One measure of a revolution is the change in faces. At Edinburgh in the fall of 1963, Kenneth Tynan made himself host to ninety gentlemen and ladies of the theatre from several corners of the narrowing globe. The delegation from the United States was led by Harold Clurman and Lillian Hellman, spirits from our vital thirties, still active, and still representative of our theatre's leadership. (Leadership is a word chosen out of courtesy: taken against the delegates of other countries, the singular message of the conference was that America had no theatre leaders. As always, a visual image told the most chilling tale: every day, three ladies took seats next to one another on the platform, each hatted and veiled like three weird sisters at a club luncheon. They were Miss Hellman, Agnes Moorhead, and Judith Anderson.

“An object of art is artistic only insofar as it is not real,” Ortega y Gasset once wrote, and meant something much broader than an attack upon naturalism. Until we are able to think of drama, for all its physical contingencies and aesthetic impurities, as existing in a different realm from the “real”—the way we are mostly able to think of poetry, painting, music—we will go on disputing over everything that is peripheral and secondary in the work of a playwright like Arden, in the effort to establish its “validity,” unconscious that this validity has already been established by the play's own internal processes and conquests.

There is something dispiriting about Arden's own vacillations between apology and peevish resentment. The prefaces to his plays are full of protests against his critics, but also of weakly enunciated and what can only be called supererogatory statements of his dramatic intentions.

That future historians of English drama will describe the period since 1956 as an era of Brechtian influence is quite possible. If so, the phenomenon will be an illustration of the quirks and ironies of cultural diffusion between nations: for that Brechtian era had a great deal of talk and discussion about Brecht and what he was thought to stand for, but few valid productions of Brecht, little genuine knowledge about Brecht, and hence little evidence of any influence of Brecht's actual work and thought. The “Brechtian” era in England stood under the aegis not of Brecht himself but of various second-hand ideas and concepts about Brecht, an image of Brecht created from misunderstandings and misconceptions.

Government-subsidized drama is not exactly new to Britain. The idea of a National Theatre dates back to the 1840's, and from the early days of the Second World War a steady trickle of Treasury money has gone to the theatre. The wartime organization that controlled these grants (the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) and its present successor (the Arts Council) both gave their main attention to helping worthy companies in the provinces; their funds were meagre. What has happened in the past six years is that the claims of London have at last been recognized and there is now a good deal more money than there used to be. These two things have transfigured the theatrical landscape.

The facts are well enough known. On April 2, 1956, a new company began a term of management at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It called itself the English Stage Company, and announced its intentions of becoming a writer's theatre, playing new English plays and contemporary classics from abroad in repertory. This sounded brave and worthy, though enough similarly brave and worthy ventures had foundered in the years since the war for the few interested people to have no great confidence in the new company's survival. The first repertory season was to consist of five productions: first a play by the novelist Angus Wilson, The Mulberry Tree, which had already been tried out at Bristol, then the first British production of The Crucible, then Look Back in Anger, a new play by a young actor, then a double bill of poetic dramas about Don Juan by one of the company's directors, Ronald Duncan, and finally Nigel Dennis's adaptation of his novel Cards of Identity.

Just as 1956 saw the beginnings of the theatrical renaissance in London (however false a dawn that may have proved), so it was a significant year in the provinces. Not an annus mirabilis: countrywide revolutions take longer than capital revelations. But it marked the start of a change in receptivity, a change in policy, a change in the stratification of audiences, that may well have more far-reaching effects than Osborne's coup de théâtre at the Royal Court.

What was the magic of this particular year? Quite simply, it saw the construction of the first new playhouse to be built in Britain, outside London, since the Second World War: the first civic theatre. The Belgrade, Coventry, was conceived as part of the massive redevelopment scheme enforced by German bombing, which culminated in the new Cathedral and the functional, streamlined railway station.

Only recently has the new drama begun to catch up with John Whiting, who if he were alive would now be almost fifty. He was out of sympathy with the social commitment of the early days. Whiting was not one of the cultural knight-errants who crusaded for working-class culture and against the bomb; rather, he belonged instinctively to the older tradition of the intellectual elite, writing difficult plays for a discriminating audience—an audience with which he never truly made contact, and which perhaps had long ceased to exist.

Yet his lifelong preoccupations with the nature of violence and of personal responsibility foreshadowed the concern of a younger generation of dramatists with issues more elemental than the kitchen sink.

Since we weren't casting any particular play and therefore weren't on the lookout for any types, and since our main concern was to find actors who were open, adaptable, and ready to rush in where rigid pros fear to tread, it was necessary to devise a completely new audition technique. I decided to do away with those murky soliloquies where a single actor pulsating with suppressed but crippling hysteria gets up and reels off the same speech he has been carting around since drama school.

The artistic failure of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Vietnam documentary US has been largely obscured by the controversies it has wittingly and unwittingly aroused. In London, at the present time, it is possible to convert almost any lukewarm entertainment into a box-office success by stirring it in the press. In the case of US, one had a subject which was already incendiary, and so it was relatively simple to work up the requisite hoopla. This is unfortunate whenever it happens, because it gives an audience the added difficulty of having to disentangle legitimate intentions and actual results from distortions perpetrated by the mass media. But in this case, Peter Brook’s production, devised collectively by the Company, is no innocent victim of circumstances. It seemed pre-disposed to vulgarization; almost intended for tabloid exploitation.

That's typical Pinter dialogue. The form is standard English, but the conversation doesn't get anywhere. Davies can see what Aston is doing, but Aston is careful not to tell Davies any more than what he can see. Sometimes, as in A Slight Ache or The Collection, the whole play is built around non-exchange of information. Pinter's goal in these plays is to mystify us. He does it through a special brand of dramatic irony in which both character and audience are unable to solve basic riddles. The game is called “put on,” and it is Pinter's favorite. Edward is put on by the Matchseller, James is put on by Stella and Bill. Davies is put on by Mick and Aston. Stanley is put on by McCann and Goldberg. None of these victims knows what the others intend for them; nor are they able to find out until it is too late.

Eliot, speaking of Jonson, said that poetry dealing with the surface of life requires great deliberateness and simplicity of effect. Pinter is a poet of the surface. His manipulation of performance conventions suggests the “comedy of manners” in its dependence on standard theatrical devices and tightly constructed exploitation of speech and gesture patterns, disabused of conscious causality and motivation data. He differs radically from most comic theatre in two important respects: his plays do not aim (or pretend) to reflect or represent society in a typical, satiric, or parodic way; and he effectively eliminates plot as even a structural element (which is one of his similarities to Beckett).

Ten years after Look Back in Anger, what has the English theatre got? In the order that it impinges upon my consciousness at the moment, I would make up the list as follows:

1. 1. The high esteem of America and the continent.

2. 2. Two well-honed, semi-permanent companies: the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare.

3. 3. Three major playwrights: John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and John Arden.

4. 4. A host of lesser lights ranging from the steady beams of Wesker and Bolt to the firefly-flickerings of Campton and Simpson.

5. 5. A chrestomathy of spot-on criticism by one drama critic: Tynan.

6. 6. Jennie Lee, recently-appointed Minister of Culture responsible for drumming the arts into the national consciousness, and directly responsible for a sizeable increase in the Arts Council appropriation.

7. 7. A few murmurings in the provinces; mostly audible at Nottingham and Stoke-on-Trent, but as yet nothing to write home about.