his identity or his language. Arnold Wesker, too, presented as a socialist playwright, and seeing himself in those terms, was struck by the failure of his own times to conform to the ideological neatness ofpre-war battles between fascism and progressive forces. In Chicken Soup with Barley, he projects his characters into that past, as many ofthe socialistplaywrights ofthe seventies were to do. But for the most part, his characters are shown struggling...