SEVEN STAGES

A History

of

British Theatre

E{trET
WORID SERVICE
A hístory of the British theatre in seven programmes. Title? Seyen Sfages.
Duration? Thirty mínutes each. Simple enough. But when producer, Amber
Bamfather, and I tried to tell the thousand year-long history of the British
theatre in those seven programmes, we found the task daunting. There was
so much to tell. Our task was not made any easier by our decision to give the
listener the story of 'theatre' rather than 'drama'. lf drama is literature, the
study of suruiving play fexfs, then theatre is the clothing of those words in
cosfumes, sefs, music and dance. Theatre is the chemistry between
performers and the audience. Somehow we had to include allthese
elements in the programmes. To do so u/e spoke to some of today's leading
British actors and directors, designers and technicíans; practitioners who
inherit the longest continuous theatricaltradition in the world. We hope that
we have done them, and their art, some justice.
Amber and I would like to thank you for listening to all or part of the sen'es
and for writing fo us. We hope fhese brief notes will be of some interest.
Thank you once again.

Michael Kaye
Presenter, Seyen Sfages

We'd like to thank the following in particular for their part in Seven Stages:
The Globe Theatre; The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art;
The Royal National Theatre; The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford;
The Theatre Museum, London
Actors Brenda Blethyn, Simon Callow, Ben Kingsley, Josie Lawrence,
Michael Maloney, Michael Pennington, Fiona Shaw, Michael Sheen,
Juliet Stevenson.
Theatre critic Michael Billington. Designer \Mlliam Dudley.
Directors John Barton, Gale Edwards, Sir Richard Eyre, Sir Peter Hall,
Terry Hands. Fight director Malcolm Ranson.
Playwrights Alan Ayckbourn, David Hare, Tom Stoppard.
Theatre poets Tony Harrison, Adrian Henri.
I The Mysteries of Theatre

The moods of nature have always impressed mankind. ln early societies

natural disasters and nature's benefits were all thought to be the work of
spirits or gods. lntricate rituals with singing and dancing to offer gifts to these
supernatural beings grew more and more elaborate in lndia and China.
Similar rituals spread throughout Asia to cross into ancient Greece before the
sixth century BC.
The first recorded Greek actor, Thespis, is now thought to have been a priest.
He stepped out from a chorus of other priests celebrating the holy day of the
god Dionysus and spoke alone.
The richest period of Greek drama began with Aeschylus, born in 525 BC,
arid ended with the death of Menander in 292 BC. During the great festivals
of Greek drama audiences of betr¡.,een fifteen and twenty thousand people
watched the plays in huge amphitheatres. Playwrights earned no money but
competed to be voted the best playwright of the festival.
Greece was conquered by the Romans who imitated Greek culture. Their
great playwrights, who later influenced the British theatre, were Seneca, who
wrote tragedies full of long speeches and bloody deeds; and the comic
writers, Terence and Plautus, whose social comedies delighted the
Elizabethan playwrig hts.

By the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in
the Fourth Century AD, the great Roman theatres were being used for
gladiatorial competitions, semi-pornographic comedies and satires against all
religion. Christian fathers such as Tertullian condemned the grotesque
practices in the Roman theatres. And in 390 AD St Chrysostom wrote:
Visiting the theatre leads to fornication, intemperance and every kind of
impurity.

After the fall of the Empire in the early fifth century, the actors dispersed,
wandering Europe as entertainers or minstrels. But the same Church which
had deplored the theatre was to revive it.

Every activity in the Church was designed to reveal God's ways to man. The
walls of church buildings were painted and the windows coloured with stained
glass to show the illiterate members of the congregation stories from the
Bible. Soon even the liturgy, the church service itself, was used to heighten
the drama of the Christian story of the universe. And the first recorded
evidence for this is to be found in England.
ln 967 AD, St Ethelwold, the Archbishop of Winchester, set down instructions
on how a part of the Easter service was to be acted. The incident, to be
performed by four male clergy, takes place when three women, the three
Marys, come to the tomb of Jesus Christ in the hope that he has come back
to life. The original text was sung in Latin and was only four lines long.
The angel begins by asking the women a question:
Quem Quaeritis, O Christicolae?
 Angel: Who are you looking for, O, Christians?
women: Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, o heaventy one.
Angel: He is not here. He is risen as he said He woutd rise. Go and tell
everyone that He has risen from the grave.

From such small beginnings grew a retigious drama which was ptayed
in
'mansions' or little stages all around the church. Sometimes thé pláys
were
so elaborate they took place outside the building. The stage directions
for the
twelfth century, Anglo-Norman, Mystery of Adam, show great sophistication
in
set design.
Paradise shall be set in a fairly high place, curtains and silk cloths shali
be hung around it, at such a height that the persons who shalt be in
paradise can be seen from the shoulders upwards. Fragrant leaves
ane¡
flowers shall be planted there; there shall also be various trees with
fruits hanging on them, so that it rooks a very pleasant ptace.

Not every churchman liked the plays. ln 1244, a Bishop of Lincoln expetted
them from his church. But then two things happened ai tfre beginninj
of the
fourteenth century which led to exciting new developments. The Bible stories
began to be translated into the new European languages, including English.
And in 1311, the feast of Corpus Christi - the body of Christ - was éstaÜlisneO
as a universal church holy day. This took place in the summer months
and
became a great theatrical street festival in the richer cities of England.

Each city that could afford it put on a 'cycle' of plays (known today as Mystery
Plays) - telling the story of the universe from beginning to the end, from
Creation to Doomsday. We still have the scriptJ of four of these great
cycles -
York, chester, wakefield and N-town (which may have been corÁntry).
ln York each playlet or episode was performed on a pageant waggon-which
moved from place to place. The Yorkshire poet Tony Hárrison wái inspireO
by
this early form of community theatre.
Tony Harrison: lmagine the streets absolutely packed - narrow streets
packed with people coming in from the countryside - farmers, children,
people selling food and drink; festivity, noise, hubbub. The plays
were
not only performed for the people in the streets, they were performed by
amateur actors. The audience knew the people who were performing
and the performers knew the audience.

The name 'mystery' refers to the craft practised by a guild or association of

workers. The church had handed over control of the ptays to the city
authorities. The city fathers checked the scripts and stored them ,*"y
carefully - which is one reason why the poet Adrian Henri was able to read
the Wakefield Cycle and adapt it for modern audiences.
Adrian Henri: we're talking about a society in which books virtually
didn't exist. Most people's way of learning was being totd thing". bo
the plays were essentially didactic. But at the same time they ú"r"
form of popular entertainment. "
Actor David Timso¡r was in the BBC World Service version of the Wakefield
Cycle.
David Timson: The language of the mystery plays is simple and
straightforward and is all the more beautiful and expressive because of
that.

The city authorities tried to match episodes of the cycles to appropriate guilds.
ln York in 1415, for instance, we know that Noah's Ark was played by the
shipwrights; the bakers played the Last Supper where Christ broke bread with
the Disciples; and the scene of the crucifixion was given to the nailmakers.

The most successful modern production of the York Mystery Cycle was not
performed in the streets of York but within the confines of the Royal National
Theatre's Cottesloe. The Director of the National, from 1988 to 1997, was
Richard Eyre.
Richard Eyre: The Mysteries were done as a promenade performance.
The audience did not sit, but followed the action around the large room.
It was thrilling to actively participate. And it's one of the greatest pieces
of theatre that l've ever seen anywhere.

Everybody involved in the original Mystery Cycles was assumed to share the
same Christian faith. That assumption cannot be made in a modern theatre.
So how would the company re-create the communial spirit of the fifteenth
century? The actors were dressed in modern clothes and mingled with the
audience before the performance. Actress Brenda Blethyn played Mary
Magdalene.
Brenda Blethyn: The actors would go in about a quarter of an hour
before the show began and have a chat with members of the audience.
It was a terrific ensemble feeling. lt was thrilling.

At the same time that the Mystery Cycles were teaching the history of the
universe, another, more intimate kind of drama was exploring the problems
afflicting the individual soul - the Morali§ Play.

Death was never far away in the Middle Ages. Danger from disease, violence
and natural disaster was ever-present. And people were terrified of where
their souls might go after dying. They hoped for Heaven but Hell was what
they feared.

One of the last and simplest of the Morality Plays was written in the early
fifteen hundreds. Everyman tells the story of one man's journey to the grave.
Without warning Death tells Everyman to prepare for his departure from life.
He has only twenty four hours. Everyman looks for somebody - anybody -
who will agree to go with him on his journey. The parts in the play are human
- Kinsman and Cousin are two of the roles - or personifications of abstract
qualities, such as Beauty, Wisdom and Goods (Riches).
ln the end, Good Deeds - weak and feeble though she is - is the only
character who will go with Everyman and speak for him. ln the Royal
Shakespeare Company production of 1996, Joseph Mydell played Everyman.
Joseph Mydell: I asked a Muslim friend who came to see the play
whether he didn't find all this Christian theology too much. He said,
"No". He said the play had a universal message. lt is about mortality.
ln addition to the Mystery Cycles and the Morality plays there were other
religious plays on saints' days. Unfortunately most of the secular theatre
which must have been performed on village greens and in market squares,
has disappeared without trace.

