BECKETT, PINTER, & 'THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD': BACKGROUND, INTRODUCTION & CONTEXT

BECKETT, PINTER, & ‘THE
  THEATRE OF THE ABSURD’:
BACKGROUND, INTRODUCTION
        & CONTEXT

      For Reading Comprehension
            and Vocabulary

      Dispensa per gli studenti del corso di
     Letteratura Teatrale Inglese (Lettorato)

                                            Dott. Ewan Glenton

    FACOLTÀ DI LETTERE E FILOSOFIA

CONTENTS

1. THE VICTORIAN AGE                       3
2. THE 20TH CENTURY                        9
3. MODERNIST LITERATURE                    12
4. EXISTENTIALISM                          15
5. ALBERT CAMUS                            17
6. JOHN OSBORNE’S LOOK BACK IN ANGER       20
7. SAMUEL BECKETT                          24
8. HAROLD PINTER                           28

                                       2

1. THE VICTORIAN AGE

Victorian Morality
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria
(1837-1901) in particular, and to the moral climate of Great Britain throughout the 19th century in
general, that were in stark contrast to the morality of the previous Georgian period. It is not actually
specifically tied to this historical period and can describe any set of values that espouses sexual
repression, low tolerance of crime, and a strong social ethic. Due to the prominence of the British
Empire, many of these values were spread across the world.

Historians now regard the Victorian era as a time of many contradictions. A plethora of social
movements concerned with morals co-existed with a class system that imposed harsh living
conditions upon many. The apparent contradiction between the widespread cultivation of an
outward appearance of dignity and restraint and the prevalence of social phenomena that included
prostitution and child labour were two sides of the same coin: various social reform movements and
high principles arose from attempts to improve the harsh conditions.

                      Queen Victoria, Albert & Family (Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1846)

The term Victorian has acquired a range of connotations, including that of a particularly strict set of
moral standards, which are often applied hypocritically. This stems from the image of Queen
Victoria – and her husband, Prince Albert, perhaps even more so – as innocents, unaware of the
private habits of many of her respectable subjects; this particularly relates to their sex lives. This
image, however, is mistaken: Victoria’s attitude toward sexual morality was a consequence of her
knowledge of the corrosive effect of the loose morals of the aristocracy in earlier reigns upon the
public’s respect for the nobility and the Crown. The Prince Consort as a young child had
experienced the pain of his parents’ divorce after they were involved in public sexual scandals.
Young Albert’s mother had left his family home and she died shortly thereafter.

Two hundred years earlier, the Puritan republican movement, under the leadership of Oliver
Cromwell, had temporarily overthrown the British monarchy and, during England’s years as a
republic, the law imposed a strict moral code on the people (such as abolishing Christmas as too
indulgent of the sensual pleasures). When the monarchy was restored in 1660, a period of loose
living and debauchery appeared to be a reaction to the earlier repression. The two social forces of
Puritanism and libertinism continued to motivate Britain’s collective psyche from the Restoration

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onward. This was particularly significant in the public perceptions of the Hanoverian monarchs who
immediately preceded Queen Victoria. For instance, her uncle George IV was commonly perceived
as a pleasure-seeking playboy, whose conduct in office was the cause of much scandal. By the time
of Victoria, the interplay between high cultured morals and low vulgarity was thoroughly embedded
in British culture.

Verbal or written communication of emotion or sexual feelings, for instance, was often proscribed
so people instead used the language of flowers. However they also wrote explicit erotica, perhaps
the most famous being the racy tell-all My Secret Life by the pseudonym Walter (allegedly Henry
Spencer Ashbee), and the magazine The Pearl, which was published for several years and reprinted
as a paperback book in the 1960s. Some current historians now believe that the myth of Victorian
repression can be traced back to early twentieth-century views, such as those of Lytton Strachey, a
member of the Bloomsbury Group, who wrote Eminent Victorians.

                                             Oscar Wilde

Throughout the whole Victorian era, homosexuals were regarded as abominations and
homosexuality was illegal. Homosexual acts were a capital offence until 1861. However, many
famous men from the British Isles, such as Oscar Wilde, were notorious homosexuals. Toward the
end of the century, many large trials were held on the subject. In the same way, throughout the
Victorian Era, movements for justice, freedom, and other strong moral values opposed greed,
exploitation, and cynicism. The writings of Charles Dickens, in particular, observed and recorded
these conditions, while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels carried out much of their analysis of
capitalism in – and as a reaction to – Victorian Britain.

Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org

                                                  *

All Change in the Victorian Age
It’s all there in popular fiction. From Jane Austen in the 1810s, via Charles Dickens’ pictures of mid
century London life, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895, the world of literature moved from
comedies of country manners to blistering portraits of urban poverty and, finally, time travel. Not
bad for 80-odd years.

Although the Industrial Revolution had already begun, Britain in 1800 had changed little in
centuries. It was a rural country, dominated by agriculture. For most, the world was restricted to

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their village – where their family had probably lived for generations – and the nearest market town,
not surprising when the fastest thing on earth was a galloping horse, covering 100 miles a day at
best. If you lived in Somerset, London was almost foreign, much as it had been in 1600.

