SOURCE: Watson, George. “Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard.” In British Literature since 1945, pp. 145-74. Houndmills, England: Macmillan Press, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, Watson asserts that Look Back in Anger played a seminal role in the revival of British theater in the mid-1950s.]

The story of London theatre, by common consent, divides at 1956, when John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre.

May 1956 was a moment of change, even revolutionary change; and like many revolutions, it was also a reaction. Before it, a more formal theoretical tradition had tried to restore an Elizabethan sense of poetry to audiences hungry for colour and style. The post-war verse plays of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry were born of austerity: in Eliot's case they were an attempt, partly successful, to reach audiences larger than his poetry was ever likely to enjoy; in Fry's, to remind a public battered by war and its aftermath that there is life and joy in the ceremonies of language, at least, if not in daily life itself. The mood was nostalgic, and verse marked a return in many senses. It was a return to the roots of English drama, in Shakespeare; to the roots of English social tradition, too, since it proclaimed the permanence in national life of dignity, ceremony and rank. There was little enough of any of those ancient virtues in Attlee's Britain, but they flourished briefly in London theatre, like exotic plants in a conservatory, with Eliot's Cocktail Party (1949) and Fry's Venus Observed (1950). Along with bitter-sweet plays by such survivors of pre-war theatre as Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, they answered to a desperate hope that, in spite of appearances, nothing essential had changed.

The trouble was that something had. It was not, on the whole, a change wrought by politicians, and extensions to a welfare state founded as long ago as 1908 have little to do with the matter. Change is natural to human society, and Britain by the 1950s was new in ways that novelists and dramatists, among others, found puzzling to account for. The war had not abolished social differences, merely entered some new players and shifted some of the rules of the game. Britain was not egalitarian, and it was already clear that it did not seriously want to be. If the young were openly impatient with the old, it was an impatience the old understandably found unspecific, nebulous and ultimately enigmatic. There was a stir in the air, but it was hard to say who was stirring, or why. Osborne's Look Back recorded that mixed mood of puzzlement, alarm and hope. Something was afoot, no doubt of it, and audiences were suddenly in a mind less for assurances than for explanations.

The revival of realism in British theatre was slightly, but only slightly, belated. Look Back follows the first published novels of Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch by only two or three years, and it may have owed less to them than to the groping intuition of a young actor—Osborne was twenty-seven at the time—who had sniffed a mood in the air rather than from the pages of books. Where Eliot and Fry had written about unchanging human verities, Osborne strove to chronicle the urgent moment, and events conspired to help. May 1956, midway in Sir Anthony Eden's short premiership, was not a critical month at home or abroad; but five months later, in October, there were the twin crises of Suez and Hungary, and the reckless young dramatist had proved himself an efficient prophet of doom. The Osborne revolution in British theatre was remarkably swift and apparently effortless, in the event, and in retrospect it is hard to see how it could have failed.

The theatre that welcomed it was and is ample in its provision. It includes nearly fifty commercial theatres in London, along with state-subsidised theatres eventually numbering five—three in the National Theatre that opened in its permanent home on the South Bank in 1976, and two belonging to the Royal Shakespeare Company; and, in addition, a shifting host of fringe theatres, some of them in improbable makeshift surroundings. As a concentration of legitimate theatre, then, London may be more or less unique: between fifty and a hundred performances within two miles of Piccadilly Circus on any weekday of the year, since there is no Sunday theatre except in private clubs; and unlike Paris, they stay open in summer. The proportion devoted to new drama, however, is hard to estimate. Some theatres, it is certain, will be playing revivals; others musicals; others, especially at Christmas, pantomimes. And not all new plays are British. None the less, the choice of new and native plays is wide, though subject to unaccountable periods of lassitude when even respectable dramatists deliver nothing but translations of foreign plays or adaptations of well-known novels, and there is probably nothing like it in the world, at least for a world language.