The Mystery Cycles and Morality plays endured for two hundred years -
longer than any other kind of theatre in Britain. They did not die naturally.
They were censored out of existence.
King Henry Vlll of England wanted to divorce his wife. He needed the Pope's
permission. The Pope said, "No". So King Henry broke with Rome in the
fifteen thirties and set up his own church, with himself at the head of it. The
new bishops of the Church of England frowned upon performances of plays
which presented the Old Religion as the truth. The old plays died one by one.
One or two survived into the childhood years of \Mlliam Shakespeare. But by
the 1590's they had gone.
Perhaps the saddest entry in the records of Hereford Cathedral reads:
This year, Corpus Christi play put away forever.

2 A Muse of Fire
King Henry Vll came to the throne of England in 1485. His accession brought
to an end a thirty year period of conflict between the rival houses of York and
Lancaster which had sapped the country's energies.

King Henry encouraged cultural activities. He revived the__cus_tom of fraving a

smq]] group._-o-f.aclors at court. And his son, Henry Vlll, took this cultural
(t)'
,
inteiest much further than his father. Henry Vlll loved pageantry of all sorts ,

music, poetry and the theatre. His Lord Chancellor until 1535 was a scholar
and statesman, with friends throughout Europe. To discover what theatre
was like in the fifteen thirties we must turn to a play written in the 1590's,
named after Henry's Lord Chancellor - 'Sir Thomas Moore'.
Moore: Welcome, good friend, what is your will with me?
Player: My Lord, my fellows and myself,
Are come to tender ye our willing seruice
So please you to command us.
Moore: What, for a play you mean?
Whom do you serve?
Player: My Lord Cardinal's grace.
Moore: My Lord Cardina!'s players? Now trust me, welcome.
The players are wandering or'strolling' players who go from inn to inn or from
one great country house to another to perform. They are under the protection
of a great lord - in this case, the Lord Cardinal. (Players without protection
always ran the risk of being driven away, put in the stocks or arrested as
'rogues and vagabonds'.) The kind of plays they performed were usually
short 'interludes' or e-ntertainments, both secular and religious. Sir Thomas
welcomes the players because he has ímportant guests to dinner, the Lord
Mayor of London, some aldermen and their wives. (By the 1590's when the
play was written, the Mayor and council of London no longer allowed the
players into the city.) Sir Thomas chooses an interlude called 'The Marriage
of Wit and Wisdom'. He then asks the Player...
Moore: How many are ye?
Player: Four men and a boy, Sir.
Moore: But one boy? Then I see
There's but few women in the play.

Women were not allowed to be actors on the British stage until the 16_6Q's.
Tñélilárts weie pláyed by boys or men. And with so few members in this
troupe, each actor would have to 'double' or play more than part. The boy
would play three female roles in the Marriage of Wit and Wisdom.
The manuscript of Sir -lhomas Moore contains five sets of handwriting, one of
which has been identified as belonging to William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was born in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon in the West
of England ¡n !§-LL Roger Pringle is Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace
Trust in Stratford.
Roger Pringle: While growing up, Shakespeare experienced quite a
wide range of different sorts of play. Plays that dramatised biblical
incidents; plays originating in the medieval morality plays; and general
pageants and entertainments con¡rected with the farming year. When
you look at Shakespeare's own professional plays, written for the
London stage some years later, you do get some taste, I think, that he
knew a lot about amateur theatre.

The most familiar example is from a Midsummer Night's Dream. A group of

working men have been chosen to present the Duke with an interlude -
'Pyramus and Thisbe'.
Quince: Francis Flute the bellows-mender?
Flute: Here, Peter Quince!
Quince: Flute, you must take Thisbe on you.
Flute: What is Thisbe? A wand'ring knight?
Quince: lt is the lady that Pyramus must love.
Flute: Yea, faith, let me not play a woman. I have a beard coming.
Quince: That's all one. You shall play it in a mask, and you may speak
as small as you will.
Bottom: An I may hide my face, let me play Thisbe too. l'll speak it in a
monstrous little voice. "Thisne, Thisne!" "Ah, Pyramus, lover dear! Thy
Thisbe dear and Lady dear."
 By 1588 Shakespeare had left his home and family for the capital. His sense
of timing was almost perfect. Patrick Spottiswood of the Globe theatre in
London.
Patrick Spottiswood: Sha-k_espgqre was born at the same time as the
,theglre building industry was born. So when he came down to London,
there were these new theatres that needed new writers and new actors.

The Red Lion was built in 1567 and then in_1_526__9ame The--.T_-h-e_?-t,re. These
playhouses were built outsídg"!h_e Cily and North of the River Thames. The
liveliest leisure-pleasure district in London lay South of the river. Every
afternoon by two o'clock thousands of people would cross the river to see a
play at The Rose, The Hope or The Globe. Tourist guide, Mary Frost.
Mary Frost: People would have to cross -Lg1¡dqn Brldge which was the
only bridge across the river until 1750. Or, if you had money, you could
ask a ferryman to take you across. And for a penny he would row you
across to the Globe.

When Shakespeare reached the theatre district, he found other ambitious

young playwrights had got there before him. The two most successful were
T_ho_nAq Kyd and Qhristopher Marlowe. We know that's Kyd's great success,
The Spanish Tragedy, impressed the young Shakespeare. (He refers to it in
his own plays.) Christopher Marlowe had such a hit with his epic about a
conquering superhero, fg¡@urhjle, that he had to write a sequel. Marlowe
is regarded as th-e inventor of several kinds of plays. ln six years he wrote,
Edward ll, a hi-s,tqry play; the Jew of Malta, a black [arce; and a profound
lor9l t¡_agq,C-y, Dr. Faustus. Actor Ben Kingsláy has played Faustus.
Ben Kingsley: "Stand still you ever moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come."
It's beautifully balanced language. Every line has a built-in spring that
propels the language forward.

t[e
unrhymed, rhythmic iambic pentameter used by Marlowe,
_P,_l,Anh-versq,
was developed by Shakespeare to express the subtleties of noble or tragic
f-e_-el!ng

The Globe Theatre was built in jl Sgg {with the materials from the dismantled
Theatre). By that time Shakespeare had written a gory tragedy, Titus
Andronicus; s_e,v_eralco.m_edies; seve-ral h_ist.o_iles; and a rgqantlc tragedy,
Romeo and Juliet. The balcony scene between the two'star-cross'd' lovers
probably took place high above the stage in a gallery. Patrick Spotiiswood is
responsible for education at the new Globe Theatre.

Patrick Sottiswood: The Globe is a twenty-sided Wooden O. lt's made

up of three galleries that surround a yard. And thrust into the middle of
that yard is a wide and deep stage. Above the actors head was the
gorgeously painted roof, known as the heavens, supported by two huge
pillars.
 t(

The stage of the original Globe was-l-o§_lhree feet wide. There was tittle or
n-o sqgngry, costumes were contemporary and the only llghtlng was natural.
And yet three_lhousand people a day crowded into the theatre to hear the
tatest play by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's men. Mary
Fiost shows visitors round the preseni-Oay Globe.
Mary Frost: You had to pay o_lgl=olhr-ee Elizabethan pennies to come
in. For a penny you stood on the ground around the stage; you were a
'groundling' or'penny stinkard' because you stank rather badly. For
two pennies you could sit in the lower gallery; for three you could go to
the top and sit by the 'v,uind=hgles' - from which we get 'windows'.

The real glory of Elizabethan theatre was not what you saw but w-he-t you
heard. Tftg l-a¡guqge set the time, the place, the plot and the feelings óf tne
P!-?y. John Barton, a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the
"l§60's and 70's, led the modern revolution in the acting of Shakesjeare Uy
persuading actors to concentrate on the text of the plays.
John Barton: What the Elizabethans had was the text. Actors tearned
their parts very quickly, acted in masses of plays, didn't have much
rehearsal time and didn't even have a director. The text was all you had.
They must have been able to pick up clues, or signals, in the text.

Texts of plays had to be submitted to the Master of the Revels who was the
-Coürt Censor. Even after a play was approved actors and playwrights could
iiitt spenO time in prison. Shakespeare's great rival and contempolary, B*e-n-
Jonson, spent time in prison for .§_qdttj_o¡'. Hig!o_1y plays were_ alw_ays risky,
Oéaiiñg as they did with pqlitical issu_es whicn midni bé misinterpretéd.
Shakespeare's three parts of Herfry-Vl'Lnd_ Richqrd lll ñád pássed the censor
but his next history play, Richard ll, almost brought disaster.
' '-2.
G_,1\,*_¿. ,u 4 i...i (.;¿¡t,,;r",'r.+")
The story is about a talented, intelligent king, unsuited to the throne, who is
deposed by his cousin, Bolingbroke. Towards the end of her reign, Henry
Vlll's daughter, Queen Elizabeth l, who ruled for over sixty years, felt her
throne increasingly threatened by the lords surrounding her. On one occasion
she is alleged to have remarked, "l am Richard ll, know ye not that?" One
day a group of men close to the Earl of Essex, the Queen's former favourite,
persuaded Shakespeare's company to put on 'the old play', Richard ll. The
next day the Earl of Essex began a rebellion against the Queen. lt f¿¡iled and
he was beheaded. Shakespeare and his colleagues were lucky. I[úpleq
of ignorance of the plot was believed and they were let off with a fine.

