Margaret Drabble and British Drama of the Late 1950s and the 1960s
GERMÁN ASENSIO PERAL
The late 1950s and the 1960s were a very fruitful period for contemporary British drama. According to Dan Rebellato, prior to this time “audiences had without response been crying out for something better” (1999, 6). But what was there before the 1950s? George Bernard Shaw and his widely acclaimed satirical plays from the 1910s to the 1930s were long gone, and after that there were a few attempts at revitalizing the genre, such as the timid dramatic incursions of T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, and W. H. Auden. In Britain, the years immediately before and after the Second World War showed very little presence of innovative playwrights, and theatrical production was run on an entirely commercial basis: “There were some significant amateur companies . . ., but the larger stages of the West End—the showcase for theatre in Britain—were controlled by entrepreneurial management groups, the most famous being H. M. Tennent Ltd.” (Pattie 2012, 29–30). There were talented authors before the explosion of the new theater at the end of the 1950s, playwrights such as J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, and Noël Coward, but somehow they belonged to a former tradition and supported well-established values, not only from an ideological point of view but also in terms of literary tradition.
Many critics underline the importance of a specific year, 1956,1 in the changing and revitalizing process of British drama. It was on May 8, 1956, that John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The Royal Court was, and still is, a small theater off Sloane Square, Chelsea. Perhaps unconsciously to begin with, it harbored one of the most important revolutions in playwriting in the history of British theater, giving rise to a “New Wave” of playwrights—most of them labeled “Angry Young Men”—and to new dramatic tendencies such as kitchen-sink drama. Most importantly, however, this revolution was largely responsible for English theater enjoying “its most vital period since the Elizabethan age” (Rebellato 1999, 68), a common opinion among critics and reviewers at the time. Osborne was by no means the only dramatist who entered this new vibrant theatrical scene: playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, John Arden, and Edward Bond, among many others, anxiously drew on this revolutionary atmosphere, bringing to light the country’s stark social realities with raw precision.
4. Margaret Drabble rehearsing on stage at Cambridge University in 1959. © John Bulmer. Reproduced with permission from the photographer.
An important issue to address here is why this dramatic revolution took place precisely at this time. The country’s economic and social conditions during the 1950s and 1960s seem to have been ideal for the emergence of such young writers and playwrights: most European countries—the United Kingdom included—were still licking their wounds, both economic and social, from the Second World War, and an atmosphere of depression and desolation hung over the population. On the one hand, new audiences were needed: the social outlook had changed drastically, and playwrights and their works had to conform to the tastes of a new and different generation. As Stephen Lacey has pointed out, the “search for a new, non-metropolitan and non-bourgeois audience was intrinsic to the New Wave project to represent class experiences hitherto excluded from the theatre (and culture generally) in the postwar era” (1995, 54). On the other hand, the idea of art as a vehicle for social change began to be taken into account. Even in Great Britain, before and after the war “governments had resisted offering subsidy to support the arts” (Rebellato 1999, 38). Not only theater but also films were affected, as Tony Richardson recounts: “We all wanted to make movies, but there were no avenues, no resources. We were all outsiders and poor: ridiculous to everyone within the industry and totally pathetic to British society as a whole” (1993, 94). Without subsidies, the 1940s and the early 1950s in general proved to be rather unfruitful, and the production business was fraught with difficulties. However, as Bridget Fowler claims, the situation for the arts soon began to take a turn for the better:
The burgeoning public sector after the Second World War to some extent took on the former role of aristocratic families in nurturing artists. In Britain there was undeniably a symbolic revolution in cultural production. Such changes need to be understood in terms of altered material limits. In the field of drama, there was not simply the provision of unprecedented state funding for the theatre but also the linked technological developments providing opportunities for new writing via television. This transformation signaled the emergence of a new wave of expressionism and a deeper realism, as well as a whole group of “uprooted,” socially-mobile authors. (2012, 9–10)
The state’s economic and cultural support of British theater was somewhat paradoxical because most playwrights at the time questioned the welfare state, their theater being “primarily concerned with white parochial social issues and challenging British institutions” as well as with “domestic political issues and, to a somewhat lesser extent, with theatre aesthetics” (Peacock 1999, 173). An additional factor to explain the change of direction in the state’s cultural policies was, perhaps, that theater critics in particular “routinely appealed to the idea that we had lost touch with our heritage. More specifically, they claimed that it was still buried deep within the British character, but for various reasons we had lost the art of displaying our genius to the world” (Rebellato 1999, 60). It can be argued, then, that one of the causes of Britain’s unprecedented but determined support of the arts, in particular theater, was rooted in an agenda of national identity: British theater had traditionally been deemed pivotal to the development of the genre in Europe, and after Bernard Shaw it seemed to have lost much of its profusion and international relevance.
