Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
He was born in 1898. He was a German poet and playwright. He is known for his anti-Aristotelian epic theatre. Brecht believed in arousing the spectator's capacity for action through his plays and transforming them from spectators to actors. His first play was Baal in 1922. This was followed by Drums in the Night, Jungle of the Cities, Man Equals Man and A Respectable Wedding.
His play Mother Courage and Her Children was written against the backdrop of the rise of Hitler. He opposed the Nazi Movement, fled from Germany in 1933 and emigrated to America. In 1940s, he was accused by the House of the Un-American Activities Committee for holding left wing views. He later left America and settled in East Germany. He died in 1956 in East Berlin.
Major Works
Saint Joan of the Stockyards
The play was written between 1922-1931 and published in 1959. In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into 'Joan Dark', a member of the 'Black Straw Hats' in 20th century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the sycophantic owner of the meat-packing plant. Like her predecessor, Joan is doomed woman, a martyr and an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humour and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure. The play, which was never staged in Brecht's lifetime.
Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)
Mother Courage is one of the plays that Brecht wrote in resistance to the rise of Fascism and Nazism. In response to the invasion of Poland by German Armies of Adolf Hitler in 1939, Brecht wrote this play.
Following Brecht's own principles for political drama, the play is not set in modern times but during the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648. It involved all the European states.
It follows the fortune of Anna Fierling, nicknamed 'Mother Courage', a wily canteen woman with the Swedish Army. She is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Eilif, Kattrin and Swiss Cheese, to the very war from which she tried to profit.
Major Works
Happy End (1929)
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938)
The Trial of Lucullus (1940)
The Days of the Commune (1956)
Trumpets and Drums (1955)
John Arden (1930-2012)
He was a British Marxist playwright. He was born in 1930. In royal court theatre, he got success with this play, Live Like Pigs (1958). In this play, he deals with the resettlement of gypsies in a housing estate which explores anti-social behaviour. John Arden was typical of a new generation of dramatists who started their careers at royal court. He was impressed with Bertolt Brecht. His play The Happy Haven (1960) was a farcical play with masks.
Serjeant Musgrave's Dance
Arden's most celebrated and a short play is based on anti-militaristic theme with a combination of music, song and symbolism. In this play, he deals with very real people, who are involved in a complex situation and seeking for principles to guide them. In Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964) and Left Handed Liberty (1965), he used historical events as settings for the evaluation of morality. Arden has written many experimental plays for young people with his wife, Margaretta D'Arcy.
Arnold Wesker (1932 - Present)
He was a British dramatist born in 1932. Among the dramatists of World War II, he is one of the most notable. He wrote three plays in the beginning of his career. Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I'm talking about Jerusalem (1960). He describes in these plays East End's Jews search for security, principles and happiness. Though he tries to show the working class for about 30 years, he has to admit that there is lack of progress and purpose because the welfare state has brought comfort and destroyed causes. He often clearly searches for pseudo-culture or a return to 19th century socialism.
Major Works
Chips with Everything was written in 1962. It has the combination of comedy, satire and a tragic allegory coloured with mysticism.
Their Very Own and Golden City was written in 1965. It is a long and detailed study of socialism and social progress. Arnold Wesker shows that his thoughts on society are old fashioned and he becomes a pessimist.
The Friends was written in 1970. In this play, Wesker is again, pessimist. He is responsible for founding centre 42, which is to take arts to neglected places.
David Storey (1933-2017)
He is an English playwright, novelist and rugby player. He was born in 1933, in Yorkshire. He was trained as an artist at the Slade School. After doing many jobs, he turned to writing.
Works of Storey
The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (1966), The Contractor (1969), The Changing Room (1971) and Life Class (1974). In all his plays, the writer sees madness or craziness as only defense, but these comedies are written in a more unnatural form.
Tom Stoppard (1937- Present)
Sir Tom Stoppard, born in 1937, is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour etc. His works cover the themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematic of society. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
Major Works
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist, existential tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard, first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966. The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Comparisons have also been drawn with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time.
The Real Inspector Hound
The play was written between 1961 and 1962, drawing on Stoppard's experiences as a Bristol theatre critic. The Real Inspector Hound is a short, one-act play by Tom Stoppard. The plot follows two theatre critics named Moon and Birdboot who are watching a ludicrous setup of a country house murder mystery, in the style of a whodunit. By chance, they become involved in the action causing a series of events that parallel the play they are watching.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is a stage play by Tom Stoppard. It was first performed in 1977. The play criticises the Soviet practice of treating political dissidence as a form of mental illness. Its title derives from the popular mnemonic used by music students to remember the notes on the lines of the treble clef. The cast comprises six actors, but also a full orchestra, which not only provides music throughout the play but also forms an essential part of the action. A chamber-orchestra version also exists. The play is dedicated to Viktor Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, two Soviet dissidents expelled to the West.