The play itself is written entirely !l_!!en[ ve_¡-q_e_(igmpic penlameteQ. The styte
moves from a formal page-gnt _o_f "medie-val-chivalry to a personal tragedy of
-lyricism and pathos. Kenneth Mcleish, a director of Shakespeare, has
studied the text of Richard ll closely.
Kenneth Mcleish: Richard talks about the holtow crown that a king
wears. He compares it to the Court of Death and says that death grins
out of that like a skull. And, at an unknown moment, Death is going to
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 come in the middle of all the pomp and majesty with a little pin and
"Farewell, King."

Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. She left a countrythat, although troubled in

her last years, was stronger and more secure than she had found it. And one
of her greatest legacies was the new professional theatre in permanent
playhouses, peopled by companies of actors and playwrights who gave bírth
to plays still able to move a modern audience. Ben Jonson, speaking of
Shakespeare, summed up the achievement of the period.
"He was not of an age, but for all time."

3 A Kind of Wild Justice

A funeral bell tolls and the ghost of the dead man appears on stage. The
ghost is seeking revenge for his untimely death. The ghost, and the theatre
audience, watch as a love story is cut short by murder, murder leads to
madness, and madness ends in a final scene of horror and destruction. This
is the plot of The Spanish Tragedy, a play by Thom¿s Kyd, and probably the
most influential piece of theatre staged in the last years of the sixteenth
century. The atmosphere, effects and plot devices of The Spanish Tragedy
inspired dozens of plays in the early seventeenth century - plays we now call
Revenge Tragedies, or the Theatre -of _Blq_qd.
.:i \
,'.-:'-.1
' -r1:- '' The ghost, mgl-dg-rs, love tangle, madness and bloody--e¡ding are all to be
.,.,
''' found in what is thought of today as the greatest tragedy in the history of
(rif British theatre - Slal<espeare's Hamlet. Hamlet was first performed in 1600.-
The range of emotions and moods that Hamlet himself explores in
Shakespeare's longest play is breathtaking. And the part offers a further
challenge to the actor - to follow in the footsteps of all the great Hamlets past.
Actor Ben Kingsley.
Ben Kingsley: I was absolutely terrified to be asked to play it and ! was
thrilled to be asked to play it. Having rehearsed for ten weeks, I felt
v€rY, very sick on the first night with terror, really itl. Suddenty I was left
on stage all by myself and I was able to articulate from my gut exactty
how I was feeling because I opened my mouth and I said, "Oh that this
too, too solid flesh would melt." - "Ladies and Gentlemen, !wish lwasn't
here."
'- Hamlet learns from the ghost of his father that the murderer of Old Hamlet
was his father's brother, Claudius. Now not only does Claudius sit on the
throne that Hamlet should have inherited from his father - he has also married
Gertrude, Hamlet's mother.
Hamlet is torn between duty and sin - between revenge and taking another
human being's life. He delays and delays. And he reveals, from time to time,
alone on stage, the perplexed state of his mind and his soul.

',{ü
/7:-r'-...'
{ l-, {;
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the
mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take
arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them."

The problem for an actor speaking the most familiar speech from
Shakespeare's best-known play, is the temptation to give the lines too much
emotional weight. Royal Shakespeare Company director John Barton,
believes the speech should come more from the mind than the heart.
John Barton: There's a big acting trap here which is to look for, and
explore, the mood that the speech suggests and to go into anguished
soul-searchings and then you generalise what is actually an intellectual
exploration. lt could be Hamlet just exploring a hypothesis that's
attractive.

Shakespeare himself would have agreed with John Barton about how actors
should perform his plays. When a troupe of strolling players arrives at the
castle of the King, Hamlet engages them to perform a play for Claudius. The
play will re-enact the murder of Hamlet's father. Hamlet wants to see how
Claudius will react. Like a modern theatre director, Hamlet gives the actors
some hints on how they should perform the play. Ben Kingsley.
Ben Kingsley: I was saying to them this has got to be naturalistic, guys.
This has got to be real. We cannot ham this up. We have to-hold the
mirr_or up to nature. Maybe this is a clue to where Shakespeare was
pushing his company.
"Let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the
word to the action, with this special observance: that you o'erstep not
the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of
playing, whose end, both at the first as now, was and is to hold, as
'twere, the mirror up to nature."
He's saying theatre has always been, must always 6e,.a reflegtlo¡_,of our
:ogi-ety. Huge statement from the 'Guv'nor', basically.
'Hamlet' ends with a sword fight between the Prince and Laertes, a young
courtier who holds Hamlet responsible for the death of his sister, Ophelia. The
audience in 1600 looked at stage fights with a more critical eye than we do
today. Fight Director, Malcolm Ranson.
Malcolm Ranson: The audience in Shakespeare's day would all have
been totally aware of what was happening on the stage because
everyone would be wearing a sword. Everyone would need a knife for
eating purposes but the servants, usually the higher-paid servants,
would wear a sword and buckler. The gentry would all be wearing
rapiers, the new fashion, and there would be lots of fencing masters
available to teach them.

Hamlet's best friend, Horatio, tries to warn him against taking part in a sword
fight with Laertes. Horatio's misgivings are justified. The tip of Laertes' sword
has been poisoned. ln this culminating scene of violence, Laertes, Gertrude
10
and Claudius all die. Hamlet himself, pricked by the poisoned sword, dies
soon after them. But before the duel, the young Prince confides in Horatio
that he is now ready for death.
"There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. lf it be now, 'tis
not to come. lf it be not to come, it will be now. lf it be not now, yet it
will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes. Let be."

ln the years after 1600, Shakespeare continued to write tragedies describing

the fall_ql great men. There are elements of revenge in OJ.!e![g, in King Lear,
in Macbeth but revenge is no longer the dominant theme.

But revenge tragedies continued to be very popular. ln 1614, the year after
Shakespeare retired from the London theatre, the public were treated to the
first performance of the Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. As in Hamlet, the
title role of the Duchess makes enormous demands on an actor. Juliet
Stevenson.
Juliet Stevenson: There were nights when I went in to play the Duchess
of Malfi when ljust felt it was an impossible task. The Duchess gets
married against her brothers'wishes to a steward and very quickly has
three children in succession, in a house in which those brothers live; so
she has to keep an entire married life completely under wraps. They
escape, she's arrested, hurled into prison. ln prison she's given a dead
man's hand to shake, then sees her husband, so she thinks, hanging up
dead in a doorway with one of her children. Shortly after which various
hooded people come into the prison and strangle her. And you've got
to tell that story, and live that journey, in a couple of hours. And, you
know, it's about as difficult as acting gets, some of it.

Webster sets the Duchess of Malfi and his other great tragedy, T¡eyhltq
Dev_il, in ltaly. All ltalian rulers were seen as cg11ning,_cruel and vicious. But
the ltalian setting of the plays was a dlsguise for criticism of contemporary
British society.
Gale Edwards, who has directed The White Devil for the Royal Shakespeare
Company, feels great sympathy towards these lost women of Webster,
trapp_ed jn_q WoF_?n hating world.
Gale Edwards: Vittoria Corombona is the centre of the play. She's
married to a man she doesn't love. So she has an affair with Brachiano.
She is a kind of ripe and fantastic woman and this is a world where the
power of women and their feminini§, if you like, their female strengths,
must be crushed, and in fact all the women in the play are destroyed
and crushed by men. lt's extremely misogynistic. There are lines in the
play like "Women are just curs who come out at night." And yet the
world presented on stage is a world pretty much without hope; so, in a
world that suppresses the female, what we seem to end up with is a
world that disappears down a sewer.

11
The White Devil, like Hamlet, ends with a sword fight. The Duke of Florence
sends a pair of murderers to kill the unfaithful Brachiano. They put poison
inside Brachiano's protective helmet and, as the poison begins to eat into his
flesh, he screams and rushes off-stage - for some help with his make-up!
Gale Edwards.
Gale Edwards: When he returns on stage, his whole head is bleeding
and blistered and covered in boils and pus. And to the horror of the
court and Vittoria, he staggers about in a state of raving madness -
while making some very lucid points, of course, about corruption - and
writhes about and dies in the most hideous way.

Sensational scenes of horror and malíce are also a feature of the plays of
Thomas Middleton. During his long, productive career as a playwright, he
iaw the richer sections of the audience move from the big, open-aii
playhouses to the smaller, enclosed private theatres. Middleton wrote
several revenge plays and added a few ingredients of his own. Sir Richard
Eyre directed Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling for the National
Theatre.
Sir Richard Eyre: The themes of the Changeling are quite simply s_e_X
3-nql¡9!9y. lt's about obsessiona! lust and Iust between the classes;
between a young woman of a very high-born family, a merchant family,
and a servant, a disfigured servant, a disenfranchised servant. So
you've got in the play the widest possible social barriers and the widest
polar extremes of sexual attraction.

The servant is De Flores and his mistress, the beautiful Beatrice-Joanna.

