Sex on Stage

Andrew Wyllie

Description

In the years just after World War II, theater provided an important critique of British society’s engagement with gender and sexual politics. Sex on Stage examines how British playwrights, actors, and directors brought women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues to the cutting edge of drama after World War II.  Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their sociopolitical context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one of reactionary statements and industry-wide anxiety.

 

Sujets

• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Película fotográfica
• Theatre
• General officer
• Playwright
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781841502922
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sex On Stage Gender and SexuaLItY In Post-War BrItIsh Theatre

BY Andrew WYLLIe

In the post-war period, theatre provided an important critique of the way in which British society engaged with issues of the politics of gender and sexuality.Sex on Stageexamines how British playwrights brought gender politics, including women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues, to the cutting edge of drama after World War II. Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their socio-political context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one in which masculine anxieties and a consequent reaction were discernible.

With its full treatment of this important aspect of British theatrical history and exploration of the intense relationship between theatre, gender politics and society,Sex on Stagewill appeal to academics and students of drama, gender studies and cultural studies.

Andrew Wyllie is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of the West of England.

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S E X ON S TA G E

Sex on Stage Gender and Sexuality in PostWar British Theatre

Sex on Stage Gender and Sexuality in PostWar British Theatre

Andrew Wyllie

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C ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The Emergence of the Female Canon

Chapter 3 Masculine Anxieties

Chapter 4 Gay and Lesbian Plays

Chapter 5 Gender and Farce: Ayckbourn and Orton

Conclusion Bibliography Index

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143 147 155

Acknowledgements For permission to reprint extracts from copyright material the author gratefully acknowledges the following: Casarotto Ramsay and Associates Limited forThe Sport of My Mad MotherAnn © Jellicoe 1958 and 1964,Relatively Speaking© 1968 by Alan Ayckbourn,How the Other Half Loves© 1972 by Alan Ayckbourn,Just Between Ourselves© 1972 by Alan Ayckbourn,Plenty © David Hare 1978 (USA); Nick Hern Books Ltd forLovesickandSchreber’s Nervous Illnessby Caryl Churchill, inChurchill: Shorts,Coming Cleanby Kevin Elyot inElyot: Four Plays, andMy Night With Regby Kevin Elyot,The Deep Blue Sea,Separate TablesandVariation on a Theme by Terence Rattigan all published by Nick Hern Books Ltd, www.nickhernbooks.co.uk; Faber and Faber Ltd forPlenty © David Hare 1978 (UK), Timberlake WertenbakerThe Love of the Nightingale, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, and The Break of Day, John OsborneLook Back in Anger(UK), The Entertainer(UK),and Inadmissible EvidenceSharman MacDonald (UK), When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout, David HarePlenty(UK), Alan AyckbournWoman in Mind, Man of the Moment, Wildest Dreams, Harold PinterThe Birthday Party(UK),The Homecoming(UK),The Lover(UK),Celebration (UK); in the USA the following used by permission of Grove/Atlantic IncThe Birthday Party© 1959, 1960, 1965 by Harold Pinter,The Homecoming© 1965, 1966, 1967 by H. Pinter Ltd, The Lover© 1963, 1964 by H. Pinter Ltd,Celebration© 1999 by Harold Pinter,Entertaining Mr Sloane© 1964 by Joe Orton,Loot© 1967 by Joe Orton,What the Butler Saw© 1969, 1976 by the Estate of Joe Orton; Gordon Dickerson for John OsborneLook Back in Anger(USA), The Entertainer(USA), and Inadmissible Evidence(USA); A & C Black for Maureen DuffyRites(UK), Sandra FreemanSupporting Roles, Patrick MarberDealer’s Choice andCloser, Phyllis Nagy Never Land, Joe OrtonEntertaining Mr Sloane(UK),Loot(UK),What the Butler Saw(UK), Mark RavenhillSome Explicit Polaroids, Philip RidleyThe Pitchfork DisneyandThe Fastest Clock in the Universe; Simon Kane, Casarotto Ramsay and A & C Black for Sarah KaneBlastedandCleansed; in the USA material fromRites© 1969 Maureen Duffy is reprinted by kind permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd, London, on behalf of Maureen Duffy; Amber Lane Press forSteaming1981 by © Nell Dunn andAnother Country© 1982 by Julian Mitchell; Judy Daish Associates Limited and Oberon Books for Howard BarkerThe Castle, The Love of a Good ManandUrsula, Fear of the Estuary; Oberon Books for Pam GemsQueen Christina; The Agency (London) Ltd for Olwen WymarkThe GymnasiumandLunchtime Concert; Alan Brodie Representation Ltd for Noel Greig and Drew GriffithsAs Time Goes By.

