Casting the Audience: Theatricality in the Stage Plays of Peter Nichols

Abstract

Peter Nichols, born 1927, is among that generation of British dramatists who matured in the late 1960s, having grown up during the second world war on cinema and music hall. Although beginning with plays for television, he aimed always to write for the stage.¹ Although music hall declined after the war (hurt by social change, television, and the rage for Bingo) it taught Nichols a good deal about theatre. And although, as he told me in 1986, many of his plays use cinema techniques, when he writes for the stage he always tries to create ‘something special for the theatre’. He is never satisfied with fourth wall realism, because he always finds ‘it difficult to ignore the audience’.2