Look Back in Anger simply gave vent to the sense of frustration with the state of the country and culture that many young authors were feeling at the time, and it was the first play to represent a new kind of drama, one that portrayed common people, with characters who spoke in colloquial language, and that dealt with everyday problems without the pretension of aiming at anything other than a representation of real life. The world had changed drastically, wrote George Devine, and the new theater had to confront the issues of its time: “There had been drastic political and social changes all around us; the new Prosperity State was more than suspect, both political parties looked the same. No man or woman of feeling who was not wearing blinkers could not but feel profoundly disturbed” (quoted in Wardle 1978, 169).
Margaret Drabble wrote Laura, a play for television, in 1964 and the theatrical piece Bird of Paradise in 1969. What had been a new kind of theater a decade earlier was by now wholly assimilated into the mainstream, and she absorbed what had been gradually expanding since the pioneering work of companies such as the English Stage Company and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop. Margaret Drabble had seen this change from the very beginning; as a would-be actress, she experienced firsthand the turmoil that had taken place in the British theatrical scene at the end of the 1950s. Later, as a writer interested in exposing her ideas to the public, she had the opportunity to transform those ideas into plays. Two titles had a particular influence on her: A Taste of Honey (1958) by Shelagh Delaney and Roots (1959) by Arnold Wesker. No young actor or actress could have remained immune to the mesmerizing performance of Joan Plowright as Beatie Bryant in Wesker’s play, particularly at the end of the piece, when Beatie finally discovers her own voice and her ability to express her own opinion. Drabble was not an exception: “I saw the first production with her [Plowright] in it [Roots] at the Cambridge Arts Theatre while I was still an undergraduate, and she was extraordinarily powerful.”2
Likewise, the freshness and vulnerability of Jo in Delaney’s play also impressed theatergoers at the time. The story of a working-class girl who becomes pregnant after an encounter with a sailor and who later settles into a kind of temporary family arrangement with Geoffrey, a homosexual boy, was a clear example of the country’s new social realities, and again Drabble had a tangential relation to the play: “I’d seen and admired all of Arnold Wesker’s work . . . and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (I was asked to audition, as an actress, for the main part of the movie of Taste of Honey, but was about to get married, so didn’t want to go to London. This must have been 1960. And I would never have got the part—although northern, I had the wrong kind of accent and was too middle class).”3 Most significantly, Delaney’s play was a source of inspiration for Drabble in her depiction of such an unconventional couple as Sophy and Lacey in Bird of Paradise. There are scenes of playful, affectionate, and sensual games between Sophy and Lacey (such as when Lacey asks Sophy if her husband is jealous “of my hopeless passion for you,” and Sophy answers, “Of mine for you, you mean” [p. 64]) that bear a strong resemblance to Jo and Geoffrey’s teasing in A Taste of Honey:
GEOF: Do you remember when I asked you to marry me?
JO: Yes.
GEOF: Do you?
JO: No. What did I say?
GEOF: You just went and lay on the bed.
JO: And you didn’t go and follow me, did you?
GEOF: No.
JO: You see, it’s not marrying love between us, thank God.