Further reproduction of any of the above extracts may only be undertaken with proper authorization from the rights holders concerned.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the author will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

I would like to thank my colleagues from the University of the West of England for their support and help in enabling me to get this book written, and especially Scott Fraser, Rebecca D’Monte and Pamela Karantonis of the Department of Culture Media and Drama and William Greenslade of the Department of English at UWE for the advice, time and energy that they provided.

1

I NTRODUCTION

The postwar era is one in which gender and sexuality have been among the central preoccupations of British society, and the theatre has been at the forefront of bringing those preoccupations to the surface of the national consciousness and debating them. The nascence of a politically aware body of women playwrights has been both caused by, and has hugely furthered, the emergence of gender and sexuality as theatrical topics. Similarly, plays which demonstrate a positive attitude towards lesbian and gay sexualities have both been enabled by a changing societal outlook and have probably been an instrument in bringing about further change. In fact, in terms of cultural development, there have been few more significant nexuses in Britain over the past fifty years or so than that of gender and sexuality within the theatre. However, this nexus and its era may prove to have ended in the late 1990s or early 2000s as new theatrical concerns have come to the fore in the postinyerface era. The personal has perhaps shifted from being the political back to being merely the personal as far as theatrical discussions of gender and sexuality are concerned. A related point is that the greatest vitality in British theatre in the early 2000s emerged from black writing, which has made its belated move to the centre of the innovative stage, and thus the perspective on gender and sexuality changed from that which had prevailed. This study is concerned primarily with plays first produced in the period 1950–2000.

It may be helpful to begin with a discussion of one or two basic terms and an explanation of how they are used in what follows: ‘Drama’ is almost exclusively used to describe textbased work for live performance in the theatre. Brief discussion of one or two films is also included, as is passing reference to a couple of television shows, but live theatre is the principal focus. Almost all of what follows is based on text, including stage directions, with very occasional references to live performance values. Another point here is the evanescent nature of performance, which makes it necessary to rely on memory, or on a third party’s account, or to work from video, all of which present complications over and above those involved with working with texts. Performance interposes at least one layer of interpretation – that of the performer or director – between the ‘text’ and the reader.

8 | SEX ON STAGE

‘British’ in this context means first produced in Britain, regardless of the nationality of the playwright. The one or two plays discussed which were first produced in the US are indicated as such. Correspondingly, the dates quoted for plays are of the first British production; any deviation from this is made clear. ‘Postwar’ theoretically covers a period beginning in 1945 and ending on whatever date this is read. In practice, the earliest play that I have considered at any length is dated 1954, and I have considered few plays dating from later than 2000. My expectation had been that the significance of 1968 would compel the bulk of this study to be a consideration of material dated later than that (indeed, it seemsa number of writers on 1 the theatre have considered the postwar period to commence in 1968) . In practice, however, the latent content of plays from the 1950s proved so rich that 1968 is, at best, a sort of hinge, with roughly equal attention given to material on either side of it.

‘Sexuality’ is a difficult term, discussed at some length both later in this chapter and elsewhere. While recognizing the inextricability of the link between sexuality and gender, I have mainly used the term where there is an indication of sexual attraction. It is not a term that has been considered solely in the context of sexual orientation – though that consideration is there, too – but more generally as a driver in people’s lives.

