The Prose, Chapter 1.The NovelBAKSHPREET SINGH
WORKING CLASS DRAMA & THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN The post-war revolt against pre-war modes came in the Fifties. Anti-intellectual and anti-elitist, its virtue was that it provided new content to drama, and depicted with energy and vitality the life and style of the new generation. John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger appeared to effect a critical breakthrough which seemed to create a sense of a general movement of revolt against middle-class drama. Osborne's Jimmy Porter is the archetypal "angry young man", a university graduate who runs a sweet shop and who vents his frustration on self, wife and system. The play created a sensation and soon had many imitators when it first appeared but, in retrospect, it appeared new and revolutionary only because of its language the fluent rhetoric of abuse used by Osborne. Its value lies in its expression of the mood of the post-war years: the restlessness, dislocations and frustrations of the working class. The label "working class drama" is often applied to plays such as Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Arnold Wesker's Chicken Soup and Barley, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and John Arden's Live Like Pigs, all plays that appeared between 1958 and 1961 because they focus on the frustrations and aimless drifting of the young, the poor and the unemployed. The dramatic method, however, remains traditional.
CONTINENTAL INFLUENCES Alienation and the Epic Theatre The plays of the late 1940s and the mid 50s were no doubt popular, but they did not set new directions, for the drama. There remained so many variants on the naturalist theme and method. However, around the same period the influences of Continental theatrical practice began to be felt in England. One of the most important influences was the historical play which Bertolt considered epic drama. Brecht, in his earlier productions, had contributed much to expressionist drama a prominent and widely - influential form of writing in the 1920s. Expressionist drama tends to represent anonymous human types instead of individualised characters and replaces plot with episode while sets are often lopsided or abstract. Expressionism dominated the German Theatre in the 20s and had a tremendous impact on the American Literary seen. Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine show the strong influence expressionism. But Brecht's theory of alienation that was a key principle of epic drama was perhaps of greater significance to the theatre in Europe and England In the typical Brechtian play an interest is some times used, as in Galileo, 1943 and theatrical colour and action and movement exploited as in the Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1945 but the central concern is with a definition of meaning more relevant to the present than to the past. The use of history enabled Brecht to emulate on stage the objectivity of epic narrative. To this end he adopted a variety of dramatic devices to produce "estranging" effects. The idea was to "alienate the audience by preventing any sympathetic identification with the protagonists in order to encourage them to think critically about the ideas and issues constituting the meaning of the play. The theory of alienation counters the time-honoured Aristote concept of catharsis of the spectators' emotions. Brecht's influence is most pronounced on John Ardens play Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (1960). Arden's
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