Sydney Newman and the ‘Golden Age’

Abstract

Extolling a ‘Golden Age’, in any art or period, can at best be controversial, and at worst boring. Looking back just for the sake of it can be valueless. Only if the recollection of past excellence can demonstrate a present lack is it worth doing. Drama is an ancient art, and the theatre (for centuries its only outlet) has had its ‘ups’ and ‘downs’. In England, Elizabethan theatre was a decided ‘up’, producing a rich crop of plays that have lasted to this day. By contrast, the mid-eighteenth century (save perhaps She Stoops to Conquer) was something ‘down’, as was the mid-nineteenth, with its fustian and melodrama. For the greater part of our own century¹ we have been fortunate — theatre flourished healthily under the Edwardians, continued strongly in the 1920s and 1930s, and for decades after the Second World War. It is only today, at the end of the century, that a glance at the list of London offerings is often disappointing: numerous extravagant musicals and revivals, yet, apart from the Royal National and Royal Shakespeare, depressingly few new plays.