Poetic Drama in the Thirties

Abstract

Innovation and conservatism in verse drama in the 1930s meant that the field was far more heterogeneous and confused than before the movement started or than it is now that the tide has receded. Traditionalists like Gordon Bottomley were writing historical or folk plays, gradually introducing perhaps Yeatsian choral and dance elements; Yeats and Eliot themselves were still developing their personal styles; and new writers were beginning to appear in two distinct schools of dramatic production: the religious drama movement was promoting several verse plays by new and established dramatists; and borrowings from illegitimate drama, British and continental, from Russian ballet to cabaret, was inspiring secular experiments in little theatres in the metropolis. This last tendency was both more distinct from other influences on poetic drama so far, and more innovative and prophetic of later dramatic development. It also attracted the most promising of the new generation of poets at least temporarily into the theatre. The plays, mostly produced under the aegis of Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre, represented left-wing sympathies, and the poets were all from middle-class backgrounds: the most important dramatically were W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally there would be no spectators. In practice every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.

(W. H. Auden, The English Auden, p. 233)