Horizons were limited and life was slow. It was horsepower or nothing, and daylight and the
seasons ruled the countryside. But all that was about to change. Although the steam engine was first
invented in 1769 by James Watt, for decades his monopoly had prevented significant development
and kept prices high. It was only in the nineteenth century that the real impact of steam would be
fully felt. And what an impact. Steam changed everything. It was faster, more powerful, and could
work independently of natural power sources, such as water. Traction engines saw fields ploughed
twenty times faster than before, and factories could be anywhere. They chose towns and cities. At a
time of massive population expansion in Britain (from 9 million in 1801 to 36 million in 1911),
cities were expanding even faster. Once islands in a sea of fields, needing the agricultural economy
to sustain them, they forged ahead as farm-workers made redundant by steam migrated to the
nearest town to find work. Manchester and Sheffield quadrupled between 1801 and 1851, Bradford
and Glasgow grew eightfold. Cities were the masters now.

With greater speed came a greater need for industries and businesses to make more and make it
quicker. Steam made this possible and changed working life forever. Gone were the days when
work was dictated by natural forces: steam engines were servant to neither season nor sunshine.
Factories had foremen and life became correspondingly more regimented. The clocking-on machine
was invented in 1885 and time and motion studies to increase efficiency would be introduced only
some twenty years later. But it was not all bad news. Agricultural incomes depended on variable
harvests and weather. Factories provided secure and predictable income, but long hours.

Working life was becoming increasingly regulated, and the working week was reorganised to
promote ever-greater efficiency. The old custom of St. Monday – when no work was done – was
gradually phased out and to compensate, work stopped around midday on Saturday and did not
resume until Monday morning. A new division between ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ emerged, and this new
block of weekend leisure time coincided with the development of spectator sports like cricket and
football, and the rise of music hall entertainment for the new working classes. New loyalties were
needed to fill some of the vacuum caused by the demise of close-knit rural communities, and they

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didn’t come from the church. Many of the middle class (itself a new term dating only from 1812)
became concerned about the godlessness of the working classes when it emerged that only 50 per
cent of the eligible population attended a church service on Census Sunday in 1851.

But if the Anglican Church was seen to be losing the working classes, Methodism, stressing hard
work and self-discipline, was increasingly popular. It fitted the ethos of the age. Commerce and
business brought a new spirit of self-help, popularised in the 1859 book of the same name by
Samuel Smiles, with the opening line, ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’. The modern
world was opening up new opportunities for those who would work hard enough to take them. A
new breed of self-made man – never a woman – had emerged. Proud of their accomplishments,
these nineteenth century yuppies encapsulated the spirit of this cut-throat capitalism.

This spirit of competition extended even as far as science. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species
(1859) described the theory of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest. The nineteenth century
was a world of free markets, free trade and laissez-faire government, with all moves towards
paternalism – in areas such as public health and poor laws – fiercely resisted. It was every man for
himself.

Meanwhile, the countryside was attracting ever less interest. The Corn Laws spelled out the shifting
balance of power. Passed in 1815 to fix the price of corn and protect the interests of the
agriculturists that then dominated Parliament, they were repealed only three decades years later,
against bitter protest from landowners and loud applause from industrialists. Farmers were passé:
everything that was anything was urban. The comic stereotypes in the satirical magazine Punch –
caricaturing agricultural labourers as backward yokels in smocks and chewing straws – flourished
in the 1870s and live on to this day.

Adapted from: Bruce Robinson: All Change in the Victorian Age (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history)

                                                        *

The ‘Two Nations’ – the rich and the poor
The time is long past when ‘Victorian’ meant everything prudish, sentimental, and conventional.
Now that we know more about them, we can see that the surface of respectability the Victorians
presented was often only a protective convenience covering feelings and conduct not unlike our
own. Under it, many of them lived private lives as freely as bearded young rebels today.

The technological revolution the Victorians were born into was in its way as violently disruptive as
that of our atomic age. Application of the steam engine to machinery early in the 19th century had
drawn millions of people from rural cottages and hand looms to work in factories. Even more
sharply than ours, their world was divided between ‘the two nations’, the rich and the poor. The
aristocracy – the titled classes and the landed gentry – still lived in castles, halls, or manor houses
on rents from vast inherited estates, hunting, sitting as vestrymen and justices of the peace, going up
to London to vote for higher duties on imported corn and stiffer penalties against poachers. In the
towns, workers lived in unspeakable slums near the factories, and the owner in his spacious house
on the hill above, away from the smoke and filth and noise. Efforts to form unions or associations to
bargain with employers met with brutal opposition. Thousands of unemployed workers

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demonstrated in the streets of the cities, while in the countryside starving farmhands set fire to
barns. Heavy-handed justice, which sentenced culprits to long terms of hard labour, transportation,
or even death, failed to end the violence.

The employers belonged to the great middle class that arose during the Industrial Revolution, when
England made itself the workshop of the world. The two traits that dominated the middle class are
the same ones for which the younger generation today repudiates its bourgeois background:
materialism and respectability. By the mid 19th century, the merchant or millowner’s success was
tangible evidence of his success in cut-throat competition for trade. And he had been too busy to
find time for much education; he left reading and artistic affairs to his wife, who, with equally
meagre intellectual development and plenty of servants, devoted herself to over-elaborate dress and
filled her house with tasteless bric-a-brac. Absorption in possessions and paucity of culture appear
in portraits of the middle class throughout the 19th century.

