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Class Struggle on Broadway
- Abstract
SINCE the late 50′s, the English theater has been staging contemporary studies in class warfare. Spokesmen for those whom Max Beerbohm called “the unmentioned by Debrett” have by now accustomed even American ears to the social tensions of U and non-U dialogue, to the comic anguish of a society in which a dropped “h” or a misplaced fish knife can erect impenetrable barriers between its citizens. Of course, beneath the surface conflict of accents and table settings, there lay a deeper social disjunction which the new dramatists attacked and exploited. The genteel sensibility of the upper classes, at least as it was depicted on the stage, became, for writers like Osborne, Wesker, Mortimer, and even Pinter, the target for an all-out dramatic assault. To them, a detached and reticent intercourse with life was not only a snobbish rebuff of democratic enthusiasms but also an obstacle to real dramatic passion, and they exulted in displaying the rude emotional vigor of their characters and in inflicting it on that fine distillation of manners by which the upper class lived and kept a safe distance from the rest of society. In his review of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Kenneth Tynan expressed succinctly the social and critical attitude of this new movement when, after admitting some reservations about the play’s artistic qualities, he chastised such disinterested judgments with the declaration that he doubted he could “love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.”
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