British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context, 1956-1965 by Stephen Lacey (review)

Book Reviews examination of American theatre history, but also as a way to understand how theatre generates social change: not just in the moment of performance, but also in the way these tiny communities of women struggled backstage to visualize and enaC I another kind of life, often at considerable personal cost. It is a legacy that Canning handles deftly. without sentimentality or inflation. ELLEN DONKIN, HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE, AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS STEPHEN LACEY. British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context, 1956-11}65. London and New York: Routledge 1995· Pp. 206. $16·95 (P8). In his Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gassel wrote a parable about the Arctic explorer Peary who checks his bearings after traveling north one day only to discover he has ended up farther south. He stood on an immense ice sheet drifting in an ocean current. Anyone studying post-war British drama cannot help but be struck by the relation between the plays, particularly those by politically-oriented dramatists, and the surrounding culture, both in and out of the theater. Independent studies of key figures that neglect to analyze this relationship may misconstrue the significance of the plays. An additional problem with studying British New Wave drama is that most of the plays have dated poorly. The structure and sexual politics of John Osborne's seminal .1956 play, Look Back in Anger, creak horribly. In spite of this, though, the period from 1956 to 1965 remains a defining moment in British theater history. Tackling both of these problems, Stephen Lacey has written an excellent study that aims to present the New Wave drama in relation to other developments in post-war culture , most notably, in the theater institutions, social science, the novel, television, and cinema. The result is emphatically not a systematic history of the period; indeed, the first detailed discussion of a dramatic text occurs almost halfway through the book. Lacey's thesis is straightforward. Using Gramsci's concept of "hegemony," he argues that in the Britain of the 1950S there was a consensus among the dominant political parties regarding general economic and foreign policies and the role of the welfare state. In addition, cultural outlets attempts to win social consent to conservative views about the ~entrality of the family and the roles of established institutions, such as the Church of England and the Monarchy, and acceptance of the idea that affluence had succeeded in removing the structural inequities of British society. The role of the Angry Young Men was to contest this consensus, and by analyzing contemporaneous demographics and theater practices, Lacey pinpoints what it was that excited audiences about Look Back in Anger. Lacey's book is panicularly useful because of his ability to pull his various themes together. Instead ofdemonstrating the similarity of the different writers, Lacey's thesis helps differentiate how they attempted to exploit theater's capacity to question hegemony . Central to the discussion of post-war British theater is the nature of realism, and · the dramaturgical difficulties the playwrights faced in trying to render their social 718 Book Reviews analyses theatrically compelling. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Lacey adroitly disentangles several conceptions of realism, distinguishing between realism as a project and realism as a style. Realism as a project attempts to show.social relations as they really are. Its ambition is to present a political, particularly materialist, analysis of the world. Realism, the style, offers verisimilitude of the outward forms of social life. In discussing selected plays by Arnold Wesker, Lacey shows how the tension between these two conceptions led to creative difficulLies, resulting in an imperfect balance between characterization and Wesker's didactic needs. As Lacey shows. this tension led some playwrights who initially used realistic means of representation to explore other dramaturgical strategies [0 analyze society. Occasionally, though, when discussing writers al a specific stage of their careers, Lacey might have noted more about choices these writers made at subsequent stages. For example, he quotes at length a 1964 article by Troy Kennedy Martin deriding the limitations of TV "naturalism " without mentioning that Kennedy Martin would later write the TV series Reilly, Ace ofSpies, probably his best known work. But then, I found myself...