routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Drama since 1945
463
career. Season’s Greetings, Absurd Person Singular, and Henceforward
are among his major plays in a prolific output during the 1970s and
1980s. Ayckbourn is probably the one dramatist who, like Greene as
a novelist, has enjoyed great commercial success while retaining a
following among the more intellectual or academic communities.
In the 1960s, following on from the social content of the ‘angry’ plays of
Osborne and the ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas of Wesker and others, a new, directly
political theatre began to emerge – often from small, untraditional theatres,
and from travelling groups with no affiliation to the normal channels of
production, which continued to focus on the West End theatres of London.
Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) caused considerable controversy, when
censorship was still in force, because of the staged stoning to death of a
baby, but Saved emerges as a key play in the recent political development
of the theatre. Bond’s Lear (1971) takes Shakespeare’s tragedy as a starting
point for an examination of human cruelty: it is interesting that Edward
Bond and Samuel Beckett should examine the geography of the human
soul in divergent ways, concentrating on cruelty and on despair respectively
– but with reference, direct or indirect, to the Shakespearean tragedy
which critics have always seen as the most pessimistic. This is a reflection
of the rediscovery of the power of the theatre as a vehicle for the deeper
examination and discussion of issues, which Ibsen and Shaw had initiated,
and which continues to be a focus for the drama.
Bond’s Bingo (1973) actually puts the character of Shakespeare on
stage, in an examination of the clash between artistic and capitalist
values. The play shows Shakespeare in his retirement in Stratford, as a
property owner rather than the cultural colossus history has made him.
Bond’s Marxist viewpoint makes Shakespeare a class enemy, an enemy
of the people, in his support for the enclosures of common land. On
the cultural level, an encounter with Ben Jonson also undermines the
traditional ideas of Shakespeare, the man, and the playwright:
JONSON What are you writing?
SHAKESPEARE Nothing.
JONSON Not writing?
SHAKESPEARE No.
[They drink.]