John Clifford Mortimer (1923-2009)
He was an English dramatist and barrister born in 1923. He learnt his methods from radio and television and became famous. He is best known for his Rumpole of the Bailey plays.
Dock Brief was written in 1957 from a TV script. In the Wrong Side of the Park (1960) and Two Stars for Comfort (1972), he wrote sympathetically about the lonely, the neglected and the unsuccessful.
He struggled against the established rules. Collaboration (1973) and The Bells of Hell (1977) are his more successful comedies. These are full-length plays in which he uses sharpness and understanding of the subtle difference in the feeling and meaning of the character. A Voyage Round My Father (1970) is a tender autobiography and review of an era. He died in 2009.
Major Works
Rumpole of the Bailey (1978)
Rumpole of the Bailey is a British television series created and written by the British writer and barrister John Mortimer. It stars Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an ageing London barrister who defends any and all clients. The original show has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels and radio programmes.
Edward Bond (1935)
He is an English poet and playwright born in 1935. He was one of those writers, who wanted a direct attack on the audience through horrifying, shocking even disgusting situations. His imagery is violent. His language is concise and clear. His plays depict man in social, political and mental chains and portray the world to be full of hopelessness.
Major Works
Saved (1965) and Pope's Wedding are his first plays. Bond sees anger and violence as the only means of self-expression, open to the socially deprived.
Bingo was written in 1974. The play shows Shakespeare in his self-satisfied retirement and complicit in the economic oppression of the poor but silent when it comes to effective social protest. His other plays are Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971) and The Fool (1975). All these plays have imaginatively different expression of his philosophy. Early Morning, an excellent example of blank farce was written in 1968.
Peter Nichols (1927)
He is an English writer born in 1927. He was versatile and imaginative. He left acting to become a playwright. His plays are quite autobiographical in nature.
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) describes a marriage and a child sensitively.
Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971) This play recollects the war period through the eyes of young people. It is a comedy with music. It has personal recollections, disguise and moments of history.
The National Health (1969) and Chez Nous (1974) Both plays have biting satires in a language, which forces a man to listen even when it hurts.
John Osborne (1929-1994)
John Osborne was an English playwright, born in London on 12th December, 1929. He obtained his education from a private boarding school, Belmont College. Osborne did not receive a college/university education. He began work in the theatre as an actor and writer.
Literary Career and Works
His play Look Back in Anger, which opened on 8th May, 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, revolutionised English theatre. This play became a representative text of the Angry Young Men Movement. Its protagonist-Jimmy Porter-captured the angry and rebellious nature of the postwar generation. The Angry Young Men Movement consisted of a group of British novelists and playwrights in the 1950s, who expressed their dissatisfaction with the prevailing sociopolitical order of their country.
This group of intellectuals, who had grown up after the World War II, belonged to lower middle class or working class backgrounds. They revolted against the hypocrisy of the upper classes and rebelled against unfair treatment meted out to them. Apart from Osborne, other writers that belonged to this movement were John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe and John Braine. Osborne’s next play The Entertainer (1957) examined the decline of post-war Britain through the decline of the once powerful art of English music hall. Osborne used theatre as a weapon to revolt against accepted norms and ideals.
He once remarked, “I do not like the kind of society, in which I find myself. I like it less and less. I love the theatre more and more because I know that it is what I always dreamed it might be: a weapon. I am sure that it can be one of the decisive weapons of our time”. Apart from plays, Osborne also ventured into writing screenplays, television adaptations and autobiography. He died as a result of complications from diabetes on 24th December, 1994, in Shropshire, England.
Major Work
Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 8th May, 1956. The play is set in a one-room attic apartment in the Midlands of England. This large room is the home of Jimmy Porter, his wife Alison and his business partner and friend Cliff Lewis, who has a separate bedroom across the hall. The cultural backdrop to the play is the rise and fall of the British Empire. The beginning of the 20th century saw the peak of power and influence of British colonialism. By the 1950’s, World War II, which devastated the British economy. The rise of the United States as the new world military and political power meant that the British Empire had entered a steep decline. Jimmy Porter is representative of an entire culture that remained nostalgic for this past glory.
