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AN REV lEW
terrible beating. The wealthy remain what they were, but the middle
income group has been taxed to the point of collapse. Their facade of
cheerful respectability grows more and more precarious and their pros–
pects are grim. So the world of drawing-room comedy, with its servants,
Bentleys, night-clubs and more or less discreet extra-marital relation–
ships, no longer corresponds even to the haziest yearnings, much less to
the cold facts of life in Wimbledon, Kensington and Maida Vale. Nice–
ness is all no longer. So the drawing-room drama plays to smaller and
smaller audiences for shorter and shorter runs. Not even the most con–
ventional registers of lower middlebrow taste, the critics in the even–
ing papers, feel they have to take it particularly seriously. When one of
Lonsdale's plays was revived recently with great elaboration and a par–
ticularly glowing cast, the producer made a telling alteration: he shifted
the time of the thing from the mid-Depression 'thirties to 1913, that
fabulous age before the flood, when England and the bourgeoisie were
still something. The implication was that drawing-room comedy, to be
enjoyed, now had to be taken as a period piece, like its Restoration an–
cestor or Romantic tragedy.
The change in taste and convention is largely the work of two
theater groups : George Devine's English Stage Company, whose theater
is the Royal Court in Sloane Square, and Joan Littlewood's Theater
Workshop, who perform at the Theater Royal in the Stratford of East
London, not Upon Avon. Between them they have altered the whole
theatrical scene. First, they have given the stage a new freedom by
introducing a great deal of modern work from abroad: Beckett, Arthur
Miller, Lorca, O 'Neill, Ionesco and many others. In this way the whole
domain of drama has changed, the drawing-room furniture has been
scrapped, and the inertia of sensibility that ruled over it has gone too.
A new range of experience as well as a profusion of new theatrical
techniques has been made possible. And suddenly it has become clear
that England in its tum has a whole generation of experimental writers
and producers who had been waiting for the chance to say their say.
Granted, their say has been patchy, much of it bad, the avant-gardism
is mostly tiresome
chi-chi,
and the Court has been conned by some ter–
rible frauds. But the new work has been performed; after the long
winter the river has begun to flow again.
The second change in the theater might be called a Left-Wing
conversion. It has been a muddled process but it began, as it may well
end, with the discovery of Bertolt Brecht. Five years ago hardly anyone
in England had even heard of him. Then the Berliner Ensemble per–
formed in London in German; Theater Workshop gave a translated
