Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Drama

In the first quarter of the 20th-century Sean O’Casey continued the movement known as the Irish Renaissance. Other playwrights of the period were James Matthew Barrie, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Sir Noel Coward.
In 1940s-1950s –‘The Lady’s Not for Burning’ by Christopher Fry and ‘The Cocktail Party’ by Thomas Stern Eliot marked a brief revival of interest in verse drama.
Apart from verse drama, there was the supremacy of the ‘well-made’ play, which focus was on the middle class audience. The most interesting playwright working within this mode was Terence Rattigan, whose carefully crafted, conventional - looking plays (‘The Deep Blue Sea’, ‘Separate Tables’) affectingly disclose desperations, terrors, and emotional forlornness concealed behind reticence and gentility.
In 1956 John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ initiated a move towards ‘kitchen-sink’ drama (naturalism); John Osborne wrote ‘Inadmissible Evidence’ and several other plays with strong central characters. Shelagh Delaney with her influential play ‘A Taste of Honey’ and Arnold Wesker gave further impetus to the movement. Also working within this tradition was John Arden. He wrote historical plays to advance radical social and political views and in doing so he provided a model for later left-wing dramatists to follow.
The Theatre of the Absurd was a reaction against naturalism with Samuel Beckett as a leading figure of the movement. Through increasingly minimalist plays (‘Waiting for Godot’) to such stark brevities as his 30-second-long drama, ‘Breath’, Beckett used character pared down to basic existential elements and symbol to reiterate the view of the human condition. Samuel Beckett was outside the literary mainstream; he was a recipient in 1969 of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long as a resident in France, he wrote his laconic, ambiguously symbolic works in French and translated them himself into English.