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314 Book Reviews C.W.E. BIGSBY, ed. Contemporary English Drama. London: Edward Arnold 1981. Pp. 192. DOUGLAS COLBY. As the Curtain Rises: On Contemporary British Drama 1966-1976. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1978. Pp. 103. C.W.E. Bigsby's Contemporary English Drama, number 19 in the Stratford~ upon-Avon Studies series, is a collection of considerable range, covering every significant British playwright writing in the more recent post-Osborne era and boasting contributions from such highly respected scholars as Martin Esslin, Ruby Cohn, and John Russell Taylor. Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Orton, Stoppard , and Bond each receive separate essays that survey and assess their recent work. A similar essay, by Julian Hilton, is devoted to three Court dramatists (Hampton, Storey, and Arden); another, by Christian W. Thomsen, to three socialist playwrights (McGrath, Churchill, and Griffiths) ; and a final essay, by Taylor, to new drama in the West End. The collection offers an exceptionally valuable statement on the state of contemporary British theatre, which is dominated by what Bigsby and Malcolm Bradbury refer to in their preface as '~ a profound sense of unease," dramatized through "disturbing images of violence and of a brutalized landscape peopled by self-deceiving individuals." Curiously, the volume's deft orchestration and consequent unity, which contribute significantly to its strength, also offer the book's only disappointment . Bigsby's invitations to contributors would seem to have been overly prescriptive, for the analytic talents of some of the best scholars in British drama repeatedly defer to overview analyses reflecting a clearly substantive background but little of the fine minds behind them. Hence Esslin, in "Joe Orton: The Comedy of (Ill) Manners," speaks of the unconventional man who replaced art plates in library books with pornographic pictures, then reviews the ways in which Orton breaks dramatic rules in Loot, What the Butler Saw, and other plays written from 1964 to 1967, when Orton was murdered. Cohn similarly summarizes Stoppard's recent career, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead to Night and Day, in uTom Stoppard: Light Drama and Dirges in Marriage," as other critics summarize the recent careers of other playwrights: Arnold P. Hinchliffe in "Whatever Happened to John Osborne?", Glenda Leeming in "Articulacy and Awareness: The Modulation of Familiar Themes in Wesker's Plays of the 70s," and Jenny S. Spencer in "Edward Bond's Dramatic Strategies." While each of the essays is a fine piece of scholarship, any committed researcher might well have been as thorough, if not as eloquent. The one remarkably individual piece is Guido Almansi's "Harold Pinter's Idiom of Lies," which manages to present the requisite overview yet still offer the original analysis one would hope for from a scholar of distinction. Noting that Pinter has "never stooped to use the degraded language of honesty, sincerity, or innocence which has contaminated the theatre for so long," Almansi argues that "Pinter's idiom is essentially human because it is an idiom of lies." He maintains that Pinter's characters are consistent, conscientious liars who create a world of "misunderstanding and misinformation." destrov- Book Reviews 315 ing the traditional trust 3n audience brings with it to the theatre. This is 3n excellent, amusing essay that praises Pinter for his "exploitation of mao's supreme cultural gift: mendacity." Bigsby's forty-page introduction ranges freely through contemporary drama, offering an intelligent perspective of the·British theatre. Surveying the backgrounds of British playwrights, Bigsby demonstrates the extent to which the British theatre is stiB a male, Oxbridge phenomenon, despite inroads made by women writers and the working class. He speculates as to the reasons that the British theatre has not attracted women, assesses the social cbanges in the theatre begun in the 1950's with Osborne's Look Back in Anger, then moves briefly to Continental and American drama as a means of placing British drama in context. For Bigsby, 1968 is a turning point in the development of British drama, for it marks the beginning of socialist drama in the fringe theatres, an emphasis lasting about a decade, notwithstanding Howard Brenton's official declaration in 1975 that the fringe was dead. Bigsby discusses such movements as Centre 42 and individual playwrights...

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