Abstract
The enthusiasm with which events at the Royal Court Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, were seized upon in the mid to late 1950s had a dual edge to it.2 It was provoked by the emergence of a considerable wealth of new writing talent certainly, but the rush to acknowledge this new talent served to underline the general sense of malaise that permeated the British theatre. Whilst there was no general agreement on the import or significance of the work of writers such as John Arden, Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, Ann Jellicoe, John Osborne, N. F. Simpson and Arnold Wesker, almost desperate attempts were made to force these and other writers into some kind of movement. But what was undeniably apparent was that something was happening and that, for better for worse, a concerted attack on the entrenched values of Shaftsbury Avenue theatre was being mounted.
The reason why Absurdist plays take place in No Man’s Land with only two characters is primarily financial.
(Arthur Adamov, 1963)1
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Notes
Arthur Adamov at session on ‘Commitment v the Absurd’, International Drama Festival, Edinburgh, 1963.
Good accounts are to be found in John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (Methuen, 1962)
Michael Anderson, Anger and Detachment (Pitman, 1976).
The liveliest debate took place in Encore, and a useful compilation is Charles Marowitz, Tom Milne and Owen Hale (eds), The Encore Reader (Methuen, 1965).
Kenneth Tynan, ‘Preface’, Observer New Plays (1958).
Kenneth Tynan, Curtains (Longman, 1961), pp. 83–4.
Robert Rubens, ‘Conversations at the Royal Court: William Gaskill’, Transatlantic Review, no. 8 (Winter 1961).
The fullest account of the reception of Brecht’s work in Britain is to be found in Nicholas Jacobs and Prudence Ohlson, Bertolt Brecht in Britain (TQ Publications, 1977).
See also Mario Germanou, ‘Brecht and the English Theatre’, in Graham Bartram and Anthony Waine (eds), Brecht in Perspective (Longman, 1982), pp. 208–24.
Howard Brenton, ‘Petrol bombs through the proscenium arch’, Theatre Quarterly, V, no. vii (1975), 20.
Tom Milne, ‘And the time of the great taking over: an interview with William Gaskill’, Encore, IX, no. iv, (July/August 1962).
Martin Esslin, ‘Brecht and the English theatre’, Tulane Drama Review, II, no. ii (Winter 1966).
Eugene Ionesco, ‘Le rôle du Dramaturge’, Notes et Contre-Notes (Paris, Gallimard, 1962), p. 72.
Published originally in Donald Watson’s translation in The Observer, 29 June 1958.
I quote the translation by Julian Wulbern in his Brecht and Ionesco: Commitment in Context (USA, University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 13.
Arnold Wesker, ‘One Room Living’, New Theatre Magazine, III, no. ii (University of Bristol, 1962).
John Russell Taylor, The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (Methuen, 1967), p. 9, p. 139 and p. 163.
Hugh and Margaret Williams, Past Imperfect (Evans, 1965).
Irving Wardle, ‘The pendulum of taste’, The Times, 26 October 1968.
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© 1994 John Bull
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Bull, J. (1994). Private Rooms and Public Spaces. In: Stage Right. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23379-3_3
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