She is betrothed to one man and in love with another. She persuades De
Flores to kill her fiancé. She then tries to reward him with money. But De
Flores wants something else.
"Come, kiss me with a zeal now. I have eased you of your trouble and I
am in pain and must be eased of you. lt is a charity. Justice invites
your blood to understand me." .,'

The revenge
--v-v_
traqedy survived until the 1630's. Sex and violence on stage
were not universally popular in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Some Protestant critics condemned all forms of theatre as un-Christian. I
suppose they hated seeing themselves mocked on the stage by playwrights
such as Shakespeare, Middleton and Ben Jonson. Actress Josie Lawrence
has played Doll Common, a prostitute, in _B5¡ {Uggl_splAy_Itle_Alqhe_ml_qt
Josie Lawrence: He wrote for the London of his time and so his plays
were set in Blackfriars in the centre of London and were filled with
prostitutes, con-merchants, shopkeepers - you know, o_fdi¡13_ry_pe-oa[e -
pgfLlAls. And to put puritans on stage at that time would have been
quite a funny thing to do because they were so against theatre, so to
have two of them in the actual play would have been hilarious*.

12
The people in Jonson's plays are not rounded characters but dominated by
o¡e_leading trait of personality. Actor, Simon Callow, has played Face, a
confidence Tríckster, in The Alchemist.
Simon Catlow: Urban satire is what it is and it's a remorsetess
uncovering of human stupidity. That's a very particular kind of ptay;
Very, very different to a Shakespearean play.

Both King James I and his son Charles I were g¡,e_at palrons of.the arts_.,
Although they enjoyed the products of the pub_llq theatre, they had the taste
and the resources to encourage their own royal entertainment - the court
masgqe. Theatre historian, Simon Trussler.
Simon Trussler: The masque was perhaps the only way in which the
English celebrated Renaissance patronage on anything like the scale of
the great ltalian princes. They Iavished money on the spectacle, on the
fusion of music and dance and ac,ti-ng and sp_elg_bgnd wond-g¡f-u_[stage
mach.inery.Jónson rosé tb that téChlicat chattéñge. He lovááiñe
possibilities of theatricality.

Ben Jonson joined with the architect and set-designer lnigo Jones to
compose ma*s_qu_e§=j¡ honour of a king. ln 1618, Jonson spent four thousand
pounds on a royal mask. He died in poverty in 162§, ln 1634, another royal
masque cost twenty one thousand pounds.
ln 1642,-civil war broke out and in 1649, King Charles I was executed. Three
of his enemies during the civil war had taken part in the last great masque
played at the court of the king. Charles himself had played the part of
Philogenes, the lover of his people.

4 Worldly Ways
ln 1660 the bells rang out to welcome King Charles ll back from exile in
France. After eighteen years of rule by the republican Commonwealth,
London greeted the restoration of the monarchy with joy. All the old theatres
had been destroyed by the Commonwealth government, but King Charles
granted patents to run theatrical companies to Sir William Davenant and
Thomas Killigrew - who had stayed loyal to him throughout his exile. The two
new companies took up residence in old indoor tennis courts! These were
soon replaced by new theatres which incorporated ideas imported from
France and ltaly.
Theatre historian Jacky Bratton.
Jacky Bratton: What had existed before the Restoration didn't include
anything like as much scenic space; that is, space for decorative
painted backgrounds. And the new theatre had something called a vista
stage, which stretched off into the far distance, showing sometimes
even modern contemporary street scenes, which again was a very new
thing. And then it had a big thrust fore-stage in front of the proscenium
arch where actually most of the acting took place; and that was very
13
much in the middle of the audience. And you have to remember that the
theatre was fully lit, insofar as anywhere was fully lit - it was by candles
- throughout the audience space, as well as the stage space. Therefore
the spectacle that you went to see was the audience just as much as the
play and you went there to see and be seen.

For a shilling, from the highest gallery in the theatre, you could stare down at
the courtiers in their six shilling private boxes, or at the fashionable young
men jostling on benches in the pit. Denied theatrical entertainment for so
long, this voracious audience demanded a new play every three days. And
both the patent theatres shared an innovation insisted on by King Charles -
and delighted in by the diarist Samuel Pepys -iwomen on stage,. Historian
Janet Todd.
Janet Todd: Earlier, when boys had been dressed as women, the plays
presented women as complex, thinking, anxious, uneasy and so on, but
with the arrival of actual female bodies, it seemed that nothing but sex
could be portrayed and as a result plays became far more bawdy than
they had been before. lt seemed that a woman could not be on the
stage without exposing her sexuality in some way and without the
audience responding primarily to that sexuality.

Actresses were encouraged to play'breeches parts' in which they would be

disguised as men - and give the audience a view of their legs. Many tales of
sexual licence and bawdiness have come down to us from the Restoration.
But we forget that many of the plays of the period made enormous demands
on the skill and intelligence of the actress.
As a girl, Nell Gwynne sold oranges in the theatre; later became the mistress
of the King; and ended her life in a grand house, her sons Dukes. Nell
Gwynne was also a gifted, instinctive comic actress with great sex appeal.
One of her biggest fans was Samuel Pepys.
March 2nd 1667. After dinner with my wife to the King's house to see
The Maiden Queen, a new play of Dryden's. The King and Duke of York
was at the play but so great performance of a comical part was never I
believe in the world done before as Nell doth this, both as a mad girl and
then, most and best of all, when she comes in like a young gallant and
hath emotions and carriage of a spark, the most that ever I saw any man
have. lt makes me, I confess, admire her.

Actor Simon Callow has made a special study of Restoration theatre.

Simon Callow: Audiences behaved abominably by our standards. They
talked all the time. They threw things at each other. They came in and
out of the theatre. There was a vigorous trade in prostitution around the
back of the stalls where people would frequently actually have sex
publicly. One can only marvel. I mean, it's almost impossible to
comprehend what the actors actually did, how they dominated these
audiences, especially as, even for the time, the language was extremely
wrought and high-flown, and in some cases quite dense.
14
Samuel Pepys: December 8th 1666. To the King's Playhouse and there
did see a good part of The Engtish Monsieur, which is a mightily pretty
play, very witty and pleasant, and the women do very well but above all
little Nelly. But lam mightily pleased with the play and much with the
house, more than ever I expected. The women doing better than ever I
expected and very fine women.

But women didn't confine themselves to acting. Aphra Behn was the first
British woman to earn her living by writing; plays, novels and translations.
Biographer of Aphra Behn, Janet Todd.
Janet Todd: Aphra Behn wonderfully expresses the Restoration
because she starts writing in 1670 when the Court of Charles ll becomes
quite clearly more cynical than it had been and she dies in 1689 at the
end of the Stuart period. She reflects the kind of excitement of the sort
of house paú, the carnival, that is the world of the Stuart Court. She
loves this society. She finds its abundance, its excess, very much to
her taste.

Then how disappointed Aphra Behn must have been at the attacks she
sustained from envious male critics. Contemporary male playwrights had
social ambitions. Congreve, Wycherley and Vanburgh wanted to bring theír
talents to the attention of the King. And once he had found a duchess,
Congreve was only too happy to leave playwriting behind him.

But Aphra Behn was driven by something more than mere ambition. Her
plays were popular, but she had something to say - something dangerous to
say about the position of women in Restoration society. And she stoutly
defended her right to say it. Jacky Bratton.
Jacky Bratton: She passionately believed that she shouldn't be
prevented from writing about everything that men wrote about. She
says this in several prefaces to her plays - that she has been unjustly
criticised for bawdy scenes when men wouldn't be criticised for writing
exactly the same sort of thing.

"When they can no other way prevail with the town, they charge it with
the old, never failing scandal that 'tis not fit for the ladies, as if the
ladies were obliged to hear indecencies only from their pens and plays."
Part of the preface to Aphra Behn's play, The Lucky Chance. The moral of
the play is defiant. Women should love where they please and have the
same sexual freedom as men.

ln 1689 King James ll was driven from the throne and in the new era of
William and Mary, the theatre shifted its attention away from bawdy sexual
licence to more polite social questions. William Congreve's play'The Way of
the World'features a courting couple, Mirabell and Millamant, who are well-
matched in intelligence and eloquence. The negotiation about the terms of
marriage in Act lV gives us the essence of Congreve.
15
Millamant: lwor¡'t be called names after lam married. Positively, I
won't be called names.
Mirabell : Names?
Millamant : Aye as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart
and the rest of that nauseous cant in which men and their wives are so
fulsomely familiar. I shall never bear that. Oh good Mirabell, don't let
us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, nor go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot to provoke eyes and whispers
and then never to be seen there together again as if we were proud of
one another the first week and ashamed of one another forever after.
Mirabell : Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.
Millamant : Trifles. Come to dinner when I please. To be sole empress
of my tea table, which you must never presume to approach without first
asking leave; and lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the
door before you come in. These articles subscribed, ¡f ¡ continue to
endure you a !ittle longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.

The Way of the World survived throughout the more sexually conservative
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aphra Behn's plays were thrown into
the rubbish bin of history until the world caught up with her ideas in our own
day. But her example inspired a new group of women playwrights.

