Theatre

The roots of modern English drama stretch back into the past, and often the process of its development is plain enough to trace. The widespread dramatization of fiction in the twentieth century is yet another link with literary tradition. There have been dramas based on the life and work of the Brontes, such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, on the Brownings (The Barrets of Wimpole Street), on Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Emma), on Gaskell's Cranford and Trollope's Barchester Towers, and on Russian novels, such as War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, all testifying to the strong literary interests of the English playgoing public. Nevertheless the English stage of the twentieth century has produced on the whole theatrical rather than literary drama. One of the best qualities of the serious English drama during the twentieth century has been its tenacity, its ability to survive in small repertory theatres and converted parish halls, in private groups and diminutive London playhouses, while the West End has been increasingly given over to lavish amusement and after-dinner comedy, where commercialism has exercised a very strong influence.

It was Bernard Shaw who lifted the realistic drama to its highest potentiality, by making it primarily intellectual drama, the intellectual brilliancy of which is ultimately enjoyable. His plays are conspicuous for abundantly witty dialogue. Bernard Shaw's first play Widower's Houses was an exposure of respectableshameful slum landlordism. After a startling success of his plays at the Independent Theatre and subsequently at the Court Theatre B. Shaw was acclaimed the leading figure of the 'new movement' in Britain. Among his most important plays are Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, Man and Superman, The Apple Cart, Pygmalion, Heartsbreak House. Being a sworn enemy of 'art for art's sake' he used the stage to denounce the injustice of capitalism and to preach his Fabian ideas of which he was an apologist. In his plays he laid bare the vices of capitalist society, severely criticizing its glaring injustice and exposing its inhumanity.

John Galsworthy, who enjoyed the widest vogue at the time, w.as another flare-up. His utterly serious and emotional plays, such as The Silver Box, Strife, Justice, Loyalties and Escape, were the best of their kind and gave the most complete picture of English bourgeois society in the twentieth century.

Among other eminent playwrights of the period were Sean O'Casey, distinguished for realistic studies of life, Lord Dunsany, also Irish, producing poetic and fantastic short plays. The point of interest is that English literature owed much to the great Irishmen: Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge whose plays were staged by leading theatres at home and abroad.

The 1930s saw a new upheaval of democratic culture in Great Britain, its main feature being the mass character and vigorous protest against war, fascism and reaction in ideology. The working class theatre was at its height. They had their own theatre and drama groups, the Unity Theatre in London and Theatre Workshop in the East End being the most famous.

A tremendous success in the 1930s was the new literary club known a& The Left Book Club. By the end of 1937 its membership grew to 50,000 people. The Club had theatrical, cinema, and musical societies which attracted talented musicians, singers and actors. It was in close touch with the Unity Theatre, the first professional working class theatre. The performances of the Unity Theatre were distinguished for their true realistic value and high artistic quality. It is remarkable that even in the hardest years of World War II the Unity Theatre never stopped its performances and its popularity grew rapidly. They staged plays by Sean O'Casey, one of which The Star Becomes Red was quite an event in the theatrical life of London.

Centre 42 is the most recent development in the working class theatre. It was founded by Arnold Wesker (b. 1932), a well-known dramatist and was supported by the trade unions. It awakened the interest of the audiences in genuine culture and as a result wide sections of the British intelligentsia, appalled by the rapidly degenerating cultural values, came to appreciate its endeavour.

Of considerable renown among the modern English playwrights are John Osborne, Robert Bolt, David Story, Edmund Bond, Nicholas Simpson and others.

There are two hundred professional companies in Britain today and many good theatres, some new, in provincial cities and towns. There is a festival theatre at Chichegter, Sussex. But London is the theatrical centre. There are thirty theatres in the West End. The National Theatre Company used to perform at the Old Vic and has now moved to the new National Theatre in the South Bank Arts centre. It also tours the provinces. The Royal Shakespeare Company performs in the City's Barbican Centre in London and at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford upon Avon. The Round-house and Royal Court Theatre and Mermaid theatre in London put on modern plays. There is the National Youth Theatre, whose members are all young people. It produces plays at home and abroad during the summer.

