Theatrical Context - Theatre in the 1950s

The 8th of May 1956, a date that has now passed into theatrical history as the day that changed
British Theatre. The date marked the premiere of John Osbornes production of Look Back In Anger
at Londons Royal Court Theatre, and the play marked a dramatic shift in the type and content of
work that British Theatre was creating:
The old era became exclusively characterised by the absence of anger, and the new era by its
presence . Rebellato quoted in Rabey, David Ian 'English Drama Since 1940' Pearson Eduction
Ltd, London (2003)
The period following the end of World War II in 1945, until 1956 saw British Theatre under threat.
Theatres such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre, which have been
leading artistic lights in the later half of the twentieth century, were not founded until the early
1960s, and The Crucible not until 1971. This left Britains mainstream theatrical scene in the early
1950s under the dominance of the financial concerns of a small number of commercial management
groups, who valued commercial success over artistic exploration, and a mainstream theatrical
culture that was a hindrance to risk and experimentation and in Peter Brooks terms, creating
deadly theatre.
The theatrical scene, both within London and within many touring enterprises was dominated by
works that "represented the safe middle-class milieu and world-view aspirations of the audiences
that would come to see them" (Batty). The audience that attended these productions were not
challenged, nor did they want to be, as Pinter remembers below:
They didnt want anything else, they were perfectly happy to put their feet up. That was what
going to the theatre was normally about, going and putting your feet up and just receive something,
received ideas of what drama was, going through various procedures which were known to the
audience. I think it was becoming a dead area. Batty (2005)

In addition to the deadly theatre that was being produced, the censorship and fear of prosecution
from the Lord Chamberlains office (which did not come to an end until 1968 ) and the
criminalisation of homosexuality in Britain (which would not be legalised until 1967) put both
pressure and restraint upon the content of work shown in British Theatres and the concerns of the
society in which it operated.
In 1952, both Rodney Acklands The Pink Room and Terence Rattigans The Deep Blue Sea bore
the hallmarks of the censorship forced upon plays within the period, by both the social climate and
censorship from The Lord Chamberlains Officer. Both The Pink Room and The Deep Blue Sea had
strong homosexual themes, but homosexuality would not be legalised in Britain for another 15
years, and the negative public opinion towards open homosexuality, influenced both writers to take
the decision to encode their concerns in order to avoid being censored and to maintain their
popular public image. In The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan altered the fated lover with an addictive
obsession for a wartime pilot, from a male persona to a female one (played by Peggy Ashcroft), but
the play still exercised references to the homosexuality of a supporting character, Miller ; and in
The Pink Room, Hugh, the struggling writers homosexual relationship was rendered heterosexual
.
The irony of course is that many of the writers, actors and directors that dominated the theatrical
scene in the early 1950s were in fact gay, but because of the social and commercial climate were
forced to produce and perform habitually straight characters.

Theatre outside of London was not in a much better state than that being produced within it.
Although the Arts Council of Britain had been founded in 1946, and was providing increasing
amounts of funding to promote resident companies, touring work and to assist established theatres
in improving production standards, it had little money to offer towards new work ; and without the
insurgence of new writing Britains Theatre was not reflecting the concerns or state of Britains
society, indeed in an edition of Encore, the radical theatrical magazine of the 1950s, Arthur Miller
bemoaned that British Theatre is hermetically sealed against the way society moves .
Clearly the increasing gulf between the interests of British society and the work shown on stage was
serving to add to the rift between the public and the stage that was creating the decline of the
popularity of theatre. M. Batty claims that a third of the work being produced by Britains theatres
was not even plays but revue sketches and that the number of theatres with permanent repertory
companies dropped from 96 to 55 between the years1950 to1955.
In addition to the gap between the work being shown on stage and the state of British society during
this period, the decline in British theatre can be strongly linked to the popularisation of the
television during the 1950s, which had a direct effect upon the number of theatre goers. In 1953 the
number of people owning a television set doubled due to the broadcasting of Elizabeth IIs
coronation; then in September 1955, ITV began broadcasting and with popular shows such as
Coronation Street (started broadcasting in 1952) and Sunday Night at the Palladium (started
broadcasting in 1955) securing large audiences on a weekly basis.
Cinema had also become a well established form of popular entertainment, and many grand
Victorian Theatres were converted into cinemas (a third by 1952). The cost of a cinema ticket
made it much more accessible than theatre, particularly to the lower classes and the draw of the
beauty and glamour from stars such as Doris Day, Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor and Marylyn
Monroe in the cinema was serious competition for the talent within British theatre, such as Peggy
Ashcroft, Noel Coward and Timothy West.
A bleak picture has been painted of theatre in Britain during the early fifties, however during this
period there were already tremors occurring in the theatrical world and in the socio-political world
that signalled the way for John Osbornes theatrical explosion in May 1956.
Public opinion had been strongly divided on the Suez crisis in 1956, it was felt that British
Imperialism had gone too far; in addition the Hungarian revolt , also in 1956, against the Soviet
powers damaged the Left's utopian vision of Communism. The weakness of both political
ideologies uncovered by the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolt added to the sense that national
identity and purpose of the everyday man in Britain was becoming less defined. The pre war
ideologies and roles were dead, the old England was dead but there was not a convincing one to
replace
it.
The 1944 Education Act (the brain child of Rab Butler, the minister of Education in Winston
Churchills coalition government) raised the school-leaving age to 15 and provided universal free
schooling in three different types of schools; grammar, secondary modern and technical. The effect
of the act upon Britains theatrical society was beginning to be felt during this period; the Education
Act meant that a new generation of writers were emerging from a different social background with
different concerns. Bigsbys comments on the effect of the Education Act (1944) demonstrate the
new possibilities that were occurring in terms of new writing:
Subjects, attitudes and writers were no longer being drawn almost exclusively from the narrow
social stratum which has, in England, traditionally dictated the nature of social action and public
forms. Now new writers, whose experiences were profoundly different and whose subjects and