By the seventeen thirties, many forms of theatre were well established - the
legitimate theatre - the two royal companies at Drury Lane and Covent
Garden - produced a range of 'straight' plays; the illegitimate theatre included
such exotic entertainments as harlequinades, puppet shows, dog shows and
Italian opera, brought to Britain by George Frederick Handel. There was
some resentment towards this foreign import, but that resentment produced a
rema rkab le theatrica I p h e n ome n o n, a ib u rle§q ge_ opgll, Theatre h istoria n
Michael Dobson.
Michael Dobson: The great fusion between ltalian opera and English
low-life theatre is John Gay's Beggars'Opera, 1727, which is the 'show
biz' phenomenon, really, of the entire eighteenth century and shows
very vividly how much the theatre was becoming a medium of mass
communication and a medium that's producing a new kind of celebrity.
The Beggars' Opera was so successful that it spawned an enormous
souvenir industry with the mass production of all sorts of souvenir
products associated with it.

The Beggar's Opera also satirised the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole.
Although Walpole publicly applauded this'ballad opera'which mocked him,
his tolerance was a sham. ln 1737, the Licensing Act tightened censorship
and confirmed the right of only three London theatres to perform spoken
drama. To avoid arrest under the licensing act, the managers of the
illegitimate theatres introduced more and more music and dance. And, as the

16
century progressed, all theatres developed ingenious theatrical machinery.
Dance historian Moira Goff.
Moira Goff: The stage was fully provided with traps, which allowed for
surprise appearances and disappearances and a variety of tricks. They
also had flying machines, which allowed them to bring gods and
goddesses going up and down and doing all sorts of surprising things.
It was a marvellous theatre that seemed to have made the audience
gasp.They paid very good money indeed to go and be surprised, to reel
out of the theatres afterwards marvelling at what they thought they'd
seen.

Theatres grew with their popularity. By the end of the century, Drury Lane
and Covent Garden could hold thousands of people. Some of the audience
were a long way from the stage so gesture became even more important.
The actor David Garrick was the greatest Hamlet of his day, and well known
for his 'start'when Hamlet meets the ghost of his father. And to the
amazement of the audience, his wig would rise to show the hair standing up
on his head. Oddly, Garrick was praised, and blamed, for a new s§le of
'naturalistic' acting.

David Garrick was largely responsible for the increasing popularity of

Shakespeare's plays. But the originaltexts were reshaped and rewritten. All
the bawdy jokes were taken out, the language modernised, female characters
added and tragedies made to end happily ever after.
But Garrick did not go unchallenged for the title of leading eighteenth century
actor. Mrs. Sarah Síddons was the Queen of Tragedy and Mrs. Jordan the
Queen of Comedy. Actresses could lead independent lives and earn good
money, but their social position hadn't improved.
Even the playwright and theatrical manager, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
disapproved of actresses - a disapproval not apparent from the brilliant lines
he gives them in his plays. ln his 1777 masterpiece, The School for Scandal,
the young Lady Teazle can certainly out-wit her old put-upon husband, Sir
Peter.
Sir Peter: Ah, Lady Teazle.
Lady Teazle: Still not dressed, Sir Peter? Are we to be late in visiting
Lady Sneerwell?
Sir Peter: ! see you have contradicted me, Madam, and got yourself a
new bonnet.
Lady Teazle: Sir, what is a husband for, Sir Peter, if he is not to be
contradicted?
Sir Peter: Lady Teazle, l'll not bear it.
Lady Teazle: Sir Peter, you may bear it or not as you please, but I will
have my way in everything. Though lwas educated in the country, I
know very well that women of fashion in London are accountable to
nobody after they are married.

17
ln 1809, Drury Lane, the great patent theatre that had taken so much of
Sheridan's time and money, was destroyed by fire - taking his fortune with it.
It's said that a friend saw Sheridan siüing drinking, watching his life burn
down and asked - "How can you sit there so calmly while the theatre is
burning?" Sheridan is said to have replied - "Can't a man sit by his own
fireside in peace?"

5 Spectacular Stages!

More people went to the theatre in the nineteenth century than ever before, or
since - and there were over a hundred different kinds of spectacularly-staged
entertainments. Most popular of all was the melodrama. Everyone, including
Queen Victoria, wanted to watch these'plays with music' - which showed
good and evil locked in a life and death struggle. Theatre hístorian Russell
Jackson.
Russel! Jackson: Melodrama had scenic spectacle. lt had music to
accompany stories that were really conveyed, not so much by the
words, which very often were commonplace, but by the gestures, by the
situations. And sometimes melodrama incorporated the everyday life
that people could see in the streets around them, rendered as faithfully
as possible on the stage, so that they're almost like looking at one of
those great big Victorian paintings of a railway station or a crowded
street scene of a battle.

A dark and brooding castle is the set for The Castle Spectre by'Monk' Lewis
- first performed in 1797. ln a typically melodramatic scene, the wicked
Osmond has the heroine Angela in his clutches. He offers to release her
father Reginald from prison in exchange for her virtue.
Osmond: Must Reginald die or will Angela be mine?
Angela: Thine? She will perish first.
Osmond: You have pronounced his sentence and his blood will be on
your head. Farewell.
Angela: Hold, hold, look with pity on a creature whom your cruelty has
bowed to the earth. Mercy, Osmond. Oh mercy. Mercy.
Osmond: Lovely. Lovely suppliant.
Angela: Away, approach me not. Dare not to touch me or this
poniard....
Osmond: Foolish girl. By hell, the very poniard which...
Angela: Villain, dost thou know this weapon? Murderer.

Even the greatest actors of the day, John Philip Kemble and Edmund Kean,
famed for their interpretations of Shakespeare, took leading roles in
melodramas. Demand was insatiable. lt led to a hectic period of theatre
building all over Britain and many pubs and taverns - where people went to
drink and be merry - converted rooms into small theatres.

18
The audiences in the pub theatres wanted food, drink and songs. This new
kind of theatrical entertainment became known as music hall.
Music hall performers began to enjoy national stardom. Their names on a
playbill would be enough to entice customers to another popular form of
entertainment. Theatre historian Jacky Bratton.
Jacky Bratton: Pantomimes were a big family entertainment by the end
of the nineteenth century. They happened particularly at big theatres
like Drury Lane and were very, very spectacular with processions of
wild animals and the most extraordinary amounts of flying elves,
children inside strange animal suits and all kinds of spectacle, and it
was an annual outing for the middle class child.

Pantomimes were usually based on well-known fairy tales, such as the story
of Cinderella. Cinderella is a poor, pretty, shy girl who has two wicked, ugly
step-sisters. They all dream of marrying a handsome prince. The pantomime
kept alive the old theatrical practice of men playing women and women, men.
So in Cinderella, the Prince is usually a beautiful girl and the ugly sisters, ugly
men!
Ugly Sisters: Who are we?
Audience: The ugly sisters.
Ugly Sisters: The ugly sisters?
Audience: Yes.
Ugly Sisters: Oh no we're not!
Audience: Oh yes you are!
Ugly Sisters: Oh no we're not!
Audience: Oh yes you are!

Far more genteel, was another form of entertainment which found a home in
the new-Savoy Theatre in London. The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
These light operas appealed to the middle classes and are still very popular
today. Very few other forms of entertainment have survived from the
nineteenth century, but we do know it was a time of great acting.
One of the first theatre critics, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, described
the electrifying performance of Edmund Kean at the Drury Lane theatre in
1814. "To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
Actor Ben Kingsley has made a special study of Edmund Kean.
Ben Kingsley: lthink he was very beautiful. lthink he had astonishing
charisma on stage. Apparently his Richard lll and his Othello were
terrifying to watch. I believe when he opened in the Merchant of Venice
the theatre was one-third full. By the time the evening was over there
was standing room only. People had left the theatre during the
performance and said, "You've got to be in this building now."

Kean never again climbed the heights of his first London season. But he did
rescue the Drury Lane theatre from financíal ruin. Then came a succession of
great actor-managers. One of these was the most successful female
impresario of the century, Madame Vestris. Her husband Charles Matthews
19
was a performer who fascinated an aspiring young actor and writer called
Charles Dickens. Biographer, Claire Tomalin.
Claire Tomalin: When he was studying to become an actor as a very
young man, he would go night after night to see Charles Matthews, who
was a comic actor, who would come on stage and perform what he
called mono-polylogs in which he took six or eight parts. He would
describe a journey and he would take the roles of all the men and
women and children - and no doubt animals - met on the journey and
this was tremendously funny and very successful.

The theatre never lost its charm for Charles Dickens. As the editor of the
v.vegkly magazine Household Words, he sketched a manager of several
theatres outside London, from the early years of the century. Mrs. Sarah
Baker turned her hand to everything.
"She sometimes beats the drum or tolled the bell behind the scenes
when the representation needed such embellishments and occasionally
fulfilled the duties of prompter. But the lady's usual station was in front
of the house. She was her own money-taker and to this fact has been
ascribed the great good fortune she enjoyed as a manager. "Now then
pit or box, pit or gallery, pit or box," she cried incessantly. "Pit, pit," a
half dozen voices might cry. "Then pay two shillings. Pass on Tom
fool." For so on busy nights, she invariably addressed her patrons of all
classes."