Outside London a few large towns have theatres in which are performed, generally for one week at a time, plays, which take a trial run before opening in London, or which have completed periods of being shown in London. The provincial music-hall, or variety theatre, has had a difficult time, and although it has survived longer than the straight drama, it is tending to die.

World-famous for its promenade concerts is Albert Hall in London. It performs from mid-July till mid-September, involving a great variety of orchestras and conductors, both British and foreign. Among first-class orchestras are.BBC.Symphony, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, New Philharmonia (all based in London), The Halle (Manchester), City of Birmingham Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Scottish National. There are a number of string and chamber orchestras and several chamber music groups of international fame. Choral singing is supposed to be a speciality of the British, and there are successful choral societies in many cities.

There is no 'National Opera House', but the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden receives a grant from the Arts Council, which was established in 1946 to improve knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts. It gives performances throughout the year of opera and ballet. The English National Opera performs operas, sung in English, at the London Coliseum. It also tours the provinces. The standard of performance is high.

One of the most famous ballet companies is The Royal Ballet. The Royal Ballet tours all over the world as well as performing in London and occasionally in other British towns. But provincial residents have weighty ground for complaint about the small amount of financial help given by the Government to artistic enterprise of all sorts outside the capital.

Local enterprise has been responsible for the development in recent years of 'festivals' of the arts in several places, of which the best known is the annual International Festival of Music and Drama in Edinburgh (August to September).

One of the most remarkable of British artistic enterprises is the annual season of opera (May to August), at Glyndebourne, an opera house built in the depths of the country in Sussex, about seventy kilometres south of London. The opera house stands in a beautiful garden. It is a fashionable and very expensive evening.

There are amateur orchestras, quartets, choirs and opera groups even in small county towns. Many schools, too, now have orchestras. The best players are chosen to play in the county youth orchestras, and a few of the very best may be picked for the National Youth Orchestra. This orchestra is trained by distinguished conductors. It plays in the Royal Festival Hall and in other big concert halls.

CINEMA

From about 1930 until very recent times the cinema enjoyed an immense popularity in Britain, and the palatial cinemas built in the 1930s were the most impressive of the buildings to be seen in the streets of many towns. Later, the rapid spread of television brought a great change. The number of cinema-goers has dropped crucially and, as a result, 1,500 cinemas were closed. British success in cinematography became much less conspicuous. Many of the films were mostly imported from America. Some films were shot in Britain and often directed by British directors, but with American money. The British cinematography was not able to provide the cinema houses with films of its own production.

It was only during World War II and after that the British producers began to make their own films on a larger scale. In this way they voiced their protest against Britain's dependence on American cinema tycoons. A glimpse of hope was seen in such productions as Hamlet produced by Laurence Olivier, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist by D. Lynn, and more recently, in Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, a number of TV plays, serials and documentaries.

But still the great majority of films dominating the British screen are Hollywood production. Britain is pervaded with all sort of American-made thrillers, westerners, spy-films, horror-films, porno-films, and the like which have a pernicious influence on the British youth. The cinema monopolies are little concerned with the ill-effects of such films as long as they bring in profits. Commercial art which can be cheaply mass produced leaves little, if any, room for real art, the latter being not a profitable commodity. Such evil practices impede the young talented film writers, actors and producers in their effort to produce really good films.

MUSIC

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English musicians had a great reputation in Europe, both for their talent and for their originality. Today there is a revival of interest in these neglected composers. It was their experiments in keyboard music which helped to form the base from which grew most of the great harpsichord and piano music of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the following centuries England produced no composers of world rank except for Henry Purcell in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Elgar in the twentieth century. The music of Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten and William Walton is performed all over the world today.

Benjamin Britten (1913—76) was not regarded to be modern in the musical sense of the word, but he was modern in his attitude towards his public. He composed music, particularly operas and choral works, that can be sung by ordinary people and by children. Some of his operas, such as Noyes Fludde (Noah's Flood) are performed in churches every year, and people from the surrounding countryside sing and act in them. His opera Peter Grimes was warmly received not only in Britain but also outside the country. The festival which Benjamin Britten started in his little home town, Aldeburgh, on the North Sea coast of Suffolk, has become one of the most important musical festivals in Britain.

Benjamin Britten's music, however, is traditional compared with the works of many of the younger generation of composers. The experiments of young composers, like Peter Maxwell Davies, Richard Rodney Bennett and John Tavener are having considerable influence abroad.