That, in itself, is a reversal. In the years that followed the peace of 1945, Paris and New York surpassed London in theatrical excitement, and the centre of gravity did not decisively shift till the mid 1950s. Since then Broadway has struggled against high and ever higher production costs, and Paris has been struck by a subtler malaise known as NED or Not Enough Dramatists. The rivals, for whatever reason, have fallen back, and since the 1960s the British have had it mostly their own way in the theatres of the West. The English dramatist, backed by the bravura of the English actor, has been the playman of the Western world: for theatre there is nothing like London.

Beneath the creative tip of that glittering theatrical iceberg lies an enormous and invisible base of the untried and unperformed. About a thousand playscripts a year, for example, are reported to reach the Royal Court Theatre, where Look Back opened in May 1956, or several on any average working day; not one per cent of them, it is reasonable to suppose, being performed at the Court or anywhere else. On the other hand the Court has over thirty playwrights under commission, and is said to accept perhaps one uncommissioned play a year. Outside live theatre, what is more, the scale of creativity is a marvel. BBC television, for example, broadcasts some four hundred plays a year: some newly commissioned, others adapted from plays and novels already in print; and it is reported to receive some eight thousand unsolicited play-scripts every year, of which it accepts perhaps two or three.¹ The survival rate, then, is rather like that of some highly endangered species in a murderous environment, and the modern dramatist works at high risk; or would do so, were it not that he contrives to survive on grants, odd jobs and loans. But however one interprets the figures, one is left dazzled at the thought of so much creative effort, and the sound of all those clacking typewriters is enough to frighten the birds.

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What sort of being is the new London dramatist?

He is not, or not usually, a man of letters in any traditional sense of the term. Shaw, Pinero, Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham were men of letters; the postwar dramatist, on the other hand, has more often been a man of the theatre and little else, and his training is most characteristically an actor's. Osborne and Pinter both trod the boards before they wrote plays; so did Alan Ayckbourn (b.1939), an actor and stage-manager in repertory theatre, and a BBC radio drama producer (1964-70), before he settled in Scarborough as a prolific writer of comedies and artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre-in-the-Round. Tom Stoppard, exceptionally, was a journalist; and Simon Gray—a plainer counter-instance—an academic: a profession that admittedly finds its uses for the histrionic, however, and he enjoyed a theatrical time as a Cambridge undergraduate before settling in London to lecture. There are odder routes to fame than these. Joe Orton trained as an actor and learned to write plays by typing out a friend's and realising he could do it better: to be murdered by his room-mate in 1967, out of jealousy, at the age of thirty-four. Christopher Marlowe too came to a violent end when young, killed before he was thirty; and it is tempting to call Orton the Marlowe of the British dramatic revival, were it not that he wrote farces and never a tragedy. And there are other dramatists like Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker who emerged out of student theatricals and seem to have a flow of actor-ready language in their veins.

The flourishing of theatre since the 1950s has been firmly based on a familiarity with theatre itself, then, rather than on the printed word. All this was unpredictable in 1956; it was genuinely surprising. In the exhausted atmosphere of post-war London theatre, few if any would have foreseen that London would shortly make of itself the theatrical capital of the Western world; fewer still that an actor could write a better play than a writer. But it is the actor, whether professional or amateur, who in the event has conquered. As Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in the 1590s replaced the University Wits, who were bookish men, so a new breed of performers suddenly replaced the literary world of Shaw, Priestley and Eliot. They may sometimes need to be taught to spell, but they do not need to be taught theatre: they have known it, one feels, as long as they have known anything. Though they may occasionally preach from their stages, they are not, like Shaw or Eliot, primarily there to edify and convert, and their ultimate loyalty is not to dogma but to theatricality itself. They know the ropes, and do not need to be reminded of Harley Granville-Barker's celebrated dictum that drama is an art, but theatre is an industry. They are part of the industry. Many of them started in it at the bottom, and like strolling players anywhere they are by nature adaptable. One of them, Harold Pinter, may be the supreme instance on earth of a dramatic factotum: he can act, direct and write, whether for live theatre, cinema or television; while Stoppard's comedies are theatrical tours-de-force based on a technical originality he has learned from watching, it must be supposed, and from reading. Shakespeare and Jonson began as actors, too, and the parallel with another Elizabethan golden age is richly tempting. These are playwrights who, whatever their training, write speeches that actors can speak, not sermons for moralists to spout. As Shakespeare himself would have said, they are sharp and sententious.

