A 20. századi angol dráma [antikvár]

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION "We English are Idealists; and on the stage especially reality stinks in our nostrils. The poor are vulgar, and in our franker moments we confess our wish to have nothing to do with them. The middle classes are sordid; we have enough of them in real life, and no desire to observe their doings in the tehatre, particularly when we wear our evening clothes. But when a dramatist presents duchesses to our admiring eyes, we feel in our element; we watch the acts of persons whom we would willingly meet at dinner, and our craving for the ideal is satisfied. " W. S. Maugham made this reflection in his Andalusia: Sketches and Impressions (1905), and his assessment of the English theatrical taste of those 'golden days' may be assumed to be pretty accurate. What attracted the Mr. Smiths and Mrs. Joneses of the late 1890s and the early 1900s was the 'amusing play with well-bred and titled persons', their marital infidelities, love-affairs and social ambitions In 1956, thousands of people queued in front of a shabby theatre building in Sloane Square, Chelsea, London to secure their seats for a play -Look Back In Anger - in which a twenty-five-year-old working-class intellectual would, night after night, pour scorn on society, the Church of England, the Press, women, and - on himself. The climate had changed, the long slumber was over. And there is the intriguing question: was this awakening a sudden one, had the change come just out of the blue? Obviously, the answer is a firm denial. The changes that were fait accompli in 1956, had started much earlier. As early as 1895, H.A. Jones noted among the cultured audiences "a growing dissatisfaction with the old stale devices of the theatre and a growing disposition to welcome a less childish and trivial form of English drama". Before the year 1895 was out, George Bernard Shaw wrote that the audiences "were getting tired of the old-fashioned play faster than actors were learning to make the new ones effective". Ever since the 1890s generations after generations had been working on "the improvement of the English drama" and, in final assessment, theyear 1956 with its theatrical revolution did not represent a new departure; it was ratiier the crowning achievement of a long-long process. - 7 -