The Young British Drama

THE YOUNG BRITISH DRAMA IT IS SAID that some 120 dramatists are active in Britain today. Of these not more than thirty are likely to see one of their plays performed in the West End of London in anyone theatrical season of twelve months. Fifteen of these at the most can expect to earn as much as £500 a year. If you bear in mind that the dramatic author has to wait for months if not for years before a play of his reaches the stage-John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was rejected by every London theater director before it was finally accepted for production after two years of waiting by the Royal Court Theatre-you will see why so few English writers are attracted to the stage. Note, by contrast, that well over 4,000 novels were published in England last year! Still, in the last few years the picture has changed rapidly. For the first time since the golden age of Queen Elizabeth the First-when every writer of talent from Shakespeare to the minor Elizabethan dramatists wrote something for the theater-there has been a rush by writers both young and not so young to express themselves through the medium of the stage. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, which is not a mere accident of literary history. In the first place we have in London, for the first time for many years, a small number of theaters whose official policy it is to encourage new dramatists. The"commercial theater"-as we call it-cannot afford to take risks with the unknown, if only because of the large capital investment at stake. And so it rarely ventures outside the "safe writers" like Noel Coward or Terence Rattigan-masters of the traditionally successful well-made play. The Arts Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, and Theatre Workshopas well as some enterprising repertory theaters in provincial cities like Bristol, Oxford, Nottingham or Coventry-have been sensitive to the needs of the young postwar generation. Stimulated by the introduction of prizes or bursaries awarded by the Arts Council of Great Britain offered either to the author or to the theater willing to "try him out," or to both, they have provided a ready-made forum for the views of the young people who are suspended in mid-air, as it were, between the second "world war to end all wars" and the next war, which we all fear, and which threatens to wipe out the world at one blow. This sense of insecurity underlies all the plays of John Osborne. The leading character of Look Back in Anger, Jimmy Porter, who acts as his author's mouthpiece, is only too ready to abuse everything and everybody around him, and is the prototype of "the angry young man," which began a vogue both in literature and in drama. Osborne is only the first 168 1960 THE YOUNG BRITISH DRAMA 169 of many other disturbed young writers-most of them far too young to have known either the horrors of the last war or the even more unspeakable horrors of the' Fascist concentration camps, except by reading about them or talking to the few people that survived them. These writers have all one thing in common, they are all intent on discussing the human dilemma widely and as loudly as possible. The "Posh Journal," as Jimmy Porter in Osborne's Look Back in Anger calls the London weekly newspaper The Observer, organized a play competition four years ago with singularly effective results. It was a condition of the competition that all the plays submitted should have a contemporary theme. The winner of the first prize,Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, was important because it was written by a Jamaican Negro and because it dealt with present-day problems in his island. This is the first occasion on which a native of an emancipated former colonial dependency has challenged successfully his sometime masters on their own ground. Another promising play also staged at the Royal Court Theatre -as was Errol John's-was Flesh to a Tiger by Barry Reckford, a native of Trinidad, who displays a colorful...