One of the great actresses of the nineteenth century was Ellen Terry, who
often performed alongside the actor-manager Henry Irving. For 28 years
people flocked to see them in lrving's lavish productions. Crowd scenes
boasted dozens of supernumeraries or extras, and the sets were the best that
money could buy. Respectabili§ for the theatre was attained at last when in
1895, Henry lrving was knighted. Theatre historian Russell Jackson
Russel! Jackson: He's rather an enigmatic person. He specialised in
playin g g uilt-ridden, ga u nt-featu red, tortu red ind ividuals, which did n't
work very well with Romeo or with the great comic roles but made him,
in that vein, a very fine Hamlet, a haunted Macbeth and, in other plays
away from Shakespeare, outstanding, particularly in a great melodrama
called The Bells.

ln contrast to the spectacular realism of lrving's productions, there was

another s§le of theatre emerging. This portrayed the everyday life of high
socie§, and it was played in what's now known as a 'box set'. lt was
Madame Vestris who first presented a room on stage with a ceiling and three
walls, complete with functioning doors and windows. The set contained real
furniture and household objects. Actors now had to learn 'business' - how to
pour a drink or light a cigar. A variation of this kind of play was known as 'cup
and saucer'drama. But audiences loved to watch s§lish actors going
through the motions of social behaviour. Russell Jackson.

20
Russell Jackson: What the audience in the 1890's saw on stage was a
world that was either like their own or their own only stightly more
expensive. They'd see the drawing rooms, the gardens, the receptions
and parties that, even if they weren't invited to, they'd like to be invited
to.

The playwright who used the conventions of the well-made socies play to
subvert jland the values it represented was Oscar Wilde. This brilliant young
lrishman, whose conversation was as witty as his plays, took the London
theatre by storm. His last and most successful play, The lmportance of Being
Earnest, produced in 1895, concerns two young men about town, Algernon
and Jack and their complicated path through courtship towards marriage.
Algernon's friend, Jack, ís courting Gwendolen, a fashionable and wealthy
young woman. To her, he is known as Earnest and she insists that she
couldn't marry anybody with any other name. Gwendolen is being protected
from fortune hunters by her mother, the formídable Lady Bracknell. Russell
Jackson.
Russell Jackson: Lady Bracknell is not just ruthless, she's well
organised. She has a good information retrieval system. She's not
alone in this. She knows who all the young, manageable men are in
London and she, in a famous scene where she confronts Jack about his
eligibility, she's able to tel! him that, frankly, he's not on her list.

Lady Bracknell: I feel bound to tel! you that you are not down on my list
of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear
Duchess of Bolton has. We work together in fact. However, I am quite
ready to enter your name should your answers be what a really
affectionate mother requires.

Russell Jackson: As she proceeds to interrogate him, as it were, for

admission to the list, she tots up his various material possessions quite
ruthlessly and at one splendid moment she asks him where he lives.

Lady Bracknell: What number in Belgrave Square?

Jack: 149.
Lady Bracknell: The unfashionable side. I thought there was something.
However that could easily be altered.
Jack: Do you mean the fashion or the side?
Lady Bracknell: Both, if necessary, I presume.

Jack seems to have won Lady Bracknell over - until she questions him about
his parents and he confesses that their identity is unknown to him, since he
wasn't so much born - as found!
Lady Bracknell: Found?
Jack: The late Mr Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable
and kindly disposition, found me and gave me the name of Worthing

21
because he happened to have a first class ticket to Worthing at the time.
Worthing is a place in Sussex. lt is a seaside resort
Lady Bracknell: Where did the charitable gentleman who had a first class
ticket for this seaside resort find you?
Jack: ln a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: A handbag?

ln Act 2, Jack leaves London and goes to the country to visit his ward, a
young girl called Cecily. Algernon follows Jack to the country and introduces
himself to Cecily as Earnest, Jack's wild London brother. He falls in love with
Cecily and offers to marry her. Meanwhile Gwendolen, engaged to Jack - but
believing his name to be Earnest - visits Cecily. \Mth both Algernon and Jack
claiming to be the fictional Earnest, there's just a chance of a little
misunderstanding between the two women.
Cecily: Dearest Gwendolen, there is no reason why I should make a
secret of it to you. Our little county newspaper is sure to chronicle the
fact next week. Mr Earnest Worthing and I are engaged to be married.
Gwendolen: My darling Cecily, I think there must be some slight error.
Mr Earnest Worthing is engaged to me. The announcement will appear
in the Morning Post on Saturday at the latest.
Cecily: l'm afraid you must be under some misconception. Earnest
proposed to me exactly ten minutes ago.
Gwendolen: That is very curious for he asked me to be his wife
yesterday afternoon at three-th¡rty. lf you would care to verify the
incident, pray do so. I never travel without my diary. One should
always have something sensational to read in the train.

Then, Jack discovers that his name really § Earnest, and so he can marry
Gwendolen and Algernon, Cecily. Wilde devised the perfect happy ending.
But his own eluded him. On the first night of The lmportance of Being Ernest,
Wilde was publicly accused of homosexuali§. Wilde sued and lost, was
charged with sodomy and served two years in prison. The trial and its
consequences exposed, even more effectively than \Mlde's own plays, the
hypocrisy of late Victorian socie§. Director and theatrical manager, Sir Peter
Hall.
Sir Peter Hall: The sad and dreadful thing is that one hundred years ago
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Jail for being a homosexual,
kept in solitary confinement and put on the wheel for eight hours a day
until his l¡ealth was broken, having just written The lmportance of Being
Earnest, which is unique in the British drama. lt's a surrealistic farce,
not like anything before or since and God knows where he would have
gone, had he been allowed to live; because he was only in his early
forties. I mean, he would have changed the face of English comedy, t'm
sure.

22
6 A Mirror Up To Nature
The standard ingredients of Victorian theatrical fare flourished well beyond
Queen Victoria's death in 1901. But far from the glitter and excitement of the
commercial theatre, dramatic concepts were shaping that were to disturb, and
finally to help sweep away, the conventional ideas of Victorian Britain.
Perhaps the most deep-rooted conventions were those governing the family
and the role of women. Women were regarded as the unpaid servants of
their families - with no right to a life of their own. But at the end of the
nineteenth century, a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik lbsen had
challenged that perception. A Doll's House, is set in a middle-class household
in Nonruay. The successful lawyer Torvald and his wife Nora have three
children, and a loveless marriage. ln the last act, Nora rebels and leaves,
rather than suffer in silence.
Torvald: lt's outrageous. You're betraying your most sacred duty.
Nora: What do you consider my most sacred duty to be?
Torvald: Do I have to tell you? lt's your duty to your husband and your
children.
Nora: I have another duty just as sacred.
Torvald: You have not. What could that be?
Nora: My duty to myself.
Torvald: First and foremost you are a wife and mother.
Nora: I don't believe that any Ionger. I believe that first and foremost I
am a human being just as you are - or at least that I must try to become
one. I have to think things out for myself so that l'll get to understand
them.
Torvald: But don't you understand that your place is in the home,
darling ? Don't you have something you can rely on for guidance in
these matters? Religion?
Nora: Torvald, I don't really know at all what religion is!

The success of A Doll's House led many enthusiasts to believe that lbsen
was a social reformer disguised as a playwright. lbsen denied it. But the
young lrish socialist and theatre critic, George Bernard Shaw, did see lbsen's
theatre as an engine of social reform. Shaw made no secret of the fact that
he wanted to see changes in British society. He divided his efforts in that
direction between writing to be read and writing to be seen. And he said that
for the intelligent he wrote the prefaces to his plays; for the lazy or stupid he
wrote the plays themselves.
Gradually, Shaw became the acceptable voice of social criticism. And in
1924, his play Saint Joan, which many regard as his masterpiece, was first
performed. A recent production of Saint Joan was directed by Gale Edwards.
Gale Edwards: Shaw is interested in political debate, the concept of
power, the concept of right and wrong, the concept of faith and belief,
weakness and strength. These are the themes he deals with and
although he has wit in his writing and indeed it's brilliant writing, it is

23
very intellectual and word-bound and it's a massive challenge to a
director.

Saint Joan is set in France in the early fifteenth century. Joan has been told
by'voices' sent by God to drive the English soldiers out of France and ensure
the Dauphin is crowned king. She has to persuade military, political and
church leaders to follow her.
Churchman: Will you not believe that the church is wiser than you?
Joan: I believe that God is wiser than I and it is His command that I do. I
mind God alone whose command lalways follow.
Churchman: No, you do not know what you're saying child. Do you
want to kill yourself? Listen, do you not believe that you are subject to
the church of God on earth?
Joan: Yes, when have I ever denied it?
Churchman: Good. That means does it not, that you are subject to our
Lord the Pope, to the cardinals and archbishops and the bishops for
whom his Lordship stands here today?
Joan: God must be served first.

Joan insists that God comes before the church. But, if God does speak to her
directly, then there's no need for a church to interpret his words. Not an idea
likely to make Joan popular with church leaders. And insisting that God's
word be obeyed is not going to make Joan popular with politicians either. So
state and church conspire to get rid of Joan, and Shaw blames ALL those
who knowingly sent an innocent child to be burned at the stake. lncluding
French churchmen.
Cauchon: I am accustomed to the fire. lt is soon over. But it is a terrible
thing to see a young and innocent creature crushed between these
mighty forces, the church and the law.
De Stogumber: You call her innocent?
Cauchon : Oh, quite innocent. What does she know of the church and
the law? She did not understand a word we were saying. lt is the
ignorant who suffer.