To have worked in theatre, sometimes as a menial, is to take a briskly professional view of what theatre can and cannot do. That, to be sure, is not the only possible view, and an Alternative Theatre still survives as a link with an older man-of-letters concept of what plays are for. Nothing, usually, is more antique than an avant-garde, and it is in Alternative Theatre since the 1960s that ancient values have been mainly cherished: Victorian social criticism, a Shavian view of the playwright as a moralist and a preacher, and a sense of theatrical contrivance that Noël Coward in his younger days would have thought old-fashioned. Intellectuals are backward-looking, by temperament; and to be experimental, in that world, can easily mean imitating the theatrical techniques of the Weimar Republic or critical theories fashionable in Paris a generation and more ago. Commercial theatre, by contrast, tends to be experimental and unconventional. As Bertolt Brecht once pertinently remarked, capitalism is naturally radical, and the money-making theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue are in practice more innovative, both in technique and in ideas, than semi-amateur happenings in half-converted pubs in Islington or Notting Hill. In fact the assumption that commercial theatre, realistic or other, is intellectually or politically cosy could only survive in wilful ignorance of what it habitually does. There is nothing inherently conservative, in any case, about realism, since it is by picturing a real world, as Osborne did, that the playwright seeks to change it; and commercial theatre, in any case, is only sometimes realistic. What sells in West End theatre is no one thing but a swift succession of different things, and the huge success of musicals like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (1981), a work daringly based on T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, is hard to reconcile with the view that in London it is only drawing-room comedies with French windows that the wider public will buy or that promoters will back.

Such innovation is intellectual as well as technical. In fact the intellectual innovation of much commercial theatre since 1956 might have been designed to illustrate Brecht's truth that capitalism is naturally radical in its social effects: that the profit-motive is more likely to transform a society, and faster, than the urge to preach at it or to regulate it. It is the avant-garde that has proved itself politically old-hat, trapped as it is in the clichés of Victorian socialism, and playgoers have understandably tired of plays with titles like Maydays or Not Quite Jerusalem that deal, more in sorrow than in anger, with the predictable failures of the Old Left and the New. That failure, as they know, is largely unsurprising, and they are sophisticated enough not to wish to be told once again that women are often as good as men or that South African apartheid is wicked. Twenty years after his success with Look Back at the Royal Court, John Osborne publicly complained that the atmosphere of the theatre, when he re-enters it, depresses him with the fug of old left-wingery and battles long ago. An audience naturally seeks to be stirred and amused, and it will only fitfully tolerate the assumption that theatre-going is a moral duty.

Realism, in some qualified sense—and realism is always qualified—lies at the heart of much, though never all, of London legitimate theatre since 1956, whether kitchen-sink realism or not. The new drama was above all a social drama; and like most things characteristically British in the arts, strongest in the field of the comic. Even its tragedies have tended to be funny. That is not an original paradox, if a paradox at all. Hamlet, after all, is a comic play, among other things, and its language sparkles with fun; even the Oresteia of Aeschylus, that foundation-stone of European tragedy, has its amusing moments; and only a year before Osborne's Look Back, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had opened in London at the Arts Theatre. It was directed by Peter Hall, some twenty years later the first director of the National Theatre, and it is a sparkling tragedy where the cause of the helpless and the hopeless never looked more amusing, written in two languages as if to show that the paradox of the tragi-comic is not exclusively English and that the Irish have always known about it. One may indeed joke about despair; in fact it may be quite the best thing to do about it.

