routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Drama since 1945
467
And then with his other hand he picked up a coat hanger. A wooden
coat hanger, and – and –
DYSART Began to beat himself?
[ALAN, in mime, begins to thrash himself,
increasing the strokes in speed and viciousness. Pause]
FRANK You see why I couldn’t tell his mother. – Religion. Religion’s
at the bottom of this.
DYSART What did you do?
FRANK Nothing. I coughed – and went back downstairs.
(Equus)
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979), Top Girls (1982), and Serious
Money (1987) were seen as innovative and highly topical plays of the
1970s and 1980s. Cloud Nine shows up the sexual ambivalences behind
the facade of the British Empire, with a fascinating time-shift when a
century passes but the characters only age by twenty-five years. Churchill
mixes her times again in Top Girls, with contrasting types of feminism
from Chaucer to a female Pope. In Serious Money she was among the
first to use currency speculators as a paradigm for 1980s Thatcherism.
Timberlake Wertenbaker is altogether a different kind of playwright.
She uses history and myth, art and intertextual references, in a range
of plays which are lyrical and poetic while maintaining a strong level
of social observation and comment. She uses Greek theatre, Greek
myth (The Love of the Nightingale, 1988), and, in Our Country’s Good
(1987), the Farquhar play The Recruiting Officer (see page 147) is
woven into the modern plot. Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) is
a critical look at the Britain of the 1980s and 1990s, using the market
for works of art as its basis. Break of Day (1995) looks at relationships
in time, and contains echoes of the Russian dramatist Chekhov’s Three
Sisters in its rich tapestry of themes and allusions.
The Abbey Theatre continues to provide Irish dramatists with a stage for
their ideas. In recent years, the works of Frank McGuinness – such as
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) and Someone
Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992) – and particularly of Brian Friel, have shown
that Irish drama continues to flourish. Friel has reached audiences worldwide
with Philadelphia! Here I Come! (1968), Translations (1986), and Dancing
at Lughnasa (1990) – plays which combine the Irish sense of dislocation
and chaos with an evocation of the past in lyrical, yet realistic, terms.