Many twentieth-century British composers, includingjtalph Vaughan Williams, Tippett and Britten, have been attracted and influenced by old English folk songs. The resurrection of English national music is closely connected with the name of one of the most popular 20th century composers, R. V. Williams, who began as a folk song enthusiast and enriched the English heritage of folk songs. His opera Hugh the Drover was a great success among the British spectators.

Based on 'special relations', there has always been a close cultural link between Britain and America, not only in literature but also in the popular arts, especially music. Before the Second World War Americans exported jazz and the blues. During the 1950s they exported rock'n'roll, and star singers like Elvis Presley were idolized by some young Britons and Americans alike.

In the early 1960s a new sound was heard, very different from anything which had so far come from the American side of the Atlantic. This was the Liverpool quartet, or 'beat'.

The people responsible for the so-called 'pop revolution' in the West were four Liverpool boys (George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Star, real name Richard Starkey) who joined together in a group and called themselves the Beatles. They played at first in small clubs in the back streets of the city, and wrote their own words and music. They had a close personal relationship with their audience, and they expected them to join in.

Soon the group won the affection of people, because, as they developed, their songs became more serious. They wrote not only of love, but of death and old age, poverty and daily life. They represented the anger and bitterness of youth struggling for freedom against the ruling class, for a better future for themselves. In 1970—1 the parthership of the Beatles broke up, but their influence continued. When John Lennon was murdered in New York in 1980, he was mourned by millions of his supporters all over the world, not only because of his fame as a Beatle, but because he had dedicatd this fame to the cause of peace.

ARTS

In the second half of the nineteenth century there existed a number of trends in European continental painting — impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, which later, in the twentieth century, gave way to cubism, futurism and surrealism, and eventually to abstractionism. The foundation in 1885 of the New English Art Club and the Glasgow School (about the same time) was the first organized opposition against the banalities of academic painting. \The New English and the Glasgow programmes were return to naturalism and for this direction they were indebted to James Whistler (1834—1903) as a forerunner and to the impressionist movement across the Channel.

The New English Art Club became the centre of English impressionism,, and from the 1880s until World War I the history of British painting is marked by a slow and rather tentative absorption of impressionist principles of light and colour. Instead of trying to represent nature in its entirety the impressionists selected one element — light — to be treated as an independent and organic element of style. The leading representatives of the school were Walter Sickert (1860—1942), Augustus John (1878—1961), and younger English artists Spencer Gore (1878— 1914), Harold Gilman (1876—1919) and others, who founded the Camden Town Group in 1911. The works of the latter were fine examples of realism in opposition to the fashionable interiors of academic painting. Their subjects included workers, petty bourgeoisie, inhabitants of slums, portraits.

During World War II, when all contacts with continental Europe were severed, there was a notable increase in artistic vitality in Britain. 'Modern' artists were accepted, as they had never been before. Graham Sutherland (1903— 80), Paul Nash (1889-1946), Henry Moore (1898—1986) all did outstanding paintings or drawings, and achieved through their absorption of modern means of expression a dramatic vividness of imagery which rose far above mere documentary illustration. Since the war the development of painting in Britain has been diverse and is therefore difficult of definition. Some British painters have turned to abstraction, not always with too much conviction. Of the geometric abstraction painters Victor Pasmore (1908) and Ben Nicholson (1894) are the most eminent. Younger painters have worked in the expressionist phase of the abstract movement. At the opposite pole in post-war British painting there is a young group of social realists, led by Jack Smith and Edward Middleditch.

Like painting, the British sculpture of the twentieth century is very different from that of the previous century and, too, is greatly influenced by expressionism and surrealism. The new expressionist trend in sculpture is represented by Williams, Butler, Chadwick and Armitage. Among the British sculptors of the period Henry Moore stands out, both in quality and originality. Like other sculptors of his time Moore looked attentively at contemporary painters, in particular at Picasso, but he evolved sculpture that is more independent of contemporary painting than that of any British sculptor and more original. One of the central themes of his preoccupation was the reclining female and the mother and child.

Modern British artists and sculptors, as well as the old masters, both British and foreign, are being kept in the numerous art museums and private art collections.

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