Literary History

After World War II, bitterness and frustration lingered in British society. People still had to ration clothing, gas, and food well into the 1950s, and a college education failed to guarantee a well-paying job. Although the Labour Party enacted many reforms, postwar recovery was slow, and many young British who did not fight in the war became disillusioned about their futures.

One of the first playwrights to capture this new form of angst was John Osborne. He epitomized the struggles of his generation in his play Look Back in Anger, which opened to audiences in 1956. This play was revolutionary in its frank, honest style. It led to the coining of the term “Angry Young Men,” which eventually referred to a group of young writers who denounced the British upper class.

Whereas the plays of the 1930s and 1940s were sometimes called “drawing-room comedies,” which referred to their setting in a living, or drawing, room, plays such as Look Back in Anger were called “kitchen-sink dramas.” These dramas dealt with working-class life and had elements rooted in Realism.

Another playwright who made enormous contributions to British drama during the second half of the twentieth century was Samuel Beckett. Irish-born Beckett’s most famous work is Waiting for Godot. This play centered around two homeless men and their seemingly empty existence. Beckett drew upon the work of existentialists, or those who questioned the meaning of life. His other plays focused on the senselessness of life and man’s constant search for meaning. These postwar plays were called “theater of the absurd” by drama critic Martin Esslin.

Another important playwright from this era of British drama is Tom Stoppard. Stoppard has a great sense of theatrical timing. He uses puns and word play, and his plays oftern focus on the themes of science and ethics. His plays are meant to both provoke and entertain.

Harold Pinter is one of the most celebrated playwrights of the twentieth century. Born in East London in 1930, Pinter is similar to Beckett in that he uses painful dialogue to express the difficulties of communication. Pinter went on to direct and act in plays and films and has won several awards throughout his life, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. Contemporary British playwrights have been influenced by Pinter, Beckett, and other postwar writers as they search for new ways to expand upon this literary form.

Bibliography

Look Back in Anger. New York: Penguin, 1982. John Osborne’s play in three acts about Jimmy Porter, who holds the higher classes of British society in disdain.

Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Written by Samuel Beckett, this play demonstrated word play of poetry and nonsense. Its search for meaning in life captured the existentialism of post–WWII Europe.

The Stranger. New York: Vintage, 1989. A new translation of Albert Camus’s classic written in 1946. This is Camus’s tale of a disaffected, alienated young man and serves as a model of existentialist writing.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1991. This is Tom Stoppard’s best-known play, based on two minor characters from Shakepeare’s Hamlet.

Complete Works: One. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1990. This collection of Harold Pinter’s plays includes The Birthday Party, The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, and A Night Out.

Web links

Existentialism
http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=366
This is a brief history and explanation of existentialism, from The Literary Encyclopedia.

Samuel Beckett
http://kirjasto.sci.fi/beckett.htm
This is a biography of Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett, who wrote Waiting for Godot and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

Harold Pinter
http://www.haroldpinter.org/
This Harold Pinter official Web site is a complete resource to his plays, films, poetry, prose, politics, acting, directing, Nobel Prize lecture, and more.