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Realism, if the word implies a touch of squalor, was a conscious and deliberate choice of the new dramatists, and their immediate predecessors had not in that sense been realists. The ten years of London theatre that followed 1945 had been years of multiple revivalism, but not of squalor. There had been Chekovian plays set in comfortable sitting-rooms, French windows and all, where gentlefolk bemoaned the rigours of austerity in a tone quietly (and rightly) confident that good times would come again. The poetic dramas of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, again, where poetic prose, from the spectator's point of view, merged imperceptibly into dramatic verse, were faintly allusive of the world about them, but more concerned with eternal moral verities than the state of England. Only an abiding emphasis on the comic, though it grows thin at times, is a continuum in this tradition. Eliot's Cocktail Party, which opened at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1949, was teasingly subtitled ‘a comedy’; its successor, The Confidential Clerk, which opened there four years later, was more cautiously subtitled ‘a play’; and both were imbued with a spirit of devout resignation, only faintly whimsical, at the spectacle of a fading culture and a world almost too bad to be borne. Fry's plays are less extreme in their assumptions, and more playful. A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), for example, based on an ancient myth, dealt gaily with the classic infidelity of womankind; The Lady's Not for Burning (1949) and Venus Observed (1950) startled audiences with their sustained verbal prettiness in an age starved by war and rationing for verve and style.

That rococo mood did not last, and by the late 1950s it had been sternly abolished by a younger breed of playwright concerned, as they claimed, not with nostalgia but with the here-and-now. In a boom world like the post-war years, Now can turn into Then rather quickly, and it must be admitted that the kitchen-sink school was touched by a spirit of nostalgia from the start. The hero of Look Back worships the memory of a father who died of wounds received in the Spanish Civil War; his father-in-law, a dignified relic of British India, is shown as amiable and worthy, according to his lights. Basement or attic poverty was after all a vanishing phenomenon when Osborne and Pinter flattered London audiences in the late 1950s with images of life by the ironing board or the kitchen sink. But the reaction of ageing opinion was gratifyingly sharp. ‘The health I have,’ wrote a retired Eton schoolmaster, praising the adrenalin-flow that only hostility can give, ‘is largely due to Leavis and Amis and Osborne and the New Statesman, and the umpire who gave me out in a critical school-match at Eton.’² Hating can be fun, and the new theatrical realism throve on it. It can also lead to sudden panic. Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, both doughty survivors of the witty chandelier-style comedies of the 1930s, fled London in despair as far as Jamaica or Hollywood, outraged by what they had seen across the footlights of West End theatres: dirty kitchens and ironing boards, draughty attics and a bucket in the middle of the room to catch the leak. All that put paid, too, and with dramatic suddenness, to the poetic revival of Eliot and Fry, which had evidently belonged to a mood too delicate and tangential to last. It was as if literature and life had suddenly and startlingly joined hands.

As myths turned real, the new spirit of theatre socialised all it touched. If, as Brecht once satirically remarked, the Germans can make an abstraction even of materialism, then the English can make even the most abstract thought concrete. In Osborne's hands a forgotten Spanish Faust play by Lope de Vega turned into A Bond Honoured (1966), where the hero is no longer a sinner in the hands of God but an ordinary Londoner with a lower-class accent and manners to match. All that can be fuelled by personal resentments, as in Arnold Wesker's Roots trilogy (1961), which was based on memories of an impoverished childhood in Stepney and rural Norfolk, and resentment can make the choice of realism look natural, even inevitable, though such social origins are no humbler than Noël Coward's. Osborne was a Londoner born in 1929, his father a commercial artist and his mother a former barmaid; and in his autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) he has cheerfully described the social embarrassments of an infancy passed between two contrasting worlds, one middle-class and one lower. Such playwrights exorcise a sense of early social deprivation, seldom exceptional as it is, by mythologising it for the public stage, and Wesker's Chicken Soup and Osborne's Look Back in Anger are purgative acts in which early humiliations are located, analysed and placed beyond the reach of hurt.

