Студопедия — ENGLISH POST WAR AND MODERN DRAMA
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ENGLISH POST WAR AND MODERN DRAMA






It was not Beckett, however, but JOHN OSBORNE (1929-) who dealt the final death blow to the short-lived revival of poetic drama. His Look Back in Anger (1956) marked the beginning of a theatrical era. In the hero, Jimmy Porter, he projected the "angry young man" whose rebelliousness and disillusionment shout themselves hoarse with more fluency than cogency. With a university education behind him, Jimmy is running a sweet-stall. He has married the daughter of a well-to-do army officer whose class he volubly condemns. The theme of irrational alienation and estrangement assumed by young beneficiaries of post-war social and educational advance touched a sore nerve and at the same time won I sympathetic applause. A seemingly more refreshing aspect of Osborne's achievement was its effectiveness in undermining the continuing tradition of well-made West End plays like those of Terence Rattigan (1911—77) whose restrained dialogue and unadventurous themes lulled audiences into cosy after-dinner somnolence. Theevidence of the 1960s and 1970s is that those dramatists who sought to downgrade the dramatic text and to turn theatrical experience into something closer to the experience of the fairground and more remote from the experience of reading a book went up a blind alley. A good play remains basically a collection of words, and the man or woman with the gift of words will always make the surest impact as dramatist. Beckett and Pinter are cases in point. So too is TOM STOPPARD (1937-) whose rare verbal versatility is matched by sure theatrical dexterity. In Rosencrantz and Cuildenstem are Bead (1966) the two undifferentiated stooges of Shakespeare's Hamlet are turned into displaced; bemused and aimless figures with a Beckettian penchant for backchat and logical enquiry. The collision between drama and life, logic and nonsense, is effected with a touch of pathos as well as of farce. In Jumpers (1972) the collision is between theory and reality, for a murder is committed in the house of a professor preoccupied philosophi­cally with the nature of good and evil and the problem of value. Travesties (1974) makes hay of the fact that James Joyce was working on Ulysses in Zurich in 1918. The historical point chosen is that when Joyce organized aproduction of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest involving a member of the British Consular staff in the part of Algernon. Nowhere is Stoppard's linguistic virtuosity more evident than in the pastiche of Wilde and the parody of Ulysses Night and Day (1978) exposes Fleet Street attitudes when reporters go to cover a rebellion against a dictator in an African country. On The Razzle (1981), a hilariously farcical romp with scintillating dialogue, is an adaptation of a play by the nineteenth-century Viennese dramatist Johann Nestroy. Theatrical expertise very different in character emerges in The Real Thing (1982) in which Stoppard interweaves a real-life story of a playwright, his wife, his mistress and her husband, with scenes from the plays he has written in which the other three perform. The movement between mental, actual and theatrical levels of experience is subtly effected.

A real personal tragedy lay behind A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) by PETER NICHOLS (1927-). He and his wife had to cope with a spastic daughter whose ten years of life were little more than that of a vegetable. On the stage Nichols shows how the daily anguish was distanced by recourse to sick humour, and his verbal adroitness makes the impact a disturbingly powerful one. Of Nichols's later plays perhaps the most telling are Chez Nous (1974), which brings a trendy pediatrician, advocate in print of teenage sexual permissiveness, up against the consequences of this advocacy in his own family, and Born in the Gardens (1979) in which middle-aged offspring gather round their mother after the death of their father. Set in Nichols's native Bristol, the play recaptures something of the emotional validity of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. A comparable trans-generarional situation is explored more deeply in In Celebration (1969) by the Yorkshire dramatist, DAVID STOREY (1933-). Three sons of a miner come back home to celebrate the anniversary of their parents' wedding. The values and attitudes of the allegedly better-educated and now middle-class sons are searchingly measured against those of their working-class origins. Storey had made his name as a dramatist with The Restoration of’ Araold Middleton (1967), a lively and amusing study of a schoolmaster who, in order to relieve domestic tension, plays the hearty, flamboyant classroom performer in his own home to the point of actual mental collapse. Storey's preoccupation with mental unbalance emerges again in Home (1970) where the audience gradually learns that the aged people before them are residents in an asylum. Their halting dialogue is symptomatic of broken contact between the surface and substance of human life. Storey was born in Wakefield, and so was DAVID MERCER (1928-80) whose After Haggerty (1970) has an interesting thematic relationship with Storey's In Celebration. A retired train-driver from Yorkshire turns up to complicate the already complicated personal affairs of his son, Bernard Link, a drama critic. The concern with the triple dichotomies of the age gap, the education gap and the social-class gap is here, however, a source of fun rather than of reflective unease. Similarly Mercer's study of an aberrant and eccentric clergyman, Flint (1970),derives its effectiveness from sparkling wit and epigram — a fount of humour which dried up in Mercer's later work. Another master of dramatic dialogue, EDWARD BOND (1934-),mines a vein of social indignation with ruthless thoroughness. The obscene murder of a baby by city thugs in Saved (1966) is intended as a comment on the violent character of a de-humanized and technologized society. Lear (1971) revises Shakespeare ex­travagantly but unconvincingly, while Bingo (1973) cuts Shakespeare's personal character in his later years cruelly down to size.