Respectability, the other middle-class characteristic, was not unrelated to materialism. The
Calvinism underlying the Puritan ethic regarded wealth as a visible sign of God’s approval, and to
acquire it and bequeath it to one’s children was the duty of an honest businessman. High moral
principles grounded in Protestant religion guaranteed the legitimacy of the children who would
inherit it. Since sanctity of property demanded sanctity of the marriage bond, commercial honesty
and marital fidelity went hand in hand – failure in either outlawed a man from respectable society.

Most of the contemporary thinkers and critics were themselves of middle-class origin: John Ruskin
(1819-1900) was the son of a wine merchant, while Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) was the grandson
of a customs collector and the son of a schoolmaster. An exception was Thomas Carlyle (1795-
1881), the son of peasants, who accused this new ‘Working Aristocracy’ of Mammonism,
exclaiming, in Past and Present:

     We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we
     think [...] that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. “My starving workers?” answers the
     rich Mill-owner: “Did I not hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the
     sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?”

                                   Hard Times (Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1885)

In earlier times, when wages could not support a man and his family, they were given relief out of
the ‘poor rate’, a tax levied upon the landowners of the parish where they lived. If infirm from
sickness or old age, the poor were cared for by the parish in a hospital or poorhouse, probably one

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surviving from monastic days or established long since by charitable bequest. But the mushroom
factory towns had no such means of dealing with poverty, unemployment or sickness. The New
Poor Law of 1834, in hope of discouraging idleness, gave help to the indigent only in the big new
workhouses built for groups of several parishes, into which men, women, children, the sick and
aged, lunatics and delinquents, were all thrown together.

Moreover, in 1830, no workers and few millowners sat in Parliament. More than two hundred seats
in the House of Commons were filled by the borough-owners without any election. Though it gave
the vote to only one out of six males, First Reform Bill was the opening wedge of democratic
government. Commissions were set up to determine what was needed, and the appalling conditions
revealed by their reports horrified even the Tory opposition. The huge sprawling towns spawned by
the Industrial Revolution were functioning under the same regulations as when they were villages of
one or two parishes. Children of six or seven were working in mills twelve hours a day, six days a
week, protected only by rules designed in Elizabethan times for apprentices living in a careful
master’s family. Another report described half-naked women working in some mines, young girls
crawling on all fours to draw trucks of coal or iron ore, children of five or six made to sit solitary in
the dark all day long, opening and shutting ventilating doors. Aghast at these revelations,
Parliament passed the first significant Factory Act in 1833, followed by the 1842 act forbidding the
employment of women in the mines or of boys under the age of ten. But, enforcement of these acts,
in either mill or mine, was far from adequate, and in other trades child labour was never treated
systematically. If, like Dickens’ Oliver Twist, they were farmed out to brutal masters, their lot
might be desperate.

Adapted from: Gordon S. Haight, ed.: The Portable Victorian Reader (Penguin, 1972).

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2. THE 20TH CENTURY

The early arms race of the 20th century escalated into a war which involved many powerful nations:
World War I (1914-1918). This war drastically changed the way war was fought, as new inventions
such as machine guns, tanks, chemical weapons, and grenades created stalemates on the battlefield
and millions of troops were killed with little progress made on either side. After more than four
years of trench warfare in western Europe, and 20 million dead, those powers who had formed the
Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia, later replaced by the United States and joined by Italy)
emerged victorious over the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire).
In addition to annexing much of the colonial possessions of the vanquished states, the Triple
Entente exacted punitive restitution payments from their former foes, plunging Germany in
particular into economic depression. The Russian Empire was plunged into revolution during the
conflict and transitioned into the first ever communist state, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
empires were dismantled at the war’s conclusion. World War I brought about the end of the royal
and imperial ages of Europe and established the United States as a major world military power.

At the beginning of the period, Britain was arguably the world’s most powerful nation. However, its
economy was ruined by World War I, and its empire began to shrink, producing a growing power
vacuum in Europe. Fascism, a movement which grew out of post-war angst and was accelerated by
the Great Depression of the 1930s, gained momentum in Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1920s and
1930s, culminating in World War II (1939-1945), sparked by Nazi Germany's aggressive expansion
at the expense of its neighbours. Meanwhile, Japan had rapidly transformed itself into a
technologically-advanced industrial power. Its military expansion into eastern Asia and the Pacific
Ocean helped to bring the United States into World War II. Germany was defeated by the Soviet
Union in the east and by the D-Day invasion of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and
Free France from the west. The war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Japan
later became a U.S. ally with a powerful economy based on consumer goods and trade. Germany
was divided between the western powers and the Soviet Union; all areas recaptured by the Soviet
Union (East Germany and eastward) were essentially transitioned into Soviet puppet states under
communist rule. Meanwhile, western Europe was influenced by the American Marshall Plan and
made a quick economic recovery, becoming major allies of the United States under capitalist
economies and relatively democratic governments.