The problems raised in such plays, and only partly overcome, lie not in their dedication to realism but in their noisy commitment to dogmas that fail to fit. The new drama is realistic, and that is its strength. It is also, less happily, a world of easy theorising, of general notions quickly adopted and as quickly abandoned, and that is its weakness. It amply exemplifies Iris Murdoch's philosophical stricture that all theory ultimately falsifies and distorts. In the second play of his trilogy, for example, which is Roots (1959), Wesker invites his audience to believe that popular songs are composed out of a sense of contempt for mass audiences by the moguls who cynically control the media. But the song he invents to illustrate that proposition, ‘I'll wait for you in heaven's blue’, shows that it is harder to write good or even passable pop than he imagines, and 1959 was only a year or two before the advent of the Beatles. The masses allegedly conditioned out of their minds by the consumer societies of Western capitalism may not have been as gullible as he thinks; and the final enlightenment of his heroine, Beatie Bryant, from the mass-produced and the third-rate on which the play ends—‘I'm talking. … I'm not quoting any more’—calls for more faith than many in the audience can bring to it. John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, in the same year, asks its audience to believe that the failure of a group of deserters to convert a Victorian mining town to pacifism is a convincing symbol of the high-minded endeavours of the modern Left. That, in a way, is all too true. The play attempts ballad theatre in the manner of Brecht, but its irrealism of form is no greater than its irrealism of content, and the notion that all wars are forced on decent peace-loving folk by sinister Establishments is too silly to be swallowed for an instant, especially by a people that had just defeated Hitler. The drab wings of History, Marxist-style, beat earnestly behind some of these early attempts to characterise the realities of a post-war world; and the first act of Osborne's Look Back offers a surprisingly old-fashioned defence of the fading doctrine of class-war. There was no class-war happening outside the Royal Court Theatre when it opened there in May 1956, and there has been none since: what the play enacts, when it stops preaching and starts showing, is not a struggle between classes but between generations. It is not about upper and lower but old and young: a social civil war lived out in words, one way or another, and sometimes bitter words, behind a good half of the house-fronts in the land.

It was the creative mistake of the new drama, at the start, to misdescribe a conflict between youth and age as a war between a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. It may be worth asking why that mistake was ever made. A school of literature, after all, does not need a theory of history at all. But theory has the advantage of being brief, modish and portable, and it can seduce for a time. ‘We all stand at an open door,’ Doris Lessing wrote in Declaration (1957), a collection of essays by new and emerging writers edited by Tom Maschler, rhapsodising over ‘a new man about to be born, who has never been twisted by drudgery.’ The remark is breathtakingly naive. But then a kitten will dart at anything that moves, and the revolutionary dogmas of that age looked as if they were in motion. Marxism was thought to be creative and socialism the way the world was going. Events have long since discredited all that. They have also illustrated that the literary mind is easily deceived into supposing a century-old doctrine to be the latest thing. When Kenneth Tynan, on seeing Brecht's Mutter Courage in 1957, told his wife it had made him a Marxist, he had not bothered to discover that the play had been written in 1941 by a German communist during the Nazi-Soviet pact to assist Hitler's war effort. Intellectual addictions to theory can be glib and shallow: ignorant of sources and historical context, and complacently content to remain so.

To dramatise a generation-struggle between the energy of youth and the apathy of parenthood is none the less a potent theatrical idea. Look Back was less a political programme, in the end, than a cry for enthusiasm—any enthusiasm. ‘There aren't any good, brave causes left,’ its hero cries, remembering a father who had died of wounds received in Spain. Jimmy Porter tries to enthuse the shabby attic he shares with a wife, a lodger and eventually a mistress, and his rhetoric is hard-hitting:

Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm. Just another Sunday evening,

and he uses first abuse, then infidelity, to break his wife's will—submissive and unshrewish as she is—and bring her into loving subjection. The play has been charged with providing no sufficient cause for anger, and the reasons Jimmy gives are plainly not those he feels, which belong less to politics than to the marriage-bed. Anger can easily misdescribe itself and mistake its own source, and the chip on Jimmy's shoulder is not an education outside Oxford and Cambridge or even the older civic universities—‘not redbrick but white tile’—or the self-imposed humiliation of running a sweet-stall for a living. It is a sheer excess of spirit: an excess emotionally satisfied, for a time, by his wife's best friend. Tynan greeted the play in a generous hyperbole when he called Jimmy ‘the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’;³ and Hamlet, too, has been plausibly charged with missing the point of his own confusions of mind. The marriage at the heart of the play has to be destroyed by a vital excess of passion before it can be restored. Kitchen Sink was always more than a realism of stage-sets. At its best, it was a realism of the heart, where the dream-figures that had inhabited the verse-dramas of Eliot and Fry have yielded place to beings that give back to audiences a telling reflection of their own anxieties and unspoken longings.

