Theater Since the 20th Century

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Originally Posted by OrphanPip

You didn't mention Beckett, but I would advise tackling him and Sartre before Pinter, because Pinter is heavily indebted to their work (especially Beckett).

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I've read Sartre now, and ironically I liked his plays more than Pinter's. No Exit and The Flies are very interesting. But I have to read Being and Nothingness to better appreciate his points about Existentialism.

Pinter has disappointed me. The Birthday Party has grown on me, even if I didn't like it very much at first. I read Faber's first volume of his collected plays, and I found the other early ones a bit of the same: The Room, A Slight Ache, The Dumb Waiter are just variations on TBP: lonely, emotionally damaged people in seedy rooms menaced by some strange event.

I noticed a change in style and tone with The Hothouse, a strange allegory of bureacracy. But after reading Václav Havel's The Garden Party and The Memorandum, Pinter's effort at tackling a theme he had no knowledge of seems risible in comparison to the plays of a man who lived in a country ruled by suffocating state bureacracy.

A Night Out was great though; it had the same emotionally damaged characters from Pinter's early plays, but the cast is expanded, there are more locations, the ending is more shattering; overall, it feels more ambitious. We'll see how volume two fares.

Pinter's sort of love-it-or-hate-it. I didn't mind The Birthday Party. Didn't think that much of The Dumb Waiter but I really liked Betrayal. It's basically the story of an affair told backwards.

I love 20th century theatre. Unfortunately the Lord Chamberlain kept interfering until 1968, so it's harder to find good British plays (Coward and Rattigan are great though) before about 1958 (when Look Back in Anger by John Osborne premiered. It's not my favourite play but it's seminal in the development of 20th century British theatre). A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney is very good- both come under the 'kitchen sink' style of drama (explorations into the lives of the working class).

Then we get to the death of censorship. Saved by Edward Bond premiered in 1965 and is infamous for the scene in which youths throw bricks at a baby. However Laurence Olivier defended it: "Saved is not a play for children but it is for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it." Then British theatre output post-Lord Chamberlain decided to go gritty but it couldn't get to the heights that American theatre did.

So, my list of British theatre recommendations:
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Private Lives by Noel Coward
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward
The Deep Blue Sea by Terrence Rattigan
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney
Saved by Edward Bond
Betrayal by Harold Pinter
Educating Rita by Willy Russell
Closer by Patrick Marber

I'll do my tour of American theatre later :D

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

Pinter's sort of love-it-or-hate-it. I didn't mind The Birthday Party. Didn't think that much of The Dumb Waiter but I really liked Betrayal. It's basically the story of an affair told backwards.

I love 20th century theatre. Unfortunately the Lord Chamberlain kept interfering until 1968, so it's harder to find good British plays (Coward and Rattigan are great though) before about 1958 (when Look Back in Anger by John Osborne premiered. It's not my favourite play but it's seminal in the development of 20th century British theatre). A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney is very good- both come under the 'kitchen sink' style of drama (explorations into the lives of the working class).

Then we get to the death of censorship. Saved by Edward Bond premiered in 1965 and is infamous for the scene in which youths throw bricks at a baby. However Laurence Olivier defended it: "Saved is not a play for children but it is for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it." Then British theatre output post-Lord Chamberlain decided to go gritty but it couldn't get to the heights that American theatre did.

So, my list of British theatre recommendations:
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Private Lives by Noel Coward
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward
The Deep Blue Sea by Terrence Rattigan
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney
Saved by Edward Bond
Betrayal by Harold Pinter
Educating Rita by Willy Russell
Closer by Patrick Marber

I'll do my tour of American theatre later :D

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Just a heads up Kelby. Rattigan is enjoying a re-assessment at the moment after years of being slightly looked down on. There was a very interesting programme about him the other night on Front Row on R4, which you should still be able to catch if you missed it on iplayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...an_reassessed/

I think that the radio is going to try and broadcast a lot if not all of his stuff because it is his centenary. I find some of his work very moving.

hopefully they'll show the 1994 version of The Deep Blue Sea with Colin Firth :D

unbelievable writing for the stage in the 20th century: Pinter, Albee, late Checkov and early Reza, Pirandello, de Fillipo, Brecht, Mccullers, Friel, Fugard, Hellman, Williams, Miller, O'Neil, the four Wonderful Wilsons (Robert, August, Doric, and Lanford), the two Oracular Osbornes (Paul and John), the two Shmarvelous Shaffers (Peter and Anthony), Churchill, Stoppard, Fornes, Fo, Havel, Dorfman, Mamet... the list goes on and on

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

Then British theatre output post-Lord Chamberlain decided to go gritty but it couldn't get to the heights that American theatre did.

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What do you mean by this?

Then British theatre output post-Lord Chamberlain decided to go gritty but it couldn't get to the heights that American theatre did.

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Originally Posted by Heteronym

What do you mean by this?

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I think Kelby just means that the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain came to an end and British theatre could get a bit more daring, without the threat of the blue pencil excising anything remotely risque etc.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

hopefully they'll show the 1994 version of The Deep Blue Sea with Colin Firth :D

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I doubt that it will beat Kenneth More and Vivien Leigh's performance in the 1955 version.

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Then British theatre output post-Lord Chamberlain decided to go gritty but it couldn't get to the heights that American theatre did.

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Originally Posted by Heteronym

What do you mean by this?

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What I mean was that it was too late, really. American playwrights had been producing innovative challenging work for years. In Britain we were showing some of their greatest plays into little clubs, instead of on the big stage where they belonged.

I wonder how British theatre might have turned out had there not been the Lord Chamberlain.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

What I mean was that it was too late, really. American playwrights had been producing innovative challenging work for years. In Britain we were showing some of their greatest plays into little clubs, instead of on the big stage where they belonged.

I wonder how British theatre might have turned out had there not been the Lord Chamberlain.

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What? British theater had Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard and Osborne, to name just a few.

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Originally Posted by Heteronym

What? British theater had Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard and Osborne, to name just a few.

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Osborne really only wrote one play of note, Look Back in Anger, which is quite a good play but no longer ground-breaking. Beckett fair enough, although there are many other examples of absurdist theatre, and he is an acquired taste. Stoppard is one of the few great British playwrights of the 20the century. And Pinter, whilst he has written some good stuff, has been overrated. Ironically, Coward and Rattigan (particularly Rattigan) were dismissed in the late fifties and sixties as being irrelevant, despite the fact that they are two of our greatest playwrights.

I'm not saying that British theatre in the twentieth century was dead, but American theatre thrived. In particular, it produced lots of great female roles.

Read August Strindberg. He is a God here in Sweden.

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Originally Posted by Gregory Samsa

Read August Strindberg. He is a God here in Sweden.

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I've only read one Strindberg play- The Father- but I definitely ought to read more.

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Originally Posted by Heteronym

What? British theater had Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard and Osborne, to name just a few.

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Beckett is technically Irish. On top of that, some of his best works (like Waiting for Godot and Endgame) were written in French and first performed in Paris. Beckett I think comes more from a Continental theatrical tradition than a particularly British one. His major influences are Continental philosophers and James Joyce.

(Edit: I agree with you in general though that British theater has been quite strong in the 20th century. Kelby is probably right in saying that American theater was better, but American theater had it's golden age in the 30-70s. And I can't really think of any American playwrights worth reading before O'Neill.)

American theatre didn't really begin until O'Neill, which makes its achievements even more impressive. There was still decent theatre in American in the eighties and nineties and Neil Labute's work is divisive but impressive.

The thirties and fifties were probably the two big decades for American theatre.