methods were likely to be equally new had emerged. Batty 2005)

London not only saw its theatrical debuts of Beckett, Brecht, Genet and Ionesco productions,
notably Becketts Waiting for Godot, but also Joan Littlewood and her partner Ewan MacColl
moved their company Theatre Workshop to London in 1953. Theatre Workshop was a project that
had been initiated by Littlewood and MacColl during the two World Wars and was unique in that it
focussed on working class orientated drama; Theatre Workshop did this both by radical productions
of the classics and new writing. Theatre Workshops style of actor-based, improvisationallydeveloped working class orientated theatre was certainly a far cry from Noel Coward in an Oscar
Wilde drawing room on the West End stage!
Then in 1956 The English Stage Company under the Artistic Direction of George Devine moved
into the Royal Court with the vision of creating theatre that staged contemporary British and
international works and [to] create an environment that would encourage new writing . By April
1956 Devine had already began to achieve the first half of his vision by featuring Arthur Millers
Crucible and Bertolt Brechts A Good Women of Szechwan, plays that still resonate today. To
achieve the second half of his vision, in January 1956 Devine put an advert in The Stage calling for
plays from new writers, and received over 700 submissions. One of these plays had already been
rejected by Laurence Olivier, Terence Rattigan and Binkie Beaumont this play was by a young
actor named John Osborne and the play called, Look Back in Anger.
Theatre in the early half of the 20th century had been dominated by well educated, well brought up
members of the upper/middle classes; the theatre produced was a reflection of their concerns,
interests and society. What Osbornes Look Back In Anger did was place a work on a major London
stage whose entire focus was on the working class; it proved that a play could have a protagonist
(Jimmy Porter) with a non-BBC accent with articulate intelligence that could dominate the action,
and indeed that the action did not have to take place in a middle class drawing room, but a one
room flat in a large Midlands town. The setting challenged traditional theatrical conventions, and
the content was radical. Look Back In Anger gave a voice to the cultural dislocation felt by Britain
in this period, to a frustrated, disenfranchised constituency of lower-middleclass, first generation
graduates of post-war British education policies, and what is more it opened the door for what
would be known as the kitchen sink dramatists.
The kitchen sink dramatis were a group of young, largely anti-establishment writers who became
very much associated with companies such as Theatre Workshop and The English Stage Company
at The Royal Court. The work of writers such as Arden, Bond, Delaney, Pinter, Jellicoe and
Osbourne was pivotal to the kitchen sink revolution, producing works such as The Birthday Party
and A Taste of Honey.
The kitchen sink dramatists saw their voices representing the voice of the post-war discontent of
their generation ; their works moved away from the sparkling wit, style and delicate naughtiness
of Rattigan and Coward and instead of fantasy, realist drama took possession of the stage. Plays like
Shelagh Delaneys A Taste of Honey with teenage pregnancies, mixed race relationships and
homosexual housemates and Willis Halls The Long and the Short and the Tall with its ambiguous
debates over the morality of war, were now being produced. The theatrical earthquake had
happened, the shift began, and the way made clear for the next decade of theatrical excellence.

Sarah
Clough,
Creative Development Programme

Education

Officer,