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Drama since 1945
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DRAMA SINCE 1945
Nothing happens, nobody comes,
nobody goes, it’s awful!
(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
The theatre was dominated until the 1950s by well-made plays in standard
English for middle-class audiences: few problem areas were touched
on, although both Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw had found
ways of making serious moral points, despite the censor’s presence.
However, the language of drama in the twentieth century has undergone
significant changes. From Oscar Wilde in the 1890s to Noël Coward
from the 1920s to 1940s, it was consistently elevated and stylish, the
formal elaborate speech modes matching the high social status of many
of the characters. Shaw, Lawrence, Synge, and O’Casey brought in dialect
and lower-class accents and helped the transition to a more workingclass
voice in the theatre which emerged in post-Second World War
drama. The plays of Beckett, Osborne, Pinter, or Orton in the 1950s and
1960s are more colloquial and slangy, in keeping with the setting and
the characters: tramps, gangsters, newspaper vendors, unemployed
youths. Their language is more naturalistic and shows gaps, repetitions,
silences, and incoherences, modelled on normal conversation.
LANGUAGE NOTE
Drama and everyday language
In the 1950s the language used in the theatre was deliberately elevated in
keeping with the elevated social position of the majority of characters. In
plays such as the poetic dramas of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, which
though written in previous decades were regularly performed at this time,
the expectation of audiences was that they would encounter characters on
stage who expressed lofty sentiments, often on issues of great moral or
religious significance and who expressed such sentiments in conventional
poetic diction and sometimes in verse drama which rhymed.
In T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party the characters, who are all members
of the upper class, speak lines which are dominated by an iambic
rhythmic movement and by a constant engagement with ideas: