Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Harold Pinter was greatly influenced by The Theatre of Absurd. He wrote disturbing and highly individual plays including ‘No Man’s Land’ and ‘Betrayal’. In his dramas of potent menace, a surreal atmosphere contrasts with and undermines dialogue of tape-recorder authenticity. Harold Pinter was the most important new playwright of the postwar period. He wrote comedy dramas that seem commonplace on the surface but have an underlying sense of menace. His most important early plays include ‘The Caretaker’ and ‘The Homecoming.’
Joe Orton produced anarchic black comedies. His comedies ‘Entertaining Mr. Sloane’, ‘Loot’, ‘What the Butler Saw’ put theatrical procedures pioneered by Pinter at the service of outrageous sexual farce.
Tom Stoppard sets intellectually challenging concepts in scenes. He won the praise for the verbal brilliance, intricate plots, and philosophical themes. His ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Travesties’ are among the most original works in Modern English drama. He shared Joe Orton’s taste for dialogue in the epigrammatic style of Oscar Wilde (his play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’, 1966).
Alan Ayckbourn was the most prolific comic playwright from the 1960s for theatrical ingenuity. His plays showed an increasing tendency to broach darker themes and were especially scathing on the topics of the greed and selfishness that he considered to have been promoted by Thatcherism, the prevailing political philosophy in 1980s in Britain (‘A Small Family Business’).
In the 1980s agitprop theatre - antiestablishment, feminist, black, and gay –thrived. One of the more durable talents to emerge from it was Caryl Churchill, whose ‘Serious Money’ savagely encapsulated the finance frenzy of the 1980s. Caryl Churchill mixed past and present in her comedy ‘Cloud Nine’ and wrote ‘Top Girls’, an imaginative feminist play.