World War II left about 60 million people dead. When the conflict ended in 1945, the United States
and the Soviet Union emerged as very powerful nations. Allies during the war, they soon became
hostile to one other as the competing ideologies of communism and capitalism occupied Europe,
divided by the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. The military alliances headed by these nations
(NATO in North America and western Europe; the Warsaw Pact in eastern Europe) were prepared

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to wage total war with each other throughout the Cold War (1947-91). The period was marked by a
new arms race, and nuclear weapons were produced in the tens of thousands, sufficient to end most
life on the planet had they ever been used. This is believed by some historians to have staved off an
inevitable war between the two, as neither could win if their full nuclear arsenals were unleashed
upon each other. This was known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Although the Soviet
Union and the United States never directly entered conflict with each other, several proxy wars,
such as the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1957-1975), were waged to contain the
spread of communism.

After World War II, most of the European-colonized world in Africa and Asia gained independence
in a process of decolonization. This, and the drain of the two world wars, caused Europe to lose
much of its long-held power. Meanwhile, the wars empowered several nations, including the UK,
U.S., Russia, China and Japan, to exert a strong influence over many world affairs. American
culture spread around the world with the advent of Hollywood, Broadway, rock and roll, pop music,
fast food, big-box stores, and the hip-hop lifestyle. British culture continued to influence world
culture, including the ‘British Invasion’ into American music, leading many top rock bands (such as
Swedish ABBA) to sing in English. After the Soviet Union collapsed under internal pressure in
1991, a ripple effect led to the dismantling of communist states across eastern Europe and their
rocky transitions into market economies.

Following World War II, the United Nations was established as an international forum in which the
world’s nations could get together and discuss issues diplomatically. It has enacted laws on
conducting warfare, environmental protection, international sovereignty, and human rights, among
other things. Peacekeeping forces consisting of troops provided by various countries, in concert
with various United Nations and other aid agencies, has helped to relieve famine, disease, and
poverty, and to contain local wars and conflicts. Europe slowly united, politically and economically,
into what eventually became the European Union, which consisted of 15 European countries by the
end of the century.

In approximately the last third of the century, concern about humankind’s impact on the Earth’s
environment caused environmentalism to become a major citizen movement. In many countries,
especially in Europe, the movement was channelled into politics partly through Green parties,
though awareness of the problem permeated societies. By the end of the century, some progress had
been made in cleaning up the environment in first-world countries, though pollution continued
apace, and environmental problems in newly industrializing countries, such as India and China, had

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grown rapidly. Increasing awareness and pessimism over global warming began in the 1980s,
sparking one of the most heated social and political debates by the turn of the century.

Medical science and the Green Revolution in agriculture enabled the world’s population to grow
from about 1.65 billion to about 6 billion. This rapid population increase quickly became a major
concern and directly caused or contributed to several global issues, including pressure on finite
natural resources, conflict, poverty, major environmental issues, and severe overcrowding in some
areas.

Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org

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3. MODERNIST LITERATURE

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the mid-1920s.
‘Modernist’ literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms
of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as painting. Gertrude Stein’s abstract writings, for
example, have often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism of her friend
Pablo Picasso. The general thematic concerns of Modernist literature are well-summarised by the
sociologist Georg Simmel: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the
individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming
social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life” (The Metropolis
and Mental Life, 1903).

The Modernist emphasis on radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos issued
by various groups within the movement. The concerns expressed by Simmel above are echoed in
Richard Huelsenbeck’s First German Dada Manifesto of 1918: “Art in its execution and direction
is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art
will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art
which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week. The best and most extraordinary
artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of
life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time.”

The cultural history of humanity creates a unique common history that connects previous
generations with the current generation of humans, and the Modernist re-contextualization of the
individual within the fabric of this received social heritage can be seen in the ‘mythic method’
which T.S. Eliot expounded in his discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “In using the myth, in
manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a
method which others must pursue after him ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history” (Ulysses, Order and Myth, 1923).

Modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose novel Hunger (1890) is
considered to be the first ‘modernist’ novel), Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle), Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce,
Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz
Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H.
Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Menno ter Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail
Bulgakov, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, and others.

           Left to Right: Samuel Beckett; Ezra Pound (by Wyndham Lewis, 1939); Dylan Thomas; Virginia Woolf

Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and to introduce
concepts such as disjointed timelines. Moreover, Modernist literature can be viewed largely in

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terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism, examining subject
matter that is traditionally mundane – a prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot (1915). Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of
the optimism apparent in Victorian literature in favour of portraying alienated or dysfunctional
individuals within a predominantly urban and fragmented society. Many Modernist works, like
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), are marked by the absence of any central, heroic figure at all, as
narrative and narrator are collapsed into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.
Modernist literature, moreover, often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a
concern for larger factors such as social or historical change, an this is particularly prominent in
‘stream of consciousness’ writing. Examples can be seen in the work of, among others, two exact
contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (1882-1941).

A great deal of experimental theatre also rejected the conventions of realism and earlier forms.
Examples include: epic theatre, absurdist theatre, and postmodern theatre. Key figures of the 20th
century include Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Konstantin Stanislavski, Harold
Pinter, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Dario Fo and Tony Kushner.

Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org

                                                   *

Modern Theatre…Modernist Theatre
The modern theatre is the theatre of today. ‘Modernist’ theatre refers to the theatre of the first fifty
or so years of the last century, when Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Artaud flourished. Their
modernism, however, infiltrates and influences all aspects of modern theatre. They bestride the gap
between ‘Modernism’ and the modern. That is why they were, supremely, the ‘makers of modern
theatre’.

