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    DRAMA

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    Jasmin Medjedovic
    The document discusses trends in British drama from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on how plays during this period emphasized societies that were unstable and individuals feeling isolated as old orders collapsed. Major playwrights discussed include Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist plays conveyed deep anxiety about the post-war world, and Harold Pinter, whose works showed non-communicating characters in a world without healthy society. Other discussed playwrights examined themes of urban violence, feminism, and the lingering impact of the past.

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    DRAMA

    Uploaded by

    Jasmin Medjedovic
    39 views11 pages
    The document discusses trends in British drama from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on how plays during this period emphasized societies that were unstable and individuals feeling isolated as old orders collapsed. Major playwrights discussed include Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist plays conveyed deep anxiety about the post-war world, and Harold Pinter, whose works showed non-communicating characters in a world without healthy society. Other discussed playwrights examined themes of urban violence, feminism, and the lingering impact of the past.

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    The document discusses trends in British drama from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on how plays during this period emphasized societies that were unstable and individuals feeling isolated as old orders collapsed. Major playwrights discussed include Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist plays conveyed deep anxiety about the post-war world, and Harold Pinter, whose works showed non-communicating characters in a world without healthy society. Other discussed playwrights examined themes of urban violence, feminism, and the lingering impact of the past.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    39 views11 pages

    DRAMA

    Uploaded by

    Jasmin Medjedovic
    The document discusses trends in British drama from the 1950s through the 1980s. It focuses on how plays during this period emphasized societies that were unstable and individuals feeling isolated as old orders collapsed. Major playwrights discussed include Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist plays conveyed deep anxiety about the post-war world, and Harold Pinter, whose works showed non-communicating characters in a world without healthy society. Other discussed playwrights examined themes of urban violence, feminism, and the lingering impact of the past.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 11

    DRAMA

    DRAMA

    • What connects many of the novels written during the Second World
    War and novel looking back to the war is an emphasis on an order that
    has fallen or is falling apart, and on the exposed individuals who then
    have to take the best of their lives in this unstable society.
    • When values are changing rapidly, however, it is the theatre that can
    often stage the most effective debate about the state of the nation,
    capturing and showing a state of flux.
    • This is certainly the case in Britain over a period of about twenty years
    that begins with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956.
    SAMUEL BECKETT

    • The major playwright who transcends these


    concerns is Samuel Beckett.
    • Like Joyce, by whom he was influenced, Beckett
    uses interior monologue as his major device to
    convey his sense of a bleak world in which all are
    isolated.
    • Where we might feel that Joyce is writing in a real
    context, making references to real history and a
    particular culture- Ireland in the 1920s – Beckett
    seems to belong more to the postmodern world.
    • The plays belong to what, since Beckett, has been
    called the Theatre of the Absurd.
    • In Waiting for Godot (1952), two tramps Estragon
    and Vladimir, wait for Godot, who never comes.
    • With Waiting for Godot Beckett changed modern
    drama forever, and changed, too, our perception of
    the world.
    • What Beckett conveys is the deep sense of anxiety
    that marks the second half of the twentieth century.
    • In Endgame (in French 1957, in English 1958) Nag and Nell, two elderly
    characters, pend the whole play in dustbins.
    • In Happy Days (1961) Winnie is buried up to her middle in a mound of earth, and
    unable to move.
    • In Not I (1973) a disembodied monologue is delivered and all that the audience
    see id a “Mouth”.
    • The impression created by the plays is of sense of desolation and sparseness.
    • Language is reduced to circularity and repetition, and isolation becomes the
    norm.
    • John Osborne and Look Back in Anger is an attempt by Britain to play a
    major role on the world stage.
    • At the time it was described as a ‘kitchen-sink’ drama.
    • Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney put a new emphasis on domestic
    realism and everyday life and language.
    HAROLD PINTER

    • The sense of isolated individuals that is


    conveyed in Look Back in Anger is present as
    well, in Harold Pinter’s plays.
     The Room- Pinter’s first play, was performed in
    1957,
     The Birthday Party- next year,
     The Caretaker in 1960
     The Homecoming in 1965
    • What Pinter presents is a world where people
    non-communicating lines of thought, or in
    fantasies, so that there is never any chance of
    a sane or healthy society emerging.
    ACT TWO OF THE CARETAKER

    I was just doing some spring cleaning… There used to be a wall plug for
    this Electrolux. But it doesn’t work. I had to fit it in the light socket…
    How do you think the place is looking? I gave it a good going over.
    Pause
    We take it in turns, once a fortnight, my brother and me, to give the
    place a thorough going over. I was working late tonight, I only just got
    here. But I thought I better get on with it, as it’s my turn.
    • The language is mundane and unremarkable.
    JOE ORJOJOE ORTONTON

    • Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and


    Guildenstem are Dead (1966) focuses
    on little men in a world beyond their
    comprehension.
    • A different slant is found in Joe Orton’s
    plays, starting with Entertaining Mr
    Sloane (1964), Loot (1965) and then
    What the Butler Saw (1969), Orton
    confronted audiences with a picture of
    bizzare people with bizzare lives, as he
    mocked the remnants of a moral order.
    • David Hane’s plays:
    Plenty (1978) and Murdering Judges (1991),
    • David Edgar’s plays:
    That Summer (1978), about the miners’ strike In Britain in 1984-5.
    • In Saved (1971) it is urban violence that Edward Bond dramatises, shocking
    audience with the stoning to the death of a baby, but it is his Lear (1971), a
    rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear that sums up the state of modern society
    as Bond sees it.
    • Behind Bond’s plays, as in the case with the works of Pinter, Hare and Edgar,
    lies a recognition of the collapse of old structures of order, but also an
    awareness of the continuing grip of the past on the present.
    • This is evident in the works of the feminist dramatist Caryl Churchill. Her best-
    known plays are Top Girls (1982) and Serious Money (1987).
    • Linda Ljajčaj
    • Marija Radović

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