GEOF: You mean you just like having me around till your next prince comes along?
JO: No.
GEOF: Oh well, you need somebody to love you while you’re looking for someone to love.
JO: Oh Geof, you’d make a funny father. You are a funny little man. I mean that. You’re unique. (Delaney [1958] 2009, 75–76)
Drabble, though, infused her plays with her own concerns, and her comment about having been “too middle class” to audition for the film version of A Taste of Honey well illustrates the main feature that differentiates her own attempts at playwriting from those pioneer plays of social realism of the late 1950s. Drabble produced her two dramatic texts by building on the two precedents mentioned, plays whose existence had originally been triggered by the need to express the voices of those on the margins (mainly northern and working class) but that she adapted to the concerns of a broader sector of society, thus confirming Alan Sinfield’s observation that British theater in the period 1956–70 consisted of a cultural product that was “patronized by only about 2 per cent of the population” but that was “the particular form within which a new, growing and ultimately influential section of the middle class discovered itself” (quoted in Milne 2000, 172).
It is significant that both protagonists of Drabble’s plays, Laura and Sophy West, are depicted alone, with no family apart from their husbands, as if they have shaken off those cumbersome and opinionated relatives present in the plays by Delaney and Wesker. In Roots, Beatie Bryant’s character is forged against the apathy and conformism of her numerous family members; Jo in A Taste of Honey feels alternatively repelled by and attracted to the most powerful influence in her life, her mother, Helen. In both cases, family relations define the protagonists, whereas in the case of Drabble’s heroines they are alone from the very beginning, as if that is the price they have to pay for achieving their movement up the social scale. It can be argued that this progress represents a doubtful triumph in the case of Laura, a struggling suburban wife in the provinces at the initial stages of a middle-class life: nothing but affluence and gentrification awaits her. And it is of course an unquestionable success in the case of Sophy, a wealthy female entrepreneur in the fashion industry.
Drabble’s heroines of the 1960s have also moved ideologically a step forward from those first female characters of the late 1950s (Jo and Beatie) in the sense that their rights are taken for granted and that they are conscious of their status as citizens who are protected by a full range of services in a developed welfare state. Laura in fact does complain about the intrusiveness of the state in her personal life, and Sophy West is asked questions that reveal that discussions about social aspects of British life were in the air and were part of the intellectual debates of the time: “What do you think of Abortion Law Reform, Homosexual Law Reform, the contraceptive pill? What do you think about secondary education for women?” (p. 69). This is an enormous leap from the situation of Jo and Helen in their dismal flat in Manchester in A Taste of Honey, almost out of the range of social services:
JO: Look, I’ve made up my mind I want to have it [the baby] here. I don’t like hospitals.
HELEN: Have you ever been in a hospital?
JO: No.
HELEN: Well, how do you know what it’s like? Oo! Give me a cup of tea quick.
GEOF: Oh well, we’ve got a district nurse coming in. (Delaney [1958] 2009, 77–78)
These examples highlight how much Drabble’s heroines have moved on from her early models, the female protagonists of Delaney’s and Wesker’s plays. Drabble’s women belong to a much more advanced stage in the development of the nation, and they are more worldly-wise, more connected to and integrated into the social environment than their predecessors. But the lives of Laura and Sophy West would not have been possible if a fictional character such as Beatie Bryant had not been written, as Joan Plowright would admit: “I am eternally indebted to Arnold Wesker[,] who provided for the contemporary actress what Osborne had provided for the actor—a character who spoke to and for our own generation and who had never before been seen on an English stage” (2001, 44). If one of the elements that underlay British theater at the time was “the idea of culture as a battlefield between the established and the radical” (Pattie 2012, 3), then the plays by Wesker and Delaney broke new ground, offering alternatives to the well-known depictions of women on stage.
