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all determined at least not to hoax their own creations.
If
nothing
else, they will stick to the facts and rhythms of modem life. In the
new plays toast is burned, clothes are ironed, bobs have to be found
for the gas-meter, the empties have to be returned to the pub. The
heroes lose their jobs rather than their fortunes, their wives more often
than their mistresses. And most important, they talk like living people.
The extraordinary thing about the old drawing-room drama was the
way even the light social chatter had been formalized until it seemed
almost a separate language. T. S. Eliot may, after all, have had a
reason for chopping into verse lines the cocktail party repartee of his
later plays. He did not succeed in making poetry out of it, in any in–
tensive sense of that term, but he did cannily indicate the degree to
which the conventions of this kind of social back-chat had become
formal and apart.
The new writers have changed all this. Miss Delaney is said to
have been prompted into writing her play by seeing a Terence Rattigan
piece while she was still a nineteen-year-old millhand. As everyone does
on these occasions, she came out saying "I could do better than that."
But unlike most other people, she went away and did so. In all fairness,
Miss Delaney does not have anything like as sharp an eye for a dramatic
situation as Rattigan. A measure of her and her colleagues' superiority
is their ear for speech. Their language is slangy, gay, messy, irreverent;
it is, in short, the real thing, just as their feelings come from a shared
experience rather than from some trumped-up device. It is this straight–
forwardness of pity and gusto that makes Behan's
The Hostage
superior,
I think, to Dylan Thomas's
Under Milk Wood.
In both works there is
a certain spurious, cossetted vitality.
As
with so much modem Celtic
art,
the line between Life-with a capital L-and Blarney is so delicate
as not to be always discernible. But Behan's vitality at least manifests
itself in terms of people rather than
in
a willed excess and trickery of
language.
The strength of Osborne, Wesker, Delaney and Behan is precisely
in their commitment to realism. This guarantees them such an imme–
diate impact that it often masks the fact that social realism has itself
become a convention. It is a convention of talk. Provided the drama–
tists can create a truth of talk they are absolved from that oth1er truth
of dramatic inevitability. Without exception their plays
all
fade out
in the last act. The audience is left simply with "a slice of life," while
the cycle of life----the process in which character and circumstance act
upon each other until they are resolved in an irresistible action-is ig–
nored. I suggest that despite appearances, the dominant influence in
the new British drama is not Brecht, who was a master of dramatic ten-