‘Gender’ is the most difficult term of all: ‘a much contested concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, but a site of unease rather than of agreement,’ as David Glover and Cora Kaplan have put it (Glover and Kaplan, 2000: ix). Where it is significant, I take the gender of a playwright to map directly on to their sex, as straightforwardly male or female. Gender and gender identity discussed in relation to individual plays, however, are much more complex than that: an initial consideration of that complexity follows later in this chapter.

The words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ arise often, and are used in more than one sense. A political play may be one which is selfconsciously and openly aimed at exposing or analyzing a state of affairs, and which has a clear intention as regards its effect on the audience. A less open agenda is often present, however, in plays whose effect may also be profoundly political: examples of plays whose politics are more or less covert occur on both the progressive and reactionary fronts.

In an effort to avoid unwieldy phraseology, there are occasions throughout the book where the term ‘gender political’ is used to cover a conflation of attitudes towards sexuality and gender.

The large majority of plays that I read and considered in researching this book were first produced in Britain between 1945 and 2001. The ones I have chosen to write about at any length are those which combine significant gender political content – latent or overt – with the dramatic force to put across that content. Both the significance of the content and the dramatic force of the play depend largely on the social context in which they were first produced. In mostcases that relationship to cultural and critical forces is apparent from the degree of commentary to which the plays have been subject. A minority of the plays discussed, however, which are remarkable for their cultural critique or dramatic form, have attracted little attention

INTRODUCTION | 9

from commentators; the extent of their achievement is often illuminated by comparing them with their better known contemporaries.

Turning now to the chapter headings used in the book – Chapter 2, The Emergence of the Female Canon, and Chapter 4, Gay and Lesbian Plays – are probably selfexplanatory in this context. With Chapter 3 – Masculine Anxieties – the significance of the sexuality and gender political content of maleauthored, nongay plays was an obvious topic to explore as a counterpart to Chapters 2 and 4. In the case of Chapter 5 – Gender and Farce – farce was the factor which linked two men, Ayckbourn and Orton, each of whom called for such extensive analysis that neither would have fitted comfortably into either Chapter 3 or 4, where they would otherwise have belonged.

This link through farce provided an opportunity to bring the matter of genre briefly within the purview of the book. Leaving aside the etymological connection between genre and gender, I do not think that any single genre is dominant in the field of gender and sexuality, since none seems to escape the presence of some significant gender political content, whether latent or overt. That said, two types of play in particular stand out: the first arises from the extent to which Brechtian techniques are in evidence in the polemical dramas of the 1970s. This phenomenon is characterized by Elaine Aston, for example, as ‘a tradition of British feminist theatrical practice and playwriting rooted originally in socialist/Marxist politics and the Brechtian style, and which subsequently…provided a political and aesthetic framework…for materialist feminist explorations of gender’ (Aston, 1995: 73). This adoption of the Brechtian style also transmigrated from feminist theatre to other polemical/radical theatre of the 1970s. The second exceptional type is farce: it is difficult to think of a farce that does not have sexual content. Among male playwrights, the contribution of Ayckbourn and Orton to the critique of social attitudes in Britain towards gender and sexuality has been of the first importance.

Theory and Polemic A major exercise in the writing of the book has been to select and marshal historical and critical material so as to highlight and contextualize the content of the plays. This has involved consulting contemporary theatre reviews, and other contemporary newspaper reports, as indicators of the prevailing social climate within which they were first being produced. Some social history texts have also contributed to this process. In practice, however, the most substantial material on the interaction between social attitudes and plays in production has been provided by literary commentaries directed to single authors or works. The other major source of input has been more generalized literary theory, largely gay and feminist criticism over the past twenty years or so.

In writing this book, it has not proved altogether possible to occupya position of neutral objectivity. I attach values to the way in which different plays engage with gender and sexuality, and awareness of that results in value judgements becoming apparent throughout: I have not felt inhibited from endorsing plays that evoke positive politics in this area. However, despite claims that it is possible to simply opt for change in gender identity, the plays that most