Modernism is usually – and correctly – associated with startling novelty, with art which deliberately
shocks or which deliberately – even joyfully – breaks conventions. It is often designed to be partial,
contentious, and challenging. Modernism created the ‘avant-garde’: those who not only introduced
new subject matter to art, but did so by the use of new methods and new forms. They were the
Symbolists, the Futurists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, and all the other innovators and
iconoclasts of that period. The richness and originality which they brought to art and culture were
almost overwhelming, and it often seems that artists ever since have been working out the
implications of their ideas. Certainly in theatre, the giants of the end of the twentieth century,
practitioners like Augusto Boal or Peter Stein or Lev Dodin, constantly if implicitly refer in their
work to that of their precursors. We may argue, for example, that feminist theatre capitalised deftly
on certain implications of Brechtian theatre, or that contemporary ‘physical theatre’ owes its birth to
the experiments of Meyerhold – or perhaps Artaud. And so on. Thus, the likes of Stanislavski,
Meyerhold, Brecht, and Artaud may be regarded not only as the makers of Modernist theatre, but as
the makers of modern theatre as well.

Modernism was perhaps most forcibly characterised by its awareness that the old certainties of life
and society, religion and culture, were fractured for ever by the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and
others. Post-nineteenth-century life, at least in Europe and America, became hard to anchor for
many whose primary experience was of incoherence and fragmentation.

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The avant-garde artistic movements of the Modernists, therefore, were not only themselves
fragments of the greater ‘Modernist’ culture, they were also responses to the perceived
fragmentation of experience. We might suggest that Stanislavski wanted to heal it, that Meyerhold
wanted to make it cohere beyond the stage in the spectator (in Roland Barthes’ sense, he wanted
‘the death of the theatre artist’), that Brecht wanted to use it for political purposes, and that Artaud
wanted to cauterise. Insofar as this was the case, between them these attitudes encompass the range
of Modernist theatre.

Adapted from: Robert Leach: Makers of Modern Theatre: An Introduction (Routledge, 2004).

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4. EXISTENTIALISM

Like ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism,’ ‘existentialism’ is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its
definition is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a
self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and
philosophical output of Sartre and his associates – notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, and Albert Camus – existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that
flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. It is worth noting, however, that many of the major
philosophers identified as existentialists, including Camus and Martin Heidegger, actually
repudiated the label. The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich
Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement.

                                            Jean-Luc Godard

Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre’s own ideas were
and are better known through his fictional works than through his more purely philosophical ones,
and the postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term:
Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted, while in Paris there were Jean Genet, André Gide,
André Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and
Ingmar Bergman were also understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of
existentialism had become a cliché, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.

                                             Ingmar Bergman

It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism is merely this bygone cultural movement
rather than an identifiable philosophical position; or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted
to Sartre’s philosophy alone. But while a philosophical definition of existentialism may not entirely
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ignore the cultural fate of the term, and while Sartre’s thought must loom large in any account of
existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and
helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of 20th and now 21st century philosophical inquiry.

                                                     Jean-Paul Sartre

In the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths
that natural science – including the science of psychology – could tell us. Nor will it suffice to adopt
the point of view of practice and add categories drawn from moral theory – neither scientific nor
moral inquiry can fully capture what it is that makes me myself. Without denying the validity of
scientific categories (governed by the norm of truth) or moral categories (governed by norms of the
good and the right), existentialism may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a
further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human
existence. To approach existentialism in this categorical way may seem to conceal what is often
taken to be its heart – namely, its character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its
anti-system sensibility, its flight from the iron cage of reason. But while it is true that the major
existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time, and
while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective
science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated
with existentialism – dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness,
and so on – find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new categorial
framework, together with its governing norm.

Adapted from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

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5. ALBERT CAMUS (1913-1960)

                                             Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His father died in 1914, during
World War I’s Battle of the Marne. War was to remain a constant throughout Camus’ life – and his
literature.

Albert’s mother was left to raise her son alone, in extreme poverty. Widowed and nearly deaf, there
was little possibility of her earning a reasonable income. She moved the family to Rue de Lyon, in
the Belcourt section of Algiers. Belcourt was a crowded, almost third-world neighbourhood. The
family had been forced to move there so a grandmother could raise Albert and his older brother.
Albert’s grandmother was dying of liver cancer, while an uncle living in the house was paralyzed.
Camus’ family represented all human misery and misfortune.

According to Camus’ accounts, his mother was permanently melancholy. To escape this home life,
he buried himself in studies and participation in local athletic teams. He distinguished himself in
sports as a leader and competitor. In academic pursuits, young Albert also excelled, and when he
entered a local Belcourt school, an instructor noticed young his intellect. The teacher tutored Albert,
helping him pass the lycée entrance exams in 1923. A lycée is an exclusive secondary school for
students destined to university, as Albert was.

An important step out of poverty, Camus was accepted into the University of Algiers’ school of
philosophy. In 1930, however, his studies were interrupted by severe tuberculosis. The disease took
away one of his most important possessions – his strength. As a result of the disease, Camus
reduced his studies to a part-time pursuit. He would subsequently attend lectures at the University
of Algiers from 1932 through 1953, never losing his enthusiasm for learning.

Between 1931 and 1935, Camus worked in a string of low-paying jobs, including positions as a
police clerk and salesman. He also had a brief marriage during this period, which ended in divorce.
Sadly, Camus wanted to be a teacher, but could never pass the required medical exam due to his
tuberculosis.