Jimmy Porter, the play's main character, became the model for the ‘Angry Young Man,’ a nickname given to an entire generation of artists and working class young men in post World War II British society. Jimmy is angry at the social and political structures that he believes has kept him from achieving his dreams and aspirations. He directs this anger towards his friends and, most notably, his wife Alison. The play is also the first well-known example of ‘Kitchen Sink’ drama, a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social relations. Look Back in Anger was adapted in 1958, as a film by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale. A second film was made in 1980, directed by Lindsay Anderson.
His Major Works
Plays
The Devil Inside (1950, with Stella Linden)
Look Back in Anger (1956)
The Entertainer (1957)
Luther (1961)
Inadmissible Evidence (1964)
A Patriot for Me (1965)
Autobiography
A Better Class of Person (autobiography, 1981)
Almost a Gentleman (Sequel to A Better Class of Person, 1991)
Shelagh Delaney (1939-2011)
Shelagh Delaney was an English dramatist and screen writer. She was born in Broughton in 1939. She was associated with the theatre of Royal Court. She died of breast cancer in 2011.
A Taste of Honey
It was published in 1958. It is a beautiful combination of solid realism and romantic dream fantasy. In this play, on one hand, she shows the innocence of young love. On the other hand, she describes the conflicts of mother-daughter relationship and homosexuality. She got success with this play.
Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
Harold Pinter was a renowned English playwright, screenwriter and director. He was born to a Jewish Tailor in London in 1930. Pinter studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but soon left to undertake an acting career under the stage name David Baron.
Literary Career and Works
Pinter started writing plays in 1957. He wrote a short play, The Room, in 1957 and went on to create his first full-length drama, The Birthday Party. This play tasted little commercial success. It was with The Caretaker in 1960s, that Pinter achieved a measure of success. The play concerns two brothers- Aston and Mick and a tramp-Davies. The Homecoming is considered to be a turning point in Pinter’s literary career. The play explores the life of a predominantly male working class family. Set in North London, the play begins with the homecoming of Teddy and his wife, Ruth. After 6 years of marriage and living in America with their three sons, Ruth finally meets Teddy’s family. His father, uncle and two brothers, all live in the same house. Competition among the men increases with the coming of Ruth to draw her attention.
Pinter's plays fall under the category of Comedy of Menace. The term was first applied to Pinter's plays by the theatre critic Irving Wardle, but was also the subtitle of David Campton's The Lunatic View.
Comedy of Menace denotes a kind of play, in which the characters feel threatened by some overpowering or frightening force. This fear and menace becomes a source of comedy. Pinter also wrote screenplays for The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Last Tycoon, and The Handmaid's Tale. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Pinter died from liver cancer on 24th December, 2008.
Major Works
The Room (1957)
The Dumb Waiter (1957)
The Dwarfs (1960)
The Basement (1966)
Family Voices (1980)
The New World Order (1991)
Party Time (1991)
Betrayal
Ashes to Ashes
The Birthday Party (1957)
The Caretaker (1959)
The Homecoming (1964)
Monologue (1972)
Celebration (1999)
No Man's Land
Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
Arthur Miller is counted as one of the three great dramatists of the modern American drama. He was born in a Jewish family in New York in 1915. His family belonged to middle class. His family was suffering from financial crisis so he had to search for a job to meet his family needs and continue his studies. He worked as an assistant in a shop for 2 years. He joined the Michigan University in 1934-1938 and studied journalism and writing plays.
Literary Career and Works
He got many prizes for his dramatic talent during his university education. He wrote his first play Honours at Dawn. This play won the university's Avery Hopwood Award for him. In 1983, he wrote his play No Villain Later, it was renamed They Too Arise. This play also won the same award for him. It also won the prize of Theatre Guild Bureau of New Plays. He wrote many plays during the World War II. He wrote The Man, who Had All The Luck in NewYork in 1944.
He wrote a book of report age Situation Normal and the screen play The Story of G.I. In 1945, he wrote a novel Focus. His play All My Sons won for him the Donald Son award and the New York Drama, Critics Circle Award. He has written about his second wife 'Marilyn Monroe' who was a celebrity. He has written about ten major plays, short stories, film scripts, critical essays and a novel. He wrote his play Death of a Salesman in 1949 at the Morosco, New York.
Situation Normal is a volume of sketches pertaining to life in the army The Man who had All The Luck is his first novelistic play. The Crucible is a kind of modern parable. Memory of Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge are focussed on the commonman.