A third dramatist to have come, like Storey and Mercer, from West Yorkshire is ALAN BENNETT (1934-). He has a verbal force and fluency which derive not only from the authentic exploitation of native idiom but also from the storage of a mind that is literary without being academic. Hence the large-scale study in Getting On (1971) of a Labour MP who has transmuted living thought and action into hollow rhetoric. The Old Country (1977), Bennet's portrayal of a Philby-style exile in Moscow who receives visitors from hoipe is a study laden with subtleties, emotional and dialectical, while Enjoy (1980) presents a couple in the last back-to-back house in Leeds, and makes a tremendous impact by brilliantly counterpointing their natural speech with the J'argon of media men and social investigators.

The 1970s also brought to light a new quality in Irish drama. Irish dramatists have repeatedly put Irish problems before the London public, as was evidenced in the case of O'Casey in the inter-waryears and Behan in the 1950s. Indeed Denis Johnston (1901-) did so in both periods. His play The Moon in the Yellow River reached London in 1934 and The Scythe and 'The Sunset' in 1959. The former goes back to the Free State-Republican conflict, the latter to the 1916 rising. Both are plays of substance by an unduly neglected writer. BRIAN FRIEL (1929-) made his first impact in 1964 with Philadelphid, Here I Come,which divides Gareth O'Donnell into twopersonae, public and private, in investigating the motives behind his decision to forsake Ireland for the United States. The subsequent play, The Freedom of the City (1973), has Justly been acclaimed as the best stage product of the current troubles in Northern Ireland. Set in Londonderry in 1970, it fastens on three people who on the spur of the moment seek shelter in the town hall from troops who are dispersing a demonstration. Rumour inflates them into a large band of armed rebels, and they are shot when they leave the building. Living Quarters (1977) is a gravely intense and tragic study of a heroic Irish commandant at the peak of his career who has married a young wife. In these plays, and in Translations (1980), Friel seems to be building up a corpus of work such as only a major dramatist could produce. The plays of Friel's compatriot HUGH LEONARD (pseudonym of John Keyes Byrne) (1926—),a writer of comparable percipience, have proved less readily exportable, perhaps because they are more sombre and more intensely confined in dimension. Leonard is a master of tension. The Poker Session (1963) keeps the audience on tenterhooks. Friends and family gather to meet a young man returning home from a lunatic asylum who has grudges to work off on some of them and whose state of mental health remains uncomfortably questionable. In Da (1973) a middle-aged man returns to Ireland to bury his fester-father and sort out his effects, and the past is touchingly recreated around him, while in A Life (1979) a retiring Dublin civil servant with terminal cancer seeks to repair a broken friendship and thereby sets in motion an ironic unravelling of past emotional entanglements.

 

Розробив

Канд.філол.н, доц.

Доцент каф.фонетики та граматики Л.В.Горішна

 

 

  ЗАТВЕРДЖУЮ Начальник факультету № 4 Підполковник С.О.Іщенко 27.08.12  






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