While a student at the University, Camus joined and then left the Communist Party, a stormy
relationship with the party which continued throughout his life. Still, he remained a socialist, and
founded The Workers’ Theater in 1935. The Workers’ Theater was intended to present socialist
plays to Algiers’ working population, since Camus hoped to educate the workers, in accordance
with his own beliefs. The theatre company survived until 1939.

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Between 1937 and 1939, Camus wrote for the Alger-Republicain, a socialist paper. As a reporter, he
compiled a detailed account of the lives of poor Arabs in Kabyles. Camus later published a
collection of essays on the conditions and ethnic discrimination faced by the Arabs. In late 1939 and
early 1940, he edited another socialist paper, the Soir-Republicain. His editorship lasted only a few
short months, as the paper closed in the midst of tensions between Algiers and France.

In 1940, Camus left Algiers for Paris, hoping to establish himself as a reporter in the leftist press.
Unfortunately, the German army invaded France, and Camus returned to North Africa. The invasion
of France left a terrible impression upon Camus.

Camus remarried in Africa, and found a teaching position in Oran. During the following year, he
produced some of his greatest essays and short stories. In less than a year, Camus wrote drafts of
The Stranger (a.k.a. The Outsider), The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague, as well as filling
notebooks with his thoughts on philosophy and politics.

                     Poster for Luchino Visconti’s 1967 film, Lo Straniero (The Stranger)

In 1941 Camus was compelled to return to France and join the French Resistance. He joined a
clandestine resistance cell, known as ‘Combat’ – also the name of the organization’s newspaper.
Camus became editor of Combat in 1943, editing the paper for four years. His columns and reports
often called upon people to act in accordance with strict moral principals, and it was during this
period that Camus formalised his philosophy that human life was sacred, no matter how
inexplicable existence might be.

Following the war, Camus toured the United States, and found that French Existentialism, as
promoted by Jean-Paul Sartre, was widely misunderstood as a philosophy of hopelessness. Camus
did hold that life was absurd – defying logical explanation, and ultimately irrational. However, he
considered life valuable and worth defending. While the American public thought existentialism

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was devoid of morality, Camus’ experiences in Algiers and France had led to a strong ethical
system.

In 1944, at the age of thirty-one, Camus was a leading voice of social change. He belonged to no
political party and was fiercely independent. His rejection of Marxism led to attacks from the
Communists in France and other countries. Camus responded by attempting to form a socialist party
of his own. While the political party never matured, it was clear that Camus spoke for many French
workers.

Camus succumbed to illness in 1949 – a relapse of his tuberculosis, accompanied by other
difficulties. For two years he remained in seclusion, writing and publishing political essays. After
recovering in 1951, he published The Rebel, a collection of his thoughts on metaphysical, historical,
and artistic rebellion. The book so angered some of his counterparts that he was ostracised by many
French intellectuals. It was this work that led to Camus’ split with long-time friend, Jean-Paul
Sartre.

The stress of The Rebel’s reception among philosophers and historians led Camus to seek more
relaxing work. He spent the next few years translating his favourite plays, and this work as a
translator led to successful French-language productions of plays by Larivey, Buzzati, and William
Faulkner.

The Fall was published in 1956, marking Camus’ return to novels. The book was well-received,
bringing him back into favour in intellectual circles. The following year, in fact, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature.

It seems almost fitting that Camus died at the pinnacle of his career as a writer. He was killed in a
freak car accident near Sens, France, on January 4, 1960. Among his papers was the novel The First
Man, a fictionalised account of his family history. This novel was published in 1995, leading to
renewed interest in Camus and his works.

Adapted from: http://mural.uv.es

                                                 19

6. JOHN OSBORNE’S LOOK BACK IN ANGER (1956)

            Left: Richard Burton and Mary Ure in the 1958 film, Look Back in Anger. Right: John Osborne

An inarticulate hope:
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
Playing at the Royal National Theatre, London
By Paul Bond
14 September 1999

The first production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 provoked a major controversy.
There were those, like the Observer newspaper’s influential critic Kenneth Tynan, who saw it as the
first totally original play of a new generation. There were others who hated both it and the world
that Osborne was showing them. But even these critics acknowledged that the play, written in just
one month, marked a new voice on the British stage.

Howard Brenton, writing in the Independent newspaper at the time of Osborne’s death in 1994,
said, “When somebody breaks the mould so comprehensively it’s difficult to describe what it feels
like”. In the same paper, Arnold Wesker described Osborne as having “opened the doors of theatres
for all the succeeding generations of writers”.

Look Back in Anger came to exemplify a reaction to the affected drawing-room comedies of Noel
Coward, Terrence Rattigan and others, which dominated the West End stage in the early 1950s.
Coward et al wrote about an affluent bourgeoisie at play in the drawing-rooms of their country
homes, or sections of the upper middle-class comfortable in suburbia. Osborne and the writers who
followed him were looking at the working class or the lower middle class, struggling with their
existence in bedsits or terraces. The ‘kitchen sink’ dramatists – as their style of domestic realism
became to be known – sought to convey the language of everyday speech, and to shock with its
bluntness.