While Shaw was lecturing audiences, Noel Coward was delighting them. His
plays, which he wrote and acted, are often dismissed as trivial or
inconsequential but in a few classic comedies he presented a make-believe
world of upper-class wit and romance reminiscent of Restoration drama.
Coward's brittle comedies allowed audiences to escape the harsh realities of
life in 1930's Britain. This was a time of great unemployment and hardship
with very little welfare support for the unemployed or their dependants. And
left wing playwrights tried to offer alternatives to the ruling individualistic
philosophy of society.
ln his play, An lnspector Calls, J.B. Priestley shows his audience how a single
unkind action may lead to tragedy. ln the course of the play, a police
inspector uncovers the guilty secrets of the wealthy Birling family and
discovers how they all may have been responsible for causing a young
working-class girl, Eva Smith, to commit suicide.
Sheila, the Birling's daughter, confesses to the lnspector that while shopping
for an expensive dress, she had Eva Smith unfairly dismissed from her job in
a dress shop.
Sheila: This girl had brought the dress up from the workroom and when
the assistant, Miss Francis, had asked her something about it, this girl,
to show us what she meant, had held the dress up, as if she were
wearing it. lt just suited her. She was the right type for it, just as I was
the wrong type. She was a very pretty girl too with soft, fine hair and big
grey eyes and that didn't make it any better. When I tried the thing on, I
caught sight of this girl smiling at Miss Francis as if to say "Doesn't she
look awful ?" - and I was absolutely furious.
I was very rude to both of them and then I went to the Manager and I told
him that this girl had been very impertinent and... How was I to know
what would happen afterwards? And if I could help her now, I would.
lnspector: Yes but you can't. It's too late. She's dead.
By the end of the play, the inspector has shown that 'no man is an island',
that we are all part of one communi§, all responsible for the death of Eva
Smith.

lnspector: We don't live alone. We are members of one society. We are

responsible for each other and I tell you the time wi!!soon come when if
men will not learn that lesson then they will be taught it in fire and blood
and anguish.
An lnspector Calls was first performed in 1946, just after the Second World
War. ln the late nineteen forties, poetic drama flickered into life with The
Lady's Not for Burning by Christopher Fry and T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party.
But far more fruitful and influential was a s§le of theatre which we now know
as the Theatre of the Absurd. This began in France where an lrish playwright
wrote his plays in French before translating them into English. Samuel
Beckett's play Waiting for Godot was written in 1952 and first performed in
Britain in '1955.
The two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, meet beneath a tree and
wait for Godot to arrive. At the end of the play, they are still waiting. ln the
interim they have explored the riddle of man's existence.
Vladimir: Charming spot. lnspiring prospects. Let's go.
Estragon: We can't.
Vladimir: Why not?
Estragon: We're waiting for Godot.
Vladimir: Are you sure it was here?
Estragon: What?
Vladimir: That we were to wait.
Estragon: He said by the tree.

25
A script of Waiting for Godot was sent to the Arts Theatre in London - a small
experimental theatre - where it was read by the twenty four year-old director
Peter Hall.
Sir Peter Hall: I was sent this play with a letter saying 'No one will do it.
The actors have all turned it down and the directors are frightened of it.
Would you like to do it at your little theatre?' And I read it but I won't
say that I thought this is the most important play l've ever read, because
I didn't. But I certainly thought it was hugely original. I thought it very
funny, very poetic, in a perfectly organic sense; and it also, of course,
made waiting into something dramatic, so it turned theatre on its head.

Vladimir: We came here yesterday.

Estragon: Ah no, there you're mistaken.
Vladimir: Well, what did we do yesterday?
Estragon: What did we do yesterday?
Vladimir: Yes.
Estragon: Why, nothing is certain when you're around.

Samuel Beckett subscribed to a philosophy which regarded all human

existence as absurd. The inability of people to communicate was one factor
in life's futility. And yet Vladimir and Estragon are funny and full of pathos.
Sir Peter Hall.
Sir Peter Hall: Oh I think it is the play of the mid century. lt far
outstretches anything else in influence, revolution and in actual
capacity still to entertain, alarm and delight us. Waiting for Godot is still
an absolutely stingingly alive poem.

Britain was a very quiet sort of place in the early 1950's. But, beneath the
surface, something was stirring. And in May 1956, a single play - performed
at the Royal Court Theatre in London - battered down the door of theatrical
complacency. The play was called Look Back in Anger. lt's twen§ seven
year-old author was John Osborne. ln long and passionate speeches, the
main character - Jimmy Porter - rails against social injustice and cruelly
criticises his middle-class wife Alison, who decides at one point to leave him.
Actor Peter Jeffrey.
Peter Jeffrey: lt burst upon us as a huge fireball really. lt's just such an
enormous change because people's emotions were dealt with in a very
naked way. To have this 'angry young man', as he was labelled,
sounding off and criticising the world he lived in and the people who
surrounded him, whom he purported to love, at such great length, was a
huge surprise and, of course, a lot of people couldn't take it. Some
people said, a lot of people said, "Oh why doesn't he shut up? This is a
tedious young man." People walked out of the theatre. They thought it
was an affront.

26
Jimmy Porter: I rage, and shout my head off, and everyone thinks, 'poor
chap!' or 'what an objectionable young man'. But that gir! there can
twist your arm off with her silence. Perhaps, one day, you may want to
come back. I shal! wait for that day. I want to be there when you grovel.
There's nothing else I want any longer.

John Osborne's angry young man, Jimmy Porter, expressed on stage the
frustrations of the young, who were rebelling against the tired values of their
parents. Theatre critic, Michael Billington describes the complexity of Look
Back in Anger.
Michael Billington: lt's partly a personal play. !t's a play about a
marriage. lt's partly a political play about the decay and the fake
gentility of Britain in the 1950's but it was significant because it
expressed something that had not been heard on the British stage
before. British theatre from 1945 to 1956 in the eleven years after the
War was dominated by conventional and rather genteel middle-class
comedies that took place in very polite drawing rooms and were
dominated by emotion repressed. Osborne's play is about emotion
expressed. That's one reason why it's a marvellous play.

Jimmy Porter: ! suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for
good causes any longer. We've had all that done for us in the thirties
and forties when we were still kids. There aren't any good, great causes
left. lf the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in
aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. !t'lljust be for the Brave, New-
nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as
stepping in front of a bus.

Look Back ln Anger revolutionised what was seen and said on the British
stage. No longer were theatre audiences to be offered nothing but pure
entertainment. From now on, theatre could say something - even something
dangerous. On stages the length and breadth of Britain, new challenging
work was produced, written by playwrights inspired by the work of lbsen,
Shaw, Priestley and Beckett and among them playwright David Hare.
David Hare: John Osborne uniquely expressed the spirit of the age and
that was that the theatre would be a place where, as I would say, adult
concerns would be expressed. lt wouldn't be sealed off from life, as the
plays of Noel Coward had been. lt wouldn't stylise life. as the plays of
Noe! Coward had done. But life would be there and recognisable in the
raw. That movement came from the Royal Court Theatre, which was
quite a puritanical theatre. lt wasn't a theatre of entertainment. lt was a
theatre of refined thoughtfulness and gut feeling: that was - a modern
theatre; and it was much needed in the fifties and was hugely influential
and plainly starts a line of descent which leads to much more political
playwrights who came along in the sixties with a wilder, more anarchic
kind of theatre.

27
7 Today
The British theatre never fails to surprise. Who would have thought that Rock
and Roll, the theatre and religion could combine to make a hit musical? ln
1972, those were the ingredients which Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice
brought together in Jesus Christ Superstar. The rock opera spoke most
clearly to the young; and it was the young who were bringing about a
revolution in British society and in British theatre.
David Hare's successful career as a playwright began in the late 1960s, when
he was in his early 20s. As he matured, he retaíned his vision of the theatre
as a place where truths are revealed.
The Hare Trilogy - three plays delving into three British institutions; the
church, the law and politics, were performed between 1989 and 1993, and
they were described as State of the Nation plays. The director was Sir
Richard Eyre.
Sir Richard Eyre: They weren't satires. They weren't trying to mock the
institutions of the church or the law or politics. They were actually plays
about how you do good in the world, how you change the world for the
better and how astonishingly difficult it is in the contemporary world to
actually make progress.

ln Murmuring Judges, David Hare takes the audience into law courts and
police stations where they meet professionals going about their business -
professionals like Woman Police Officer, Sandra Bingham.
"You see it's all mess. That's what it is mostly. lf you take the charge
room, for instance, there's maybe th¡rly or forty people arrested in a
day. Most of them are people who simply can't cope. They've been
arrested before - petty thieving, deception, stealing car radios, selling
stolen credit cards in pubs, getting drunk, getting drunk and going for a
joyride, getting drunk and then driving home, attacking your wife, who
then won't testify. That's the basic stuff. !t's the stuff of policing. All
you have to do with it is be a ledger clerk. You fill in bits of paper. Every
officer carries thirty-six bits of paper about their person at any one time.
Policing's largely the fine art of getting through biros - and keeping
yourself ready for the interesting bits."

