POST-50’s PLAYWRIGHTS
John Arden
Among the post-50’s playwrights, John Arden (b. 1930) emerged in the 60’s as a representative of the new generation of writers who were provocative, argumentative and Anglo-Brechtian. These dramatists, namely Arden, Wesker, Pinter, Orton, and Stoppard, were launched by the Royal Court theatre in London.
Arden’s first play, Live Like Pigs (1958), presents the plight of gypsies, explores their anti-social behaviour, and seems to suggest that “respectability” and its guardians, the police, ultimately prove far more damaging to a society’s health than the unconventional style of living of the gypsies. His most popular and punchy play, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) deals with an anti-militaristic theme, using a dramatic combination of Brechtian exposition and music-hall routines of dance, song, and monologue. His other plays include Left-Handed Liberty (1965), The Hero Rises Up (1968), and The Island of the Mighty (1972). In his later plays, Arden’s rigorous scepticism seems to have mellowed.
Arnold Wesker
Another playwright of the period is Arnold Wesker (b. 1932), whose first play, Chips with Everything, was acted at the Royal Court in 1962. It is largely based on the playwright’s own experience in Royal Airforce Service. His other plays include The Kitchen (1959), in which both camp and kitchen are used as metaphors for an unfair and stratified society (class-based), in which the disadvantaged, like drop-outs, have to fend for themselves. And when it comes to doing that, they have nothing to fall back upon but their proletarian vigour and innate emotional richness; and his famous trilogy—Chicken Soup and Barley (1958), Roots (1959), I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960), which brings to fore his sympathy for the working-class, his socialism, his inclination for the Jewish cause, etc. His effort to combine art with socialist agenda in setting up “Centre 42” did not succeed, leaving him rather disheartented.
Harold Pinter
A more popular dramatist who emerged during the period was Harold Pinter (b. 1930), who shared with Wesker his Jewish background, but who was an actor by profession rather than an activist like Wesker. Unlike Wesker, he does not directly address the political issues of the time in his plays. “They open up instead,” as Sanders remarks, “a world of seeming inconsequentiality, tangential communication, dislocated relationships, and undefined threats.” Pinter started as dramatist with a bang, producing three plays in the same year - The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party - in 1957. The last of these three has been a favourite of the readers. Then came out in 1959 his The Caretaker, which was performed the following year. His plays show an influence of Beckett as well as Kafka. They also show, in their dialogue, the influence of Eliot. The Birthday Party remains his most polyphonic, in which incongruous cliches intrude quite often.
One notices a definite change in Pinter’s art with the performance of his The Homecoming (1964) at the Royal Shakespeare company. It is generally taken as a turning point in his career. Rather indefinite and unspecific in situations and characters, it dramatizes several sides of social tensions woven in the lives of a large family (presumably Jewish). The play leaves behind an impression of sourness and negativity. It was followed by Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978), all marking an extension in themes handled in The Homecoming. As John Russell Brown sums up, “the new playwright is then the portrayer of character, new in the shortness of his plays, their small casts and the replacement of conventional plot development by strange and often menacing events. His plays are half character studies and half fantasy or imitation of parts of an early Hitchcock film.”
Joe Orton
Another dramatist of the post-War era, less known in India than Pinter, or Osborne, or Beckett, was Joe Orton (1933-1967), whose dramatized protest against state oppression is more direct and powerful than in Pinter. A character in his play Loot (1966), named Inspector Truscott, underlines the dramatist’s attitude to the subject of state repression of common citizens: “If I ever hear you accuse the police of using violence on a prisoner in custody again, I’ll take you down to the station and beat the eyes out of your head.” Orton earned notoriety because of his active and promiscuous homosexuality (his predecessor, we know, was Oscar Wilde) at a time when it was still a criminal offence in England. Orton wrote four major comedies, besides Loot, namely, Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), The Ruffian on the Stair (1967), The Erpingham Camp (1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969), all calculated to outrage. His comedies attempted to expose the folly of the fool, the hypocrisy of the hypocrite, the incoherence of the incoherents. They also attempted beyond this task to upset the status-quo. As for the form of comedy, he does not just exploit the traditional forms, but also transforms them into something dangerously different.
Tom Stoppard
In comparison to Orton’s explosive and untidy comedy, the comedy of Tom Stoppard (b. 1937), a Czechoslovakian by birth, is implosive and tidy. His plays are meticulously designed, which logically find their endings in their beginnings. The play that has made him famous (partly because of the title derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967). According to the play’s stage direction, the play opens with “two ELIZABETHANS passing the time in a place without any visible character.” The play, as a matter of fact, is a re-reading of Hamlet from the viewpoints of Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives, and Beckettian principles. Everything is presented relatively. Perspective changes, time is fragmented, the Prince is marginalized, or decentred. The two coin-spinning attendant lords are made to take on the weight of a tragedy which is both beyond their comprehension as well as above their status. Although on surface it is a farcical comedy, it carries beneath the surface a lurking sense of doom or death, which the audiences are never allowed to forget. The play’s contemporary relevance lies in the present-day consciousness of the two leading characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who in their Elizabethan costumes, language, and setting, feel out of place, with their twentieth-century awareness of convergence, concurrence, and consequence: “Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles.” The message is that life may look arbitrary, there is logic in life which is inescapable, just as the pattern of Shakespeare’s play determines that Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s strutting and fretting must come to an end with death, just as human life on earth does.