The play
The three-act play takes place in a one-bedroom flat in the Midlands. Jimmy Porter, lower middle-
class and university-educated, lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in the
British Army in India. His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them.
Jimmy, intellectually restless and thwarted, reads the papers, argues, and taunts his friends over
their acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his
                                                        20

bile for Alison’s friends and family. The situation is exacerbated by the arrival of Helena, an actress
friend of Alison’s from school. Appalled at what she finds, Helena calls Alison’s father to take her
away from the flat. He arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes Alison away.
As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy’s
baby. Helena can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves. Finally Alison returns to Jimmy
and his angry life.

The problem, which even a fine revival like this production has, is with the melodramatic qualities
of the narrative. Osborne’s script became almost a template for the new school of writers, and it is
difficult to present his work without being aware that there is a faint whiff of formula about it. But
despite the plot’s shortcomings (which were recognised even by such a fierce admirer as Tynan), it
still has the power to startle. There was an audible intake of breath from the audience when Jimmy
fell into Helena’s arms. Thanks to a fine performance from William Gaunt, the sympathy felt by
Colonel Redfern, Alison’s father, for Jimmy came as a revelation, but still totally understandable
within the framework of the play.

The language, too, still has the power to shock, such as when Jimmy, unaware of Alison’s
pregnancy, says to her:

     If only something – something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you
     could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little
     mass of India rubber and wrinkles. Please – if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might
     even become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it.

It is a tribute to Gregory Hersov’s direction and Michael Sheen’s performance as Jimmy that this
does not seem overblown or ridiculous.

Some of the imagery and language doesn’t travel too well historically and reflects only the
preoccupations of the era. It is difficult, for example, to imagine jazz being quite as exotic as it is
for Jimmy. Or to understand the intellectual courage of saying about a gay man, “He’s like a man
with a strawberry mark – he keeps thrusting it in your face because he can’t believe it doesn't
interest or horrify you particularly. As if I give a damn which way he likes his meat served up”. At
the time, homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

The production stays close to Osborne’s original stage-image. This enables it to show the play as
standing at a crossroads both of the British stage and also of political and historical epochs. Before
the show, the title is projected onto the curtains like a jazz album cover. Between scenes, wreaths of
cigarette smoke rise up the curtains. An era is evoked. Matilda Ziegler’s Helena also captures a lost
period of weekly repertory theatre, of companies travelling the country with precisely the sort of
play that Look Back in Anger was attacking; a world evoked with such nostalgia in The Dresser. It
was a time when actors auditioned in suits or the sort of starched twin-pieces that Helena wears
before she moves in with Jimmy. The admiration of Colonel Redfern for Jimmy’s principles and his
amusement at Jimmy’s description of Mrs Redfern as “an overfed, overprivileged old bitch”, are set
against his total lack of comprehension of what Jimmy’s life actually means. Alison says to him
“You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And
neither of you can face it. Something’s gone wrong somewhere, hasn’t it?” Or, as it was put in a
Daily Express article from December 1959 which is quoted in the programme: “Out of this decade
has come the Illusion of Comfort, and we have lost the sense of life’s difficulty”.

It is clear from Osborne’s script that there was no lack of a sense of life’s difficulties around at the
time. But the emphasis had shifted from the martyred expressions of the British ruling class and
their “white man’s burden”, as represented in Colonel Redfern, to a more serious appraisal of life

                                                        21

for those outside that ruling class. Emma Fielding does a good job playing Alison, who has grown
up with the one attitude but has been forced by her situation into the other. Fielding gives a good
performance as the woman who tolerates Jimmy’s invective, living constantly with the threat of
something erupting in front of her. Helena, on the other hand, ultimately cannot stay with Jimmy
precisely because of the destruction of all her old certainties.

Perhaps the only truly sympathetic character in the play is Cliff, here excellently played by Jason
Hughes. From his role as Jimmy’s foil in the early exchanges, to appearing as Alison’s real friend,
to the point when he decides that he does not want to stay in the flat, Hughes gives a magnificent
portrayal of solidness. Whilst Alison is forced to accept Jimmy’s rages because her family
background has robbed her of any other viable option, Hughes shows us Cliff as someone who is
keeping the peace by hiding his real character – by playing along with all the games.

In Jimmy Porter, Osborne created what came to be seen as a model of the ‘angry young man’ –
railing at the lack of passion of his age, entreating Alison and Cliff to show some enthusiasm. He is
marvellously, unreasonably idealistic in a wildly unfocussed way. Kenneth Tynan, who described
Jimmy as “the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet”, criticised those who attacked
the recklessness of Jimmy’s attacks.

     Is Jimmy’s anger justified? Why doesn’t he do something? These questions might be relevant if the
     character had failed to come to life; in the presence of such evident and blazing vitality, I marvel at the
     pedantry that could ask them. Why don't Chekhov’s people do something? Is the sun justified in
     scorching us?

It is just this “evident and blazing vitality” that Michael Sheen represents so well. Spluttering with
indignation, retreating into his pseudo-literary takes on vaudeville, firing off his vindictive gags
almost because he can do nothing else. Osborne, throughout his work, was fascinated by end-of-pier
music hall and vaudeville. In The Entertainer, one year later, he used vaudeville and its washed-up
performer Archie Rice in a brilliant take on the crisis in post-war British society. Here he has
Jimmy and Cliff perform a variety-style number, “Don’t be afraid to sleep with your sweetheart just
because she’s better than you”, as well as trading cheap cracks in true hackneyed music hall style.