There are also parallels to be drawn between Bird of Paradise and the work of one of the most renowned playwrights at the time in England, Harold Pinter. Not only did Drabble and Pinter share the same political inclinations, as would be explicitly manifested in their belonging to the same think tank, the June 20 group, many years later, but they met several times and exchanged letters.4 Drabble even mentions Pinter in her story “Les liaisons dangereuses” (1964) as a typical topic of conversation in fashionable society: “He could hear from time to time words like ‘defence mechanism’ and ‘Harold Pinter’” and “[he] had not the nerve to go and accost a group of strangers . . . simply in order to add his own unoriginal views on Harold Pinter” (Drabble 2011, 1).5 Bird of Paradise was commissioned by Plowright in 1969, well into a decade during which Pinter had been garnering unwavering commercial and critical success with his early “comedies of menace,” such as The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (written in 1957 and produced in 1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), and The Caretaker (1960). Michael Billington writes that at the turn of the decade Pinter was “increasingly recognized as a writer of conspicuous promise” (1996, 88).
Given Drabble’s active involvement in the London literary life of the 1960s and Pinter’s triumphant entrance onto the dramatic scene precisely at that time, it is highly likely that his early drama influenced her in some way when she was devising her own theatrical pieces. In particular, it is in the dialogue of Bird of Paradise where one finds overwhelming resemblance to Pinter’s early work, especially The Birthday Party. They concur, first and foremost, in their explicit incomprehensibility. Harold Hobson, an early reviewer of The Birthday Party, praised the “fact that no one can say what precisely it is about” (quoted in Scott 1986, 10); similarly, Drabble said of Bird of Paradise that she “had a feeling that nobody knew what the play was about.”6 The Birthday Party (Pinter 1965) introduces us to Meg and Petey, an elderly couple who run a decrepit and derelict seaside boardinghouse. Stanley, a long-term tenant who treats his landlords rather badly, dismally witnesses the arrival of two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, on his birthday. They slowly start to take over his own independent self and abduct him back to social normality after he tries to strangle Meg and rape Lulu, the neighbor, during the birthday party. One could argue, then, that in terms of plot The Birthday Party and Bird of Paradise are in no way related to each other. Their similarity stems from dialogic style rather than from plot-based elements. Toward the end of Bird of Paradise, Sophy and Lacey unleash a cascade of cliché-ridden dialogue while wondering about Sophy’s money lust:
SOPHY. An embarrassment of riches?
LACEY. A helpless victim of history.
SOPHY. At the mercy of political circumstance.
LACEY. A woman in a man’s world.
SOPHY. The Married Women’s Property Act.
LACEY. The Free Woman.
SOPHY. The fight for survival.
LACEY. Poor bleeding innocent.
SOPHY. Poor little rich girl.
LACEY. The innocent murderess.
SOPHY. The strong are lonely. (p. 68)
This quasi-stichomythic exchange is later reinforced by the staccato, two-page-long overflow of frantic questions from journalists at Sophy’s self-fashioned press conference:
QUESTIONS. Tell me, Miss West, to what do you attribute your success?
What do you think of Abortion Law Reform, Homosexual Law Reform, the contraceptive pill?
What do you think about secondary education for women?
Do you think it’s morally respectable to spend all your life encouraging women to spend more money on clothes?
What do you think about the Permissive Society?
Do you think women enjoy their economic independence?
What do you think about the maxiskirt?
What do you think?
Do you think? (p. 69)
It is in light of these particular passages that the influence of Pinter’s The Birthday Party becomes apparent. Pinter’s play has been recognized for its “intense staccato form” (Worth 1972, 94) and its “pithy stichomythia” (Cohn 1962, 59), and some interventions by Goldberg and McCann in acts 2 and 3 evidence this stylistic tendency. Consider, for example, the beginning of act 3, when Goldberg and McCann, much like the journalists in Bird of Paradise, verbally accost Stanley after having subdued him the previous night:
GOLDBERG: It goes without saying. Between you and me, Stan, it’s about time you had a new pair of glasses.
MCCANN: You can’t see straight.
GOLDBERG: It’s true. You’ve been cockeyed for years.