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Tynan's famous hyperbole about Look Back and Hamlet, however, is only part true of the revival of a tradition, and Osborne's real sources were not Shakespeare but something much nearer his own time.

If the traditional strength of British fiction is comic realism, then Look Back is a traditional play, and its real sources are in Sheridan, Wilde and Coward. For two centuries and more there has been an unappeasable need for prose comedies on the London stage, new or revived, and no verse drama can satisfy that hunger. Political radicalism is not the point. Real people talk prose, and one likes to laugh at oneself and one's own. Osborne, in any case, was to turn conservative at an accelerating pace in the 1960s, when a new wave of youthful radicalism rapidly threatened his own. Radical noises in those days were supposed to be for the young, and the long diatribe against youth in Inadmissible Evidence (1965), which followed Look Back by less than a decade, suggests that public affairs always concerned the dramatist less as a programme than as an area of debate in which to strike attitudes that define, to others and to oneself, one's own place in the world:

Nothing, certainly not your swinging distaste, can match what I feel for you. … There is no lather or fear in you, all cool, dreamy, young, cool and not a proper blemish, forthright, unimpressed, contemptuous of ambition but good and pushy all the same. You've no shame of what you are … No one before has been able to do such things with such charm, such ease, such frozen innocence as all of you seem to have, to me …

That sounds like the envy of those who have suffered for a generation which, as they suppose, has not. It is a fervent case for the bad old days: a new-found conservatism extended, as a case, in West of Suez (1971), which comments on the decolonisation of Africa and the West Indies only a decade after it happened. The hero of that play is not a youth like Jimmy Porter but an elderly author called Wyatt Gillman, a creature wholly British in being at once absurd and wittily conscious of his own absurdity: a hero of disillusion who utters scathingly conservative views about the world around him. The play broke new ground, among writers freshly minted since the war, in suggesting subversively that it might be possible to be conservative and intelligent at the same time—a hypothesis as disturbing to theatre audiences as anything anywhere proposed in Look Back. When Gillman is summarily killed at the end of the play by local nationalists, someone exclaims ‘My God, they've shot the fox!’, and the symbolism is blunt. That old quarry for radicals known as the British Empire, happily hunted for as long as anyone could remember, was suddenly noticed to be dead, and progressives felt suddenly naked in the need for a better argument. They had lost their best game. Their fox was dead: killed off, in the worst of bad form, around 1960 by a Conservative government.

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Osborne's theatrical realism was never wholly political; and it was impelled from the start, like Amis's fiction, by a passion for social manners and a fascination with social taboos. The hero of Look Back had been an implacable critic of word, gesture and conduct—a carping conoisseur of everyone's behaviour except his own. A stage-direction speaks of his ‘blistering honesty or apparent honesty’ and of his tenderness and freebooting cruelty, which suggests that, like Hamlet, he embraces opposites. The play is not just a tract in support of his case. It excites pity as well as assent. The first act, by far the best, is a scintillating diatribe against the manners and morals of the age, and it marks a theatrical return. After the brief digression of poetic drama, British theatre reverts here to a tradition a century and more old, and the mid-century Kitchen Sink school can plausibly claim a dramatic ancestry that is continuously longer than any other. An emphasis on abuse, contention and social banter in dramatic dialogue is the tradition of Shakespeare's Much Ado, after all, and of Congreve, Sheridan and Shaw. It is a tradition of theatre that cannot easily die, since it gratifies audiences with the sight and sound of a world they intimately know.