More than any other writer of his generation, Osborne was fascinated by the tragedy lurking at the
heart of the light entertainment performance. Michael Sheen adds another layer to this in his
spluttering soliloquies, carrying with them an echo of Tony Hancock’s ridiculous suburban
pretensions. It is a fascinating comparison: Hancock, the parodist of lower-middle-class aspirations,
and Jimmy Porter, the raging expression of the frustrations of the lower middle class. Sheen has a
lightness of touch that suits Jimmy’s failed jokes and misplaced comments, as well as his more
furious denunciations of the absence of passion.

The impact Osborne had on British theatre is incalculable. With Look Back in Anger he brought
class as an issue before British audiences. Under Hersov’s direction, Sheen articulates the
realisation of a man who has reached the limits of the possibilities open to him but is struggling to
retain his dignity. “Why don’t we have a little game?” he asks. “Let’s pretend that we’re human
beings, and that we’re actually alive”. Sheen gives a marvellous performance of a man running in
circles trying to find a way out.

Osborne has often been criticised for not seeing a way out, and not explaining more carefully the
crisis in which Jimmy finds himself. Robert Wright, reviewing the first production in the Star,
wrote, “He obviously wants to shake us into thinking but we are never quite clear what it is he
wants us to think about. Is it the Class Struggle or simply sex?” This incoherence in Jimmy’s rage is
both strength and a limitation to the play.

                                                         22

It is apparent from the text that Osborne recognised this limitation, even tacitly. Helena criticises
Jimmy, saying,

      There’s no place for people like that any longer – in sex, or politics, or anything. That’s why he’s so
      futile.... He doesn’t know where he is, or where he’s going. He’ll never do anything, and he’ll never
      amount to anything.

It seems almost a recognition that within his own work there are insufficient answers. This goes
hand-in-hand with Jimmy’s statement that “people of our generation aren’t able to die for good
causes any longer.... There aren’t any good, brave causes left.”

Such a statement could be read as the voice of pessimistic nihilism. Writing about Celine’s novel
Journey to the End of Night, Trotsky described it as “a book dictated by terror in the face of life,
and weariness of it, rather than by indignation. Active indignation is linked up with hope. In
Celine’s book there is no hope.” That is clearly not the case here. Jimmy yearns for passion, and
clings to the idea of it. When Alison returns to him he tells her, “I may be a lost cause, but I thought
if you loved me, it needn’t matter.” There is a vision, however confused, of the possibilities of
human existence. What makes Jimmy’s statement so interesting is precisely the historical context in
which it occurs.

Kenneth Tynan, who referred to the play’s “instinctive leftishness” in his Observer review, wrote in
a piece on ‘The Angry Young Movement’ that Jimmy Porter “represented the dismay of many
young Britons [...] who came of age under a Socialist government, yet found, when they went out
into the world, that the class system was still mysteriously intact.”

It is the mistaken association of the post-war Labour government with the failure of socialism per se
that accounts for Porter’s frustration. Osborne, active in various protests at the time, such as the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, articulated his own sentiments through his lead character. In
this respect, it is possible to see in the play expressions of the political impasse that had been
reached in Britain during the 1950s, as a result of the domination of intellectual life by Stalinism
and social democracy.

Nonetheless, it is also possible to see a challenge, albeit confused and unclear, to that impasse.
There remains somewhere at the play’s core – even if it cannot be explained – hope. There remains
a belief that somehow people can survive the worst and perhaps even overcome it; a belief in
humanity, and the possibility of a way forward.

Adapted from: http://www.wsws.org

                                                        23

7. SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989)

                                           Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle
class, Protestant home, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school Oscar Wilde had
attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, “I had little talent for happiness.”

Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man,
often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any
lengthy conversation – it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up – but the women could not
resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He
once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce’s daughter, that he was dead and had no
feelings that were human.

In 1928, Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. Shortly after he arrived, a
mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce, and Beckett soon became an apostle of the older
writer. At the age of 23, he wrote an essay in defence of Joyce’s magnum opus against the public’s
lazy demand for easy comprehensibility. A year later, he won his first literary prize – 10 pounds for
a poem which dealt with the philosopher Descartes’ meditations on the subject of time and the
transient nature of life. After writing a study of Proust, however, Beckett came to the conclusion
that habit and routine were the “cancer of time”, so he set out on a nomadic journey across Europe.

Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing poems
and stories and doing odd jobs to get by. In the course of his journeys, he no doubt came into
contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these acquaintances would later translate into some
of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and
they would spend lengthy periods together, although it was rumoured that they mostly sat in silence,
both suffused with sadness.

Beckett finally settled down in Paris in 1937. Shortly thereafter, he was stabbed in the street by a
man who had approached him asking for money. He would learn later, in the hospital, that he had a
perforated lung. After his recovery, he went to visit his assailant in prison. When asked why he had
attacked Beckett, the prisoner replied “Je ne sais pas, Monsieur”, a phrase hauntingly reminiscent
of some of the lost and confused souls that would populate the writer’s later works.

During World War II, Beckett stayed in Paris, even after it had become occupied by the Germans.
He joined the underground movement and fought for the resistance until 1942, when several

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