New English Dramatists 3. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION As the British theatre declines, the British drama revives. Not since the first Elizabethan flowering has so much relevant energy been at work on our stages, dwindling though they be. The three dramatists represented in this volume - Willis Hall, John Arden, Harold Pintér - are all making notable contributions to a dramatic excitement which has been gaining impetus since the mid-i950s. None of them is revolutionary in any obvious sense of the word. Few and faint are the signs of influence from the United States, Francé, and Germany. They certainly do not rely on technical ef&ontery or shock tactics to catch attention. Their plays are traditional, in somé cases positively old-fashioned, in structure. Their characters are presented as humán beings in a given set of situations, seldom as symbols, never as puppets. Their use of symbolism, indeed, is at all times mercifully modest. And their verbal rhetoric, when they use it, flowers from the nattiralistic idioms which they one and all affect. They are all in tone playwrights of the Left: but they are not political agitators - even John Osborne's plays strike me as basically explorations of emotional situations, which are given social and political trimmings much as St Sebastian was given arrows. The commitment of all these playwrights is to the humán situation seen from the point of view of articulate underprivilege (the very phrases sound as dated as the states of mind which gave birth to them). They are humanitarian radicals of a good traditional British kind, finding their way back, in the wake of O'Neill and O'Casey, to the theatre from which censorship banished them in the eighteenth century. Look first at Willis Hall. As with most of the dramatists who have followed Osborne, anger has no place in his work. In the double-bill, LAST DAY in dreamland and a glimpse of the sea, he ÍS aS i writer of dialogue more at home with ebb-tide stallkeepers in an amusement arcade than with a middle-class husband, wife, and mistress; but the latter emerge not as less worthwhile, only as less amusing. And in the iong and the short and the tall, an army episode, his comment on the officer-class is simply to exclude it firom the play altogether. Authority is resented by those, notably the Cockney Bamforth, who normally resent authority - but here it is represented by a sergeant, a corporal, and a lance-corporal. The conflict is seen for what in fact it always is, a conflict of temperament, not of class. Mr Hall's study of men immured in a hut in the Malayan jungle, taking one Japanese prisoner but themselves surrounded and at last ambushed and killed - all but one of them - is not deeply characterized.