THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

itself ambiguous. Gunmen on both sides overshadow the characters, but the gunman of the play is a sham. It is not
this supposed warrior, the ‘poet and poltroon’ Donal Davoren, who dies violently but the girl who looks upon him as a
hero, the ‘Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement’, Minnie Powell. The conflict between bravado and bravery and
between swaggering and fighting also determines the complex interactions of The Plough and the Stars. The assaulted
tenement is both partially detached from the political struggle taking place beyond its walls and inextricably bound up
in its confusions, injustices, and bloody accidents (again it is a woman, the otherwise impressively resilient Bessie
Burgess, who is the victim). When O’Casey’s experimental comment on the First World War, the ‘Tragi-Comedy’
The Silver Tassie, was rejected by the Abbey Theatre, O’Casey found a London theatre for its première in 1928 (he
himself had already moved to England two years earlier). With Charles Laughton in the lead role and with scenery for
the stylized expressionism of Act II designed by the painter Augustus John, The Silver Tassie seemed set to launch the
dramatist on a new phase in his career. Its accentuated paradoxes, and the jerky contrast between the naturalism of its
first and fourth acts and the exposed alienation of its middle two, in reality merely formed a prelude to the
uncertainty, the awkwardness, and the socialist rhetoric of his later work. Neither Red Roses for Me (1943) nor the
gesturing anti-clerical, anti-capitalist analyses of modern Ireland, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949) and The Bishop’s
Bonfire (1955), managed to recall the tense, unsentimental energy of his Abbey plays.
The work of the most representative English dramatist of the period, Noël Coward (1899-1973), contrasts vividly
with that of O’Casey. Coward combined the talents of actor, composer, librettist, playwright, and poseur and his long
career allowed each aspect a more than ample expression. After uncertain theatrical beginnings in the immediately
post-war years he achieved a double succès de scandale in 1924 with The Vortex, a high-flown exploration of the
condition of a drug-addict tormented by his slovenly mother’s adulteries, and the equally melodramatic The Rat Trap,
a study of the miserable marriage of a
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playwright and his novelist-wife. In what must have seemed to audiences an abrupt change of style, in 1925 Coward
produced Hay Fever. This elegantly malicious comedy, in which absurdity meets incomprehension, exposes both the
eccentric, self centred rudeness of the Bliss family and the bafflement of their conservative guests. His subsequent
smartly packaged excursions into Ruritania — The Queen was in the Parlour (1926), The Marquise (1927), and the
musical comedy Bitter Sweet (1929) — though vastly well-received in their time, effectively looked back nostalgically
to the lost enchantments of the Edwardian theatre. In his three major plays of the early 1930s, however, Coward
glanced freshly at the problems of the immediate past and the increasingly uneasy present. The elaborately staged
Cavalcade (1931) traces the fortunes and opinions of the Marryot family in twenty-one short scenes covering the
years 1899-1930, and includes episodes set variously in drawing-rooms, theatres, bar parlours, railway stations, and
even on board the Titanic. It concludes with two contrasting scenes, the first of which shows its now aged central
characters toasting the future in the hope that ‘this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and
greatness and peace again’. The second, called ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, takes place in a nightclub and intermixes a
song about ‘chaos and confusion’, popular dance, wounded war-veterans making baskets, and the cacophonous sounds
of loudspeakers, jazz-bands, and aeroplane propellers. The ‘angular and strange’ effect that Coward sought at the end
of Cavalcade is minimally reflected in the dialogue of his two comic studies of fraught marital relationships, Private
Lives (1930) and Design for Living (1933), though, alas, neither play ultimately fulfils the psychological promise of
the situations Coward wittily establishes. The limited ambitions of both were summed up in 1931 in their author’s
insistence that ‘the primary and dominant object of the theatre is to amuse people, not to reform or edify them’. His
last great success, Blithe Spirit, written in five days in 1941, ran for 1,997 performances in the West End of London (a
record for a non-musical play in its time) as well as touring the provinces. It offered an essential escape from the
preoccupations of the ‘Home Front’ in the Second World War, though it included, through the ethereal presence of
Elvira and the spiritual interference of Madame Arcati, the reassurance to families parted by the war that death did
not necessarily mark the end of a relationship.
J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley (1894-1984), like Coward one of the most familiar and popular figures in the realm of
propagandist entertainment during the Second World War, established his reputation as a novelist with The Good
Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). The first, an account of the vagaries of the life of a travelling
theatrical troupe, was successfully dramatized (with the aid of Edward Knoblock) in 1931. It opened the floodgates to
Priestley’s career as a dramatist in his own right, a career which ultimately included more than forty plays. His stance
as a no-nonsense populist and professional Yorkshireman, so self consciously cultivated in his wartime radio
broadcasts (published
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under the confident titles Britain Speaks (1940) and All England Listened (1968), belied his genuine sophistication