A Nouvelle Vague (1959-60)

SURVEYING the London Theatre a few years ago, one would have written in terms of people like Anouilh, Ionesco, Brecht, Miller, Williams ... foreign dramatists all. Now the English theatre is with us - Arden, Pinter, Wesker, Owen: needless to say, the foreign dramatists are still there, but the foreground is occupied by the natives. The Royal Court, the Theatre Royal, and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, are the patrons of the new movement, and one wonders whether it is not inappropriate to speak of a nouvelle vague amongst English playwrights.

The breakthrough came in 1956 with the English Stage Company's production of Look Back in Anger, and the pent-up energies then released have since found their expression in plays like The Sport of My Mad Mother, Live Like Pigs, Roots, The Caretaker, One Way Pendulum... The "kitchen sink " drama has arrived, a drama where " duchesses and cucumber sandwiches " are exchanged for " bus drivers and empty sauce bottles ".

Overnight, theatrical tradition went by the board, and the attempt to catch up with our foreign rivals began: the proletariat was depicted in human terms rather than as untouchables; bourgeois values were derided; curtains dispensed with; the proscenium arch and its box-like effect unceremoniously assaulted. A robust, critical theatre appeared in which the end was supposed to justify the most exotic means.

But before one dissolves into ecstasies, this surge of new drama must be seen in perspective and its end questioned closely. Doing this is one bound to agree with one critic who declared, "It is simply silly for anybody to claim that it broke any new ground that had not been ploughed by Ibsen, harrowed by Shaw and trodden pretty bare by the little theatres of the 1930's"?

It is true there is nothing new about social realism, and that although the proletarian drama is now more fashionable, a change in fashion should not be confused with a revolution in taste. Yet that a thing is not fundamentally new surely does not invalidate its existence or detract from the praise accorded it. After all, Aristotle did say there are only thirty-nine possible plots, and one doubts if there are that many ways of presenting them, as the chaotic state of modern dramatic form tends to illustrate.

The theatre is the place where truth is conveyed through participation in a falsehood. The form or means by which the falsehood is presented is of secondary importance. What is important is the end - that a grain of truth, contemporary or universal, be glimpsed amongst the verbiage.

The real significance of the new drama is that it is a thinking one and a drama therefore which satisfies a demand that has been in existence since before the war. It no longer flatters its patrons and their egocentric values; it is no longer sophisticated and trivial; it provides no longer a means of escape. Rather it is a place where one is shocked into an awareness of one's environment. Here lies the revolution.

The modern dramatists are preoccupied with the present, the plight of the ordinary human being confronted by the catastrophic truth represented by the Hydrogen Bomb, the Welfare State, and the advance of Technology. Their comments are as valid as those of Shaw and Ibsen on the values of their time. On another level they depict human beings struggling with human problems, and the reactions and attitudes they record add to the ever-increasing fund of knowledge about Man.

That their plays are by no means perfect is to be expected: they lack maturity and theatrical judgment, and these defects result in constructional weaknesses, thematic faults and the occasional blurring of purpose as in Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, but the integrity and vitality of the new dramatists is not to be denied.

One wonders where, when and how the wave will break.

B. P. MADDAMS, M.VI.