Angus Wilson
NEW PLAYWRIGHTS
On rereading various reviews that I have written in recent
months on books about the theater, I find that I have committed my–
self to two apparently contradictory opinions. In commending, with a
few reservations, Miss Mary McCarthy's collection of theater notices,
I suggested that most intelligent adults, in England at any rate, had
for some decades now found the contemporary drama insufficiently
serious to merit their attention. In other reviews I have suggested that
in the last three years there has been some real stirring of life in the
British drama, and, even that there is some possibility of the theater,
so long stagnant in all but its presentation, being the first of the literary
arts to reflect the changed customs, outlook and conflicts of what may
be called the new prosperity England. Is there any real contradiction
in these two opinions? I don't think so. Only those who have known
a long, cheerless English winter can know why we fuss so over the first
aconites; they are rather drearily "modest, little" flowers in themselves,
but they may---'God knows how unlikely that "may"-herald one of our
rare, fine English summers. So it is with our new young dramatists and
the lively new managements-Royal Court, Theater Workshop, Strat–
ford, Belgrade at Coventry, '59 at Hammersmith and Meadow Players
at Oxford. For once we don't have to put inverted commas around the
word young; these new playwrights--or many of them-have yet to see
thirty. Their plays offer very little more intellectual substance than
those so familiar to us for the last twenty years; but the adolescent silli–
ness of youth, though often tiresome, has not the fearful, deadening ef–
fect of the prolonged adolescent silliness we have been used to from our
older playwrights or indeed of the sort of vacuity that usually passes
for maturity in our theater. We may readily fear that these new drama–
tists will in their turn be cutting the same juvenile emotional capers
that they are now offering us when they can no longer
clailn
youth,
even the prolonged writer's kind of youth. The dread comparison
be–
tween Mr. Noel Coward's "wicked" youth and Mr. Osborne's "angry"