The limitations remain. A master of mannerism, Osborne was never a master of construction, and knew it. Look Back had fumbled for an ending; and the end it gets, fiercely anti-feminine in an age between feminisms, shows a returned wife grovelling for forgiveness and nestling in her husband's arms in a childish whimsy about squirrels and bears. That has nothing to do with class-war or generation-war, and it is a highly wishful contribution to the literary battle of the sexes. But then starting one play and ending another is the characteristic mode of this playwright, and his plots are often a mass of loose ends, committing such outrageously deliberate mistakes, at times, as forgetting a character after the first act or creating an expectancy for one that never appears. Osborne's disdain for construction is candid. ‘If I would never make it as a theatrical draughtsman,’ he remarks in his memoir, on reading Pinero in youth, ‘I could never be so dull either,’ recalling his contempt on hearing an agent recommend ‘the Newtonian principle of theatre’ embodied in Rattigan's Winslow Boy. All that suggests an open defiance of the Well-Made Play, even a defiant proclamation of the Ill-Made Play. Coward on Construction, he decided when young, looked ‘pretty wobbly’. All of which is as presumptuous as Jimmy Porter, since the Kitchen Sink owed more to Coward and his kind than it was ever ready to confess. Above all, it owed the concept of the dramatic quartet.

The dramatic quartet is a foursome of lovers who change partners, whether temporarily or permanently, like the four lovers in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream or the two married couples in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915). Coward deftly re-adapted it to comic theatre in Private Lives (1930), where the crisscross of married couples is completed, one is meant to guess, shortly after the end of the play: as Elyot and Amanda steal off to resume their interrupted marriage, their second spouses, deserted on their wedding-nights, fall into that irritable quarrelling which in Coward betokens love. Look Back is a kitchen-sink version of Private Lives—a broken marriage resumed after a bout of bickering and adultery—though here the crisscross is unmatched by any rival pair. It is no blunter than Coward, who was also a master of verbal abuse. It is Coward in the attic.

Coward's plays, at their best, were nothing like wobbly in construction. They were to be revived shortly before his death in 1973, when a fashion for theatrical squalor was replaced, in its turn, by a revived taste for elegance and wit. Since then he has grown in stature both as a dramatist and a song-writer, and it is hard to think of any other playwright of the century who has left four comedies—the last of the four, Present Laughter, appeared in 1942—that are forever revivable. His post-war achievements in theatre were admittedly anti-climactic, but the Kitchen Sink owed him more than it was ever ready to concede; more, too, than he, in his horror of the new style, would ever have wished to acknowledge. Even their faults resemble his. Coward could write brittle dialogue, Osborne brittle diatribe, till the cows come home, and both were good haters. What they lack, and what their successors Pinter and Stoppard often lack, is the supreme dramatic talent of making things happen on stage: happen, as opposed to being recollected, explained or foretold. Their inventive powers lie with words rather than with events, and their plays sometimes show the strain of too large a dependence on sheer talk. Stoppard once remarked in a lecture: ‘I know what I want to say—the problem is: who says it?’, adding that characters can all too easily be walking statements: ‘I like stereotypes, and would like to write a play of nothing but.’ Flesh and blood does not come naturally to this school of dramatists. Coward's usual device for stretching the action had been to compose a comic cameo for a menial, like the breakfast-serving French maid in the last act of Private Lives. In Osborne and in his successors, much of the action occurs offstage, to be described in long retrospective speeches. Simon Gray's The Common Pursuit (1984) is an extreme instance of that awkward theatrical device. The new dramatist is undeniably a master of language, and he has chosen drama rather than fiction, it may be supposed, because he loves theatre and above all dialogue. But he is less clearly a master of action, and the two-hour traffic of the stage is sometimes visibly too long for him.

Notes

1. Shaun Sutton, The Largest Theatre in the World: thirty years of television drama (London: BBC, 1982).

2. George Lyttleton to Rupert Hart-Davis (25 June 1959), in The Lyttleton-Hart-Davis Letters (London, 1982), IV.86.

3. Kenneth Tynan, Curtains (London, 1961), p. 130.