Jubilee Playwrights: Michael Coveney’s guide to the new Elizabethans

1950s

There was Ionesco and Beckett, Graham Greene and Emlyn
Williams, Salad Days and The Boy Friend. And, opening within a month of each
other in May 1956, Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, the last hurrah for the
old-style West End, and John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, which changed
everything, not least the audience for new plays. Arnold Wesker, too, announced
the upheaval in Roots. Early in the decade, Terence Rattigan wrote his best
play, The Deep Blue Sea, and at the end of it, Harold Pinter wrote The Birthday
Party. The Queen’s coronation was at the still centre of a convulsive decade,
with Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney as influential at Joan Littlewood’s
Stratford East as Osborne was at the Royal Court.

1960s

The march of the meritocracy was followed by the satire of
the savages and swingers. The revue Beyond the Fringe and Oh, What a Lovely War
(again, Littlewood’s Stratford East was hugely influential) were soon followed
by Joe Orton, who summed up the new mood of sexual liberation and blasphemous
provocation; he died (killed by his lover) after writing three brilliant,
subversively stylish black comedies. Edward Bond’s Saved announced a
prophetically new tone of voice in our theatre and was directly instrumental in
the demise of the Lord Chamberlain, figure of state censorship, already being
softened up by Tom Stoppard, Peter Nichols, Peter Barnes and David Rudkin in a
series of caustic, fragmented, quasi-epic new dramas. Alan Bennett and David
Storey suddenly emerged as dramatists. Pinter, who had written revue sketches,
wrote his masterpiece, The Homecoming.

1970s

The fringe explosion stayed small, but the dramatists
prepared to go big were denied the Royal Court and went to Nottingham Playhouse
with Richard Eyre: David Hare collaborated with Howard Brenton on Brassneck, a
satirical epic attuned to the 1970s economic recession; Brenton wrote The
Churchill Play and Trevor Griffiths, The Comedians (Griffiths’ other major
1970s play had been The Party, a scathing analysis of left wing in-fighting,
with Laurence Olivier giving his last stage performance as a Glaswegian
Trotskyite). Frayn and Stoppard consolidated, Stephen Poliakoff wrote some edgy
inner city piѐces noires and Caryl
Churchill switched from radio to the stage. Simon Gray’s Butley and Otherwise
Engaged were newly witty and dyspeptic boulevard comedies, both starring Alan
Bates. David Edgar wrote a brilliant dissection of racism and local politics in
Destiny, and Brenton wrote the first new play for the new NT on the South Bank,
Weapons of Happiness, directed by Hare.

1980s

This was the decade of Mrs Thatcher, Andrew Lloyd Webber and
Cameron Mackintosh. Greed was good and globalisation rampant. Blockbusters
thrived in the RSC’s ten-play epic, The Greeks, and the two-part, six-hour
David Edgar version of Nicholas Nickleby. Peter Hall responded at the NT with
Tony Harrison’s Oresteia. Alan Ayckbourn wrote possibly his best play, A Small
Family Business, for the NT, summing up an era of rampant capitalism going
badly wrong. And it was hilarious. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Serious
Money were the outstanding Royal Court plays, and there was a notable incursion
of inventive biography in Terry Johnson’s Insignificance (Albert Einstein meets
Marilyn Monroe) and Michael Hastings’ Tom and Viv (T S Eliot’s wife goes mad).

1990s

Frank McGuinness wrote an enduring hostage drama, Someone
Who’ll Watch Over Me, while Brian Friel (who had been a powerful, poetic
presence since the mid-1960s) wrote his most commercially successful play,
Dancing at Lughnasa (known as “Dancing at Lasagna” on Broadway). Irish theatre
and playwrights came into sharper focus, with the work of another veteran, Tom
Murphy, and novelist Sebastian Barry. London-based Martin McDonagh caused a
sensation with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Conor McPherson embarked on a
series of mysterious, lyrical ghost dramas with The Weir. Sarah Kane’s Blasted
exploded in the middle of the decade; Stephen Daldry’s tenure at the Court also
produced several other distinctive new voices in Mark Ravenhill, Joe Penhall
and Jez Butterworth. The Bush Theatre replied with David Eldridge, Simon Bent
and David Harrower.

2000s

Richard Bean wrote steadily and unpredictably throughout
this decade, claiming a position in the front rank with Harvest, England People
Very Nice at the National and The Big Fellah; One Man Two Guvnors was still
around the next corner. Simon Stephens was prolific and always challenging. Of
the old guard, Frayn and Bennett wrote possibly their best plays in Democracy
and The History Boys. And Simon McBurney and Complicite found a new way of
writing theatre altogether in Mnemonic, Street of Crocodiles, The Elephant
Vanishes and A Disappearing Number, all of them extraordinary. Documentary and
verbatim drama renewed our theatre as a crucible of commentary, but it was too
early to tell whether the remarkable rush of new writing talent, especially
among women writers – Polly Stenham, Penelope Skinner, Anya Reiss and Laura Wade
to name but four – would stay the course, though such judgmental criteria
seemed increasingly obsolete in a new age of instant and disposable creativity
and criticism.