UNIT 6: THE THEATRE OF THE 70s AND 80s

The 1970s and 1980s

 Swinging London: London became the centre of the arts and fashion from the
mid-1960s onwards – the recovery of the economy, the rise of the youth
population, the spread of general education.
 May Revolution/French civil revolt in 1968.
 Civil rights protests in the US and the protests the Vietnam War.
 Cultural revolution: the counter-cultural movements of the “hippie era”
 The contraceptive pill began to be sold in 1960 – shift in morals from the
lingering puritanical values of the Victorian era to the sexual liberation of the
1960s.
 Second wave of feminism.
 Development of LGBT activism.
 Post-colonial and non-white culture growing in cultural representation.
 Manifestos and movements in art and politics, much like the modernist era.
 This generation, although innovative like the modernists, was not naïve and
was sceptical of everything: morality, religion, the family, the establishment,
bourgeois culture, justice, politics, etc.
 Collectivisation becomes a catch-all word.
 All this transferred to theatrical practice: collective creation and production
were the norm in the theatre groups that sprang up everywhere – companies
avoid hierarchies and opt for creative processes based on equality (the
playwright loses importance)
 Different types of theatre: workers’ theatre, feminist theatre (different from
women’s theatre, gay theatre and black theatre.
 In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female Prime Minister. She
was Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990 – the “Thatcher era”.
 Positive growth and recessions, the latter were very hard on the working and
middle class and unemployment rose alarmingly.
 State companies were privatised, financial and labour markets deregulated,
National Health Service and state education began to be dismantled.
 Trade Unions were systematically ignored.
 The 1982 Falkiands War against Argentina helped her re-election.
 Yupple culture: Yupple: “a young person who lives in a city, earns a lot of
money, and spends it doing fashionable things and buying expensive
possessions” (Cambridge Dictionary)
 Artists and writers made a kind of common front against the government.

Edward Bond (b. 1934)

 His early plays scandalised most critics and audiences for their crude depiction
of violence on stage.
  Saved has achieved canonical status because it helped end censorship in theatre
 His theatre blends extreme left-wing naturalism with Artaud’s theatre of
cruelty, and Brechtian rationality.
 “I think it’s necessary to disturb an audience emotionally to involve them
emotionally in my plays” (Canadian theatre Review 1979: 112-113)
 The “agroo effect” is his own reworking of Brecht’s alienation effect – societies
united by aggression produce aggression.
 The degree of violence increased in each play because – “if I went on stoning
babies in every play then nobody would notice it anymore”
 His intention was to make audiences think, using farce to control the violence
with ironic detachment, but the crudity of his images of violence produces an
excess of emotion that blocks thought.

Edward Bond

Saved:

 Set in the deprived slums of South London, with young people living on the
dole and with no hope of a better future.
 The characters speak in the South London dialect
 At the core of the play, the scene of the baby stoned to death makes it difficult
to engage with the rest of the play: “It remains a horrifying scene that captures
all too accurately the escalating rhythm of violence and the imaginative
barrenness of youths who assume that babies are simply animals devoid of
feeling”
(Billington, The Guardian, 14 Oct 2011)
 The final scene features the family sitting happily in the drawing room –
Edward Bond describes the end of the play as “almost irresponsibly optimistic”
 Some critics believe that the family has been “saved” despite the degradation in
which they live
 Beneath the drama lies an Oedipal story turned comedy
 The play was not revived for more than 25 years

Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)

o Born in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), he became a British subject

at the age of nine.
o Considered the most interesting and respected English comic playwright of the
second half of the century.
o Won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for directing and adapting his
own play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990) and an Oscar for Best
Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1998)
o His first plays were considered to belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, although
his style is much more that of high comedy.
o He was not interested in the political, his approach was philosophical and
literary
o He uses verbal wit and farce, very much in the style of Oscar Wild, to illustrate
his themes: free will versus fate, the existence of God, the function of art and
literature, the nature of freedom and modern science.
o His plays are always metaliterary (and usually …