name it has been known ever since. J. M. Synge brought the speech and imagination of Irish country people into theater, but the Abbey's 1907 staging of his play The Playboy of the Western World so offended orthodox religious and nationalist sentiment that the audience rioted. While defending Synge and other pioneers of Irish drama, Yeats also continued to write his own plays, which drew themes from old Irish legend and which, after 1913, stylized and ritualized theatrical performance on the model of Japanese Noh drama. In the 1920s Sean O'Casey brought new vitality to the Abbey Theatre, using the Easter Rising and Irish civil war as a background for controversial plays (one of which again sparked riots) that combined tragic melodrama, humor of character, and irony of circumstance. In England T. S. Eliot attempted with considerable success to revive a ritual poetic drama with his Murder in the Cathedral (1935), though his later attempts to combine religious symbolism with the chatter of entertaining society comedy, as in The Cocktail Party (1950), were uneven.
Despite the achievements of Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, and Eliot, it cannot be said of Irish and British drama, as it can of poetry and fiction in the first half of the century, that a technical revolution changed the whole course of literary
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history. The major innovations in the first half of the twentieth century were on the Continent. German expressionist drama developed out of the dark, psychological focus of the later plays of the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849?1912). Another worldwide influence was the 'epic' drama of the leftist German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956): to foster ideological awareness, he rejected the idea that the audience should identify with a play's characters and become engrossed in its plot; the playwright should break the illusion of reality through the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) and foreground the play's theatrical constructedness and historical specificity. The French dramatist Antonin Artaud (1896? 1948) also defied realism and rationalism, but unlike Brecht, his theory of the theater of cruelty sought a trans- formative, mystical communion with the audience through incantations and sounds, physical gestures and strange scenery. Another French dramatist, the Romanian- born Eugene Ionesco (1909?1994), helped inaugurate the theater of the absurd just after World War II, in plays that enact people's hopeless efforts to communicate and that comically intimate a tragic vision of life devoid of meaning or purpose. In such Continental drama the influences of symbolism (on the later Strindberg), Marxism (on Brecht), and surrealism (on Artaud and Ionesco) contributed to the shattering of naturalistic convention in drama, making the theater a space where linear plot gave way to fractured scenes and circular action, transparent conversation was displaced by misunderstanding and verbal opacity, a predictable and knowable universe was unsettled by eruptions of the irrational and the absurd.
In Britain the impact of these Continental innovations was delayed by a conservative theater establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s, when they converged with the countercultural revolution to transform the nature of English-language theater. Meanwhile the person who played the most significant role in the anglophone absorption of modernist experiment was the Irishman Samuel Beckett. He changed the history of drama with his first produced play, written in French in 1948 and translated by the author as Waiting for Godot (premiered in Paris in 1953, in London in 1955). The play astonishingly did away with plot ('Nothing happens?twice,' as one critic put it), as did Endgame (1958) and Beckett's later plays, such as Not I (1973) and That Time (1976). In the shadow of the mass death of World War II, the plotlessness, the minimal characterization and setting, the absurdist intimation of an existential darkness without redemption, the tragicomic melding of anxiety, circular wordplay, and slapstick action in Beckett's plays gave impetus to a seismic shift in British writing for the theater.
The epicenter of the new developments in British drama was the Royal Court Theatre, symbolically located a little away from London's West End 'theater land' (the rough equivalent of Broadway in New York). From 1956 the Royal Court was the home of the English Stage Company. Together they provided a venue and a vision that provoked and enabled a new wave of writers. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), the hit of the ESC's first season (significantly helped by the play's television broadcast), offered the audience 'lessons in feeling' through a searing depiction of class-based indignation, emotional cruelty, and directionless angst, all in a surprisingly nonmetropolitan setting. At the Royal Court the working-class naturalism of the so-called 'kitchen sink' dramatists and other 'angry young men' of the 1950s, such as Arnold Wesker, author of the trilogy Chicken Sou-p with Barley (1958), also broke with the genteel proprieties and narrowly upper-class set designs that,
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in one unadventurous drawing-room comedy after another, had dominated the British stage for decades. The political consciousness of the new theater was still more evident in John Arden's plays produced for the Royal Court, such as Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), which explores colonial oppression, communal guilt for wartime atrocities, and pacifism in the stylized setting of an isolated mining town. By the later 1960s the influence of the counterculture on British theater was unavoidable. Joe Orton challenged bourgeois sentiment in a series of classically precise, blackly comic, and sexually ambiguous parodies, such as his farce What the Butler Saw (1969).
While plays of social and political critique were one response to the postwar period, Beckett and the theater of the absurd inspired another group of Boyal Court writers to refocus theater on language, symbolism, and existential realities. Informed by kitchen-sink naturalism and absurdism, Harold Pinter's 'comedies of menace' map out a social trajectory from his early study of working-class stress and inarticulate anxiety, 71le Room (1957), through the film-noirish black farce of The Dumb Waiter (1960) and the emotional power plays of The Caretaker (1960), to the savagely comic study of middle-class escape from working-class mores in The Homecoming (1965). Later plays reflect on patrician suspicion and betrayal, though in the 1980s his work acquired a more overtly political voice. Though less bleak than Pinter, Tom Stoppard is no less indebted to Beckett's wordplay, skewed conversations, and theatrical technique, as evidenced by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) and other plays, many of which embed within themselves earlier literary works (such as Godot and Hamlet) and thus offer virtuoso postmodernist reflections on art, language, and performance. This enjoyment and exploitation of self- conscious theatricality arises partly out of the desire to show theater as different from film and television and is also apparent in the 1970s productions of another playwright: the liturgical stylization of Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973) and the bleak mental landscape of his Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1979) emphasize the stage as battleground and site of struggle (an effect lost in their naturalistic film versions). Stoppard's time shifts and memory lapses in Travesties (1974) allow a nonnaturalistic study of the role of memory and imagination in the creative process, a theme he returns to in Arcadia (1993), a stunning double-exposure account of a Bomantic poet and his modern critical commentators occupying the same physical space but never reaching intellectual common ground.
Legal reform intensified the postwar ferment in British theater. Since the Theatres Act of 1843, writers for the public stage had been required to submit their playscripts to the Lord Chamberlain's office for state censorship, but in 1968 a new Theatres Act abolished that office. With this new freedom from conservative mores and taste, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, Edward Bond, and David Hare were able to write challenging studies of violence, social deprivation, and political and sexual aggression, often using mythical settings and epic stories to construct austere tableaux of power and oppression. Bond's Lear (1971) typifies his ambitious combination of soaring lyrical language and alienatingly realistic violence. Directors such as Peter Brook took advantage of the new freedom in plays that emphasized, as had Artaud's theater of cruelty, physical gesture, bodily movement, and ritualized spectacle. The post1968 liberalization also encouraged the emergence of new theater groups addressing specific political agendas, many of them inspired by Brecht's 'epic' theater's distancing, discontinuous, and socially critical style. Companies such