Stoppard’s other plays include The Real Inspector Hound (1968), which is a parody of an English detective story; Jumpers (1972), which ridicules intellectual gymnastics, in which intellectuals do jumping exercises, raising unstable philosophic structures; Travesties (1974), which is considered his most witty and inventive play, and includes the cast of historical figures such as Joyce, Lenin, Tristan, Tzara, etc.; Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which is on a direct political theme; and Arcadia (1994), in which locations alternate between Byron’s England and Stoppard’s England, attempting a fusion of complementary oppositions. This is considered Stoppard’s most allusive and subtle play.
Edward Bond
Still another notable playwright of the period is Edward Bond (b. 1934), who has faithfully followed the didactic German tradition, although he later disclaimed that he was working as a sort of disciple of Brecht. His point of departure, in his view, was to necessarily “disturb an audience emotionally” through various means to make what he called the “aggro-effect” more complete. His early plays include The Pope’s Wedding (1962) and Saved (1965), both of which deal with the inherited lexical and emotional deficiencies of the working class life. This life, he believes, perforce finds expression in violence. His analysis is that violence is a logical consequence of the brutalization of the working class. And brutalization, in his view, results from the uncaring treatment meted out to them by the stratified, industrial society. In his subsequent plays, Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), Bingo (1974), and The Fool (1976), he presents anger and violence not merely as means of self-expression but also as instruments of social change. In his Lear, he drastically changes the story of Shakespeare’s play, making it a twentieth century tale of violence and repression, where love always remains something that might-have-been.
Caryl Churchill
Very much like Bond, Caryl Churchill (b. 1938) has been greatly opposed to a social system based on exploitation. She, however, relates exploitation and repression to the subjection of women. In her view, there is a direct correspondence between the traditional power of the capitalists and the subjection of women. She always presents her women characters as victims of a culture which regards them as mere commodities, or which has imposed conditions of inequality on them, brought up to subject to the masculine social conventions. Her plays include Owners (1972), which draws parallel between colonial and sexual oppression; Cloud Nine (1979), which creates farce through the shifts of gender and racial roles; Top Girls (1982), which exposes the superficial nature of women’s liberation (so-called) in the 1980’s. Her later work includes Serious Money (1987), which is topical and apocalyptic presenting the effects of stock-market deregulation in the city of London; Mad Forest: A Play from Romania (1990), which makes a searching study of competing truths and half truths; and the two inter-related short plays, Blue Heart (1997), the first of which carries the title of Heart’s Desire, the second of Blue Kettle, which focus on lexical problems and failure of communication. We need to include here, as a sort of late entry, Robert Oxton Bolt (b. 1924) whose A Man For All Seasons (1960), based on Thomas More’s life, deals with power politics and the clash of ambitions. His first play, Flowering Cherry (1957), deals with self-deception striving to disguise failure.
POST-MODERN CRITICISM
Until the time of the modernist period of English literature, literary criticism was a “literary” activity, with leading (call them policy) documents written by the leaders of the literary movements. We know how from Dryden and Pope and Johnson to Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats to Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne to Eliot and Auden and Spender, English poetics was theorised by the leading English poets.
But in the post-modern period there is no such thing as literary theory, nor any of the dominant theoretic documents of today’s activity of criticism has come from any man-of-letters. It is mostly the philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, etc., who have propounded all kinds of dismantling orders, which are being applied, by their followers, in the field of literature. Today, the activity called “theory,” is related to, not any particular subject, but to all subjects. No wonder the literary criticism today has become cultural studies, feminism, postcolonialism, etc., which use literary texts for making political, sociological, or psychological case studies. As Jonathan Culler has attempted to explain the nature of THEORY:
Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study.... It is a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define....a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophesy, but all of these mingled together in a new genre. The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong. This is the simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.
Thus, the main effect of theory is disputing all that we have been considering “common sense.” It questions all the concepts and beliefs we have held about literature, author, reader, text, meaning, etc. It questions as well the non-literary concepts of philosophy, sociology, linguistics, etc. Theory challenges the conception of the author’s intention, that the meaning of work or speaker is what he “had in mind.” It also challenges that literature is a representation of “life”, whose truth is outside of itself, in history, or biography, etc. It further challenges the very notion of reality as something present at a given moment. In this all-round critique of common sense, theory insists that all that passes in the name of natural or essential or universal is nothing but a construction of social practices, a production of a certain discourse. Broadly, Culler makes the following four points to sum up the activity called theory:
a. It is interdisciplinary, always deriving ideas or leaving effects outside an original discipline.
b. It is analytical and speculative, always working out what is involved or implied in a text, or language, or meaning, or subject, etc.
c. It is a critique of common sense, always questioning whatever is considered a given or natural or essential or universal.
d. It is thinking about thought, always enquiring into categories and concepts we use in making sense of things, such as what is woman or man or meaning or text, etc. (Culler, p. 15)
Critics like Terry Eagleton (a well known British Marxist critic) may find in theory an expression of democratic impulse, and a liberation “from the stranglehold of a civilized sensibility,” the fact of the matter is that it has seriously subverted the value of literature in various ways, such as the following:
1. It has made criticism a jargon-ridden writing, inaccessible to the common reader. As such, it is anti-democratic.
2. It has reduced literature to the status of a speech, any speech, political, pornographic, stray writing, etc. As such, it deprives art and literature of their humane and ennobling effect.
3. It has reduced literary criticism to dividing people into regions, races, tribes, cultures, colonizers, colonized, etc. As such, it is divisive, not unifying.
4. It has also made criticism a negative activity, which is meant to trace faultlines, lapses, absences, what the text does not say or has failed to say.
Thus, theory has given birth to a set of approaches in criticism, which transforms the activity of understanding, appreciating, and evaluating a literary work into (largely) an activity of self-reflection. It tends to marginalize artists and their art-works.
(Continued)
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There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
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