MCCANN: Now you’re even more cockeyed.
GOLDBERG: He’s right. You’ve gone from bad to worse.
MCCANN: Worse than worse.
GOLDBERG: You need a long convalescence.
MCCANN: A change of air.
GOLDBERG: Somewhere over the rainbow.
MCCANN: Where angels fear to tread. (Pinter 1965, 84)
This use of clichéd expressions inserted into riotous, anarchical dialogues fulfills the same purpose in both pieces and prompts thematic correlation. In a letter to Peter Wood in 1958, Pinter acknowledged about The Birthday Party that “the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio-religious monsters arrive to effect altercation and censure upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility . . . towards himself and others” (quoted in Scott 1986, 82). Thus, the idea of the system as a repressive force comes literally into play: the individual (Stanley) and his free will are repressed by the forces of tradition, Goldberg (Jewish) and McCann (Catholic). Similarly, in Bird of Paradise the system continually casts doubt on Sophy and thwarts her progress on account of her gender. Being a successful and independent businesswoman whose husband is a subordinate and little else was not commonplace in England in the 1960s. At the end of the play, the journalists question her male-threatening position by consciously bringing her womanhood to the fore and in a bombardment of personal and professional interrogations try to undermine her capabilities:
Were you happy as a housewife?
Has success changed your life?
Are you ambitious?
Why did you want to succeed? . . .
Do you feel integrated?
Do you feel free?
(Sophy’s head gradually droops, and her smile fades. She sits staring blankly ahead of her.) (pp. 70–71)
As regards theater technique, in Bird of Paradise Drabble also took lessons from the new plays that were being produced by young and adventurous authors such as Shelagh Delaney. In the one-act play Drabble had been commissioned to write for the National Theatre, she wanted to do something different, to break the static, unmovable setting of conventional drama, and so designed an open stage set in which three different spaces could be seen. At the beginning of the play, for example, the television studio where Sophy is being interviewed is in a corner (“downstage opposite prompt [stage right]” [p. 50, italics omitted]); Sophy’s home, where Derek is watching his wife on TV, is at center stage; and in the other corner (prompt downstage) Lady Garfield is being interviewed. The lights fade in and out at the two extremes of the stage, producing the effect of simultaneous action without the speakers interrupting each other. Later on Sophy will have a telephone conversation with her assistant Lacey, and it will be seen with the characters in two different parts of the stage. Drabble employed additional antinaturalistic features, such as having Sophy directly address the audience (at one point, her husband also speaks to the public) and even introduces the following episode: “The next scene will be a brief and somewhat static tableau presenting my business—or one might call it professional life. To portray this, I will have to change my clothes” (pp. 59–60). To add to this unconventional structure, which is intended to remind the audience that they are watching a play, Drabble devised a sort of interrogation of Sophy at the end of the piece, which breaks completely the tenuous temporal progression that has thus far been created, producing a sense of pressure on the protagonist, a tension that she will be capable of bearing until the final curtain.
It is not difficult to guess where Drabble might have taken ideas for the structure of Bird of Paradise. As someone acquainted with new drama, she would surely have noted that the plays being developed at the time in Britain incorporated a dynamic sense of action and a swift transition between scenes. A Taste of Honey could have been a source of inspiration, “where realism is broken, interrupted, interrogated by the characters’ worlds, by the breaking-up of scenes through the use of music or dance, and by a style of dialogue that refuses to create a hermetically-sealed world, but which instead reports and questions—engaging the audience as it does so” (Aston 2009, ix). Another successful play of the decade, John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957), also aimed at theatrical innovation, escaping from the fixed concept of a single stage set. In this and other plays, Drabble saw that different options were possible: “the stage [in The Entertainer] can be quickly divided or opened up by means of backcloths, ‘flats’ and ‘swags’ so that the naturalistic scenes of domestic life can alternate with music hall ‘numbers’” (Pattie 2012, 157). The very act of addressing the audience and breaking the illusion of being enfolded within a story is of course a Brechtian technique, and it had already been known in Britain for more than a decade by the time Drabble employed it (Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble had worked in London in the summer of 1956, and the English Stage Company had performed The Good Woman of Setzuan by the German dramatist a few months later).