The Misfits is the effect of maladjustment in a matrimonial alliance. After the fall is based on the stream of consciousness technique. 'The Prince' describes family quarrel between two brothers. He died in 2005.
Major Works
Plays
The Crucible (1953)
After the Fall (1963)
Incident at Vichy (1964)
The Prince (1968)
Playing for Time (1981)
Two-way Mirror (1985)
The American Clock (1980)
A View from the Bridge (1955)
The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977)
A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)
Novel
The Misfits
Autobiography
Time Bounds (1987)
Short Story
I Don't Need You Anymore
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
He was born on 26th March, 1911, Palm Sunday in the rectory of Dr Walter Edward, who was his maternal grandfather in Columbus. Palm Sunday is considered holy because on this day Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem. It is the Sunday before Easter. His father had Cornelius Coffin Williams was a man of ancestry.
His mother Edwina Darkin belonged to the Quakers. His father was a travelling salesman for the international shoe company. So, his family lived at Episcopal rectories in Mississippi with his wife's parents.
In 1918, his father got promotion as a sales manager so the family moved to St Louis. This transfer affected both the children because they had lost carefree and natural environment of the rectories. At St Louis, they were ridiculed for their Southern ways and manners. These things brought him and his sister Rose closer to each other. When his brother Darkin was born, he was sent to his maternal grandfather for a year in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
During his study, he studied the books of Dickens, Shakespeare and other writers from his grandfather's library.
When he returned home in St Louis, he found that his family atmosphere had become worse because his father went on quarrelling with his mother continuously. He found solace in the books and type writer of $ 10, which was gifted to him by his mother on his 11th birthday. Soon, he (Nickname-Tom) began to write from his typewriter. He wrote many poems, vignettes, sketches and short stories.
Literary Career and Works
At the University of Missouri, his grandfather Dakin Ralph helped him in admission. He met Hazel Kramer. She had been his intimate friend since his grammar school days in St Louis. At the university, he was the first youngman, who won an honourable mention from the Dramatic Arts Club for his play named 'Beauty is the World'. He failed in the reserved Officers Training Corps. Being angry his father pulled him out of the school and got him a job at the international shoe company as clerk-cum-typist. He hated this job.
He wrote a comedy named Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay to be played in the theatre. This play got some success. At the Washington University in St Louis, he made friendship with Clarkmills Mc Burney. During this period, he wrote a play called The Magic Tower. In a play writing contest conducted by the theatre Guild of Webster Grooves, Missouri, he won the first prize for this play. He was introduced to Mummers, a little theatre group of St Louis. He continued to write plays in college.
After years of obscurity Williams got great success with his play The Glass Menagerie. He continued to write until his death on 25th February, 1983, by accidental choking.
Major Works
A Street Care Named Desire (1947)
Summer and Smoke (1948)
Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964)
The Rose Tattoo (1951)
Camino Real (1953)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
Garden District (1958)
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
Period of Adjustment (1960)
Night of the Iguana (1961)
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1962)
Slapstick Tragedy (1965)
The Seven Descendants of Myrtle (1968)
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969)
Small craft Warnings (1972)
The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)
Vieux Carree (1977)
Creve Coeur (1978)
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
Eugene O' Neill (1888-1953)
Eugene O' Neill was the greatest dramatist in America. He was born on 16th October, 1888 in an up-town family hotel named Barrett House on Broadway at 43, Street New York.
His father James O' Neill was a famous actor. His mother Ella Quinlan was a beautiful lady, who was a fan of music. Eugene O' Neill would go with his father on his acting tours. He got his early education from Catholic Boarding School. For 6 years, he studied at the Betts Academy. In 1902, he went to Princeton. He took admission in the university, but studied only a year.
Literary Career and Works
Eugene decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays (the events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatised in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night). O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. O'Neill's first play, Bound East for Cardiff, premiered at this theatre on a wharf in Province town Massachusetts.
O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the US occupation of Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. In The Hairy Ape, the Hero Yank is different from the Aristotelian theory of tragic heroes because he has no tragic flaw yet he meets a sad end. His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been. In 1936, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature after he had been nominated that year by Henrik Schuck, member of the Swedish Academy. After a ten-years pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and it was decades before coming to be considered as among his best works.
He was also part of the modern movement to partially revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek theatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays, such as The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed.
Major works
The Iceman Cometh
Beyond the Horizon (1918)
Anna Christie (1920)
The Hairy Ape (1921)
Desire Under the Elms (1925)
Strange Interlude (1926)
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