The Politics of Anxiety: Contemporary Socialist Theatre in England

Abstract

This year has seen a number of somewhat subdued celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre in its present form, and of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger. Celebration is not without its ironies, since in many ways the mood and style of the fifties are staging a come-back. History repeats itself, this time, perhaps, as farce. Whereas Sir Harold Macmillan had told the British that they had never had it so good, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher now tells them that they have had it far too good for far too long. But both periods are characterised by the disintegration of old models of behaviour and national purpose. There is a sense now as then of cultural crisis. Then it was Suez; now it is economic decline. And for twenty-five years we have had a theatre which has acknowledged this sense of unease, instability, usually in social or political terms, but in the case of writers like Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard , at least, in terms which raise ontological and epistemological questions. Indeed, even those writers initially hailed as representing some kind of breakthrough on a social or political level were in fact responding to a more profound sense of dislocation than could be contained by such an analysis.

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