Finally, by making her main character, Sophy, take off her clothes, express her anxieties to her confidant, overcome her fears, adopt a false personality for interviews, fight with her husband—in short, by showing her as a complex human being with weaknesses and strengths—Drabble was drawing on a style of acting that had been initiated by the English Stage Company, far from the more formal models of previous theater, and that had promoted a new kind of character, “more physical, less dependent on the traditional skills of verbal inflection, timing, and twirling cloaks, and without a so-called gentleman’s accent” (Richardson 1993, 106–7). It can therefore be concluded that in her plays Drabble continued a line that already existed but that was far from being exhausted in the 1960s; the formula still allowed variations for playwrights or for authors trying their hand at writing for the theater. A writer such as Drabble would then have been justified in believing that the style of the new drama of the 1950s was still capable of convincingly portraying contemporary individuals and that issues of the day could also be effectively exposed.
Works Cited
Aston, Elaine. 2009. Foreword to Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey, v–ix. London: Methuen.
Baker, William. 2013. A Harold Pinter Chronology. London: Macmillan.
Billington, Michael. 1996. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber.
Cohn, Ruby. 1962. “The World of Harold Pinter.” Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 3: 55–68.
Delaney, Shelagh. [1958] 2009. A Taste of Honey. London: Methuen.
Drabble, Margaret. 2011. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories. Edited by José Francisco Fernández. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Fowler, Bridget. 2012. “Pierre Bourdieu, Social Transformation, and 1960s British Drama.” Theory, Culture, & Society 29, no. 3: 3–24.
Komporaly, Jozefina. 2006. Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lacey, Stephen. 1995. British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context, 1956–1965. London: Routledge.
Milne, Drew. 2000. “Drama in the Culture Industry: British Theatre after 1945.” In British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945–1999, edited by Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield, 169–91. London: Routledge.
Pattie, David. 2012. Modern British Playwriting: The 1950s. London: Methuen.
Peacock, D. Keith. 1999. Thatcher’s Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Pinter, Harold. 1965. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen.
Plowright, Joan. 2001. And That’s Not All: The Memoirs of Joan Plowright. London: Orion.
Rebellato, Dan. 1999. 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama. London: Routledge.
Richardson, Tony. 1993. The Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir. New York: William Morrow.
Scott, Michael. 1986. Harold Pinter: “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming.” London: Macmillan.
Taylor, John Russell. 1962. Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Wandor, Michelene. 2014. Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and Family in Post-war British Drama. London: Routledge.
Wardle, Irving. 1978. The Theatres of George Devine. London: Jonathan Cape.
Wesker, Arnold. 1959. Roots. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Worth, Katherine J. 1972. Revolutions in Modern English Drama. London: Bell.
1. Many books and articles have been written highlighting the importance of the year in which John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first produced, exploring the drastic changes that the play brought about for both British society and British theater. See, for example, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama by John Russell Taylor (1962); British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context 1956–1965 by Stephen Lacey (1995); 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama by Dan Rebellato (1999); Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present by Jozefina Komporaly (2006); and Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and Family in Post-war British Drama by Michelene Wandor (2014).
2. Margaret Drabble, unpublished comments on her plays, 2012, document sent by Drabble to José Francisco Fernández.
3. Drabble, unpublished comments on her plays, 2012.
4. In his record of Pinter’s daily activities, William Baker (2013) registers Margaret Drabble in four entries during 1987, 1988, and 1997, when she met Pinter for dinner or drinks.
5. The British edition of A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (2011), the published collection of Drabble’s short fiction, does not include “Les liaisons dangereuses” because it was initially deemed to be a sketch rather than a short story. It was, however, included in the American version (Drabble 2011).
6. Drabble, unpublished comments on her plays, 2012.