The Trilogy grew out of David Hare's informed interest in British institutions;
he was inspired to write 'Racing Demon', the first play in the trilogy, after
attending a synod - a general meeting of the people who run the Church of
England.
David Hare: I found a way of writing plays that was very well researched
in the real world to begin with but then took off into fiction and was a
completely invented story. Richard Eyre, the Director of the National
Theatre, said to me this is a wonderful way of doing plays. lt isn't
documentary. lt's a fiction which is enriched by the fact that you've
done so much real life research on the subject.

28
Sir Richard Eyre: I think David Hare is an exceptional social historian.
He's somebody who is obviously deeply interested in social behaviour
and in political ideas and he's able to embody these in stories which are
of the contemporary moment and so it seems to me that this is one of
the things that theatre does extraordinarily well. lt puts up a looking
glass.

Another kind of looking glass is held up by Tom Stoppard, a playwright who's

almost an exact contemporary of David Hare's. His first play appeared when
he was twen§ one. 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' brings two
marginal characters from Shakespeare's play Hamlet to the centre of the
action, where they talk in language reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Waiting
for Godot. But is this Theatre of the Absurd? Tom Stoppard.
Tom Stoppard: I suppose that Stoppardesque, if there were such a
word, would probably denote something about a mixture between quite
frivolous comedy and some kind of intellectual content, expressed in
quite a literary way. And if I had to express everything in a sentence, a
sentence which would leave quite a lot out, lwould say that I view
theatre principally as a recreation.

Tom Stoppard is a very'theatrical' playwright, an illusionist who plays tricks

with the audience's perceptions. ln 1968 The Real lnspector Hound featured
theatre critics who are sucked into the action of the play. ln The Real Thing in
1982 there is a play within a play. ln Jumpers, Travesties and Arcadia,
Stoppard intertwines elaborate verbal games with phílosophical ideas.
Tom Stoppard: It's one of the things I secretly like about myself that I
don't seem to have a play which I keep writing. I've never said that
before. What an awful thing to say. How immodest. But the thing is
that, immodest or not, there's some truth in it.

That first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, has already achieved
the status of a classic. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were fellow students
with Prince Hamlet at the University of Wittenberg. They're ordered to return
home to Denmark by King Claudius. When they arrive, they're told to spy on
Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern express their fear in jumbled words.
RosencranE I want to go home.
Guildenstern Don't let them confuse you.
Rosencrantz l'm out of my step here.
Guildenstern We'l! soon be home and high, dry and home.
Rosencrantz It's all over my death.
Guildenstern l'll hie you home.
Rosencrantz Out of my head.
Guildenstern Dry you high.
Rosencrantz : Over my step. Over my head body. I tel! you it's all
stopping to a death. !t's boding to a death. Stepping to a head. Itell
you it's al! heading to a dead stop.

29
Alan Ayckbourn is yet a third kind of playwright. He began his career at a
provincial theatre in Scarborough in the North of England. His first success
was Relatively Speaking in 1967. Since then his plays have been performed
in London theatres, on television and around the world. But Alan Ayckbourn
himself has remained loyalto Scarborough. Ayckbourn has been the most
prolific and commercially successful playwright of the second half of the
twentieth century. His plots are ingenious but his humour has darkened as
the years have gone by. Director, Sir Peter Hall.
Sir Peter Ha!!: Well he's terribly good at the middle classes and the
lower middle classes and their absolute terror of sex and sexuality and
passion and love. Ayckbourn's characters are very ridiculous but very
sad. He shows male weakness and male insecurity at a point when they
are both hysterically funny and painful.

A good example of this mixture of comic and tragic comes from Ayckbourn's
Time of My Life. Gerry and Laura are celebrating her birthday in an ltalian
restaurant. As the wine flows, Laura's tongue loosens and she confesses to
having had an affair. Her husband is desperate to discover the man's
identity.
Gerry Who is he? Laura!
Laura There's no point in talking about it in here, is there?
Gerry Now! I want to talk about it now!
Laura How can we talk about it now?
Gerry All right. Come on, we're going home.
Laura I haven't finished my drink.
Gerry You heard me, home!
Laura Don't you shout at me!
Gerry I'm not shouting at you! I wish to God I could!
Laura Just calm down. Calm down, will you ? You'll drop dead in a
minute.
Gerry : Don't worry. I won't be the one who drops dead. Have no fear
about that. Whoever he is, he'll be the one who drops dead because l'll
murder the bastard! l'll k¡¡l him and I'll thrash the daylights out of you!
Laura Oh shut up. Big talk. Just shut up.
Gerry I promise Iwill.
Laura You can't murder him anyway.
Gerry Why not?
Laura : Because he's already dead, isn't he? He's been dead since
1974.

Alan Ayckbourn holds a highly privileged position at the Stephen Joseph

Theatre in Scarborough. He's not only a director and playwright, he's also the
theatre's artistic director. The theatre is not exclusive - the young, old and the
disabled of Scarborough all make plays for its stages.
Alan Ayckbourn: It's also a place to - this sounds very pompous but -
to assert our common humanity. lt's somewhere where we all laugh
together, we sometimes cry together, we sometimes you know feel pain
together. You all suddenly look up and say, "Gosh, we all felt the same
about that."

The Royal Court Theatre in London has a proud history going back to the
early years of the century. Since John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger in
1956, its policy has been to encourage new playwrights. But, while many
exciting talents emerged in the sixties and seventies, only one female name
stands out among them - Caryl Churchill. Theatre critic Michael Billington.
Michael Billington: Her great gift has been to introduce themes of great
importance to women and to women's consciousness and to do them
in a very arresting and dreamlike way. She is not a logical or
conventional or realistic writer. She uses time very freely in the theatre.
She experiments very freely. She once told me that she likes to
reinvent the form of a play each time she sits down to write a new work.

ln 1982 Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls appeared at the Royal Court to great
acclaim. Michael Billington.
Michael Billington: lt's significant because it is about feminism but its
main point is that if women in their social and political advances simply
imitate men and male career structures and male power hungers then
feminism wil! have achieved nothing. lt's saying that women have to
find a path of their own. lt's a very po\flerful and a very timely play.

The longest established of the British playwrights who came to prominence

after Look Back in Anger is Harold Pinter. His first full-length play The
Birthday ParV appeared in 1958. The play has menace, humour, spite, sex
and tension. For Pinter life seems to be a battle for control. There are usually
many tense silences and very few characters in a Pinter play. ln The Dumb
Waiter there are only two characters - Ben and Gus. Michael Billington.
Michael Billington: ln The Dumb Waiter two men are in a room: a
typical Pinter situation, two men in a room. They're both gangsters.
They've both been told to go to a certain place to carry out a job, an
assassination job, and you see them nervously awaiting orders.

Ben : How often do we do a job? Once a week? (Laughs) What are you
complaining about?
Gus : Yes, but we've got to be on tap though, haven't we? You can't
move out the house in case a call comes.
Ben : You know what your trouble is?
Gus : What?
Ben : You haven't got any interests.
Gus : l've got interests.

Michael Billington: What becomes clear is that one of these two men
has been assigned to kill the other, so it's a cat and mouse game with a
surprise ending but it's comic, it's political, it's very frightening. lsay

31
'political' because what it seems to me to be saying is that we're all
subject to some power outside ourselves.
I suppose what Pinter has done for the theatre is first of all to make
poetry out of common-or-garden everyday speech. He's taken the kind
of language that you hear in bus queues, at railway stations, in cafes,
and turned it into a form of theatrical poetry.
I think his second great achievement is to have banished the idea of the
author who knows everything. Before Pinter it was assumed that the
author knew who the characters were, where they'd come from, where
they were going to, what the situation meant. After Pinter there is no
such obligation on the author. Pinter says, "Here is the evidence. These
are the people who've come into my imagination. Make of them what
you will. You decide." That, lthink, is a radical breakthrough.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, Britain's theatre is

flourishing. The cinema and television play to bigger audiences but they can
never rival the sense of participation of the theatre. Not only are there many
new works being written, but companies are reviving lost treasures. Mystery
plays, obscure Tudor interludes, revenge tragedies and the suppressed plays
of women Restoration dramatists - all have their place in the modern British
theatre. From where they stand at the very heart of that theatre, directors Sir
Richard Eyre and Sir Peter Hall see the future continuing the great traditions
of the past.
Sir Richard Eyre: The virtue of British theatre has always been its
pragmatism, its pragmatism mixed with continuity. We have this
extraordinary time-span and we have a continuity and that's very
important. lt is like no other theatre culture anywhere in the world.
What worries me is that this wil! be eroded. What makes me optimistic is
that there keep coming up a generation of writers, directors and actors
who have huge talent and huge appetite for the medium of theatre.

Sir Peter Hall: We still have twenty, twenty-five world ranking

dramatists. No other country has got as many great playwrights as we
have at this moment. In the last couple of months l've read about th¡rty
new plays by people under th¡rty. There is a hell of a lot of writing talent
surging forward. Theatre's not dead. lt's very, very much alive.

32