Theatre of United Kingdom plays an important part inBritish culture, and thecountries that constitute the UK have had a vibrant tradition oftheatre since theRenaissance with roots going back to theRoman occupation.
Theatre was introduced fromEurope to what is now the United Kingdom by theRomans andauditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose (an example has been excavated atVerulamium). By themedieval period, theatre had developed with themummers' plays, a form of early street theatre associated with theMorris dance, concentrating on themes such asSaint George and theDragon andRobin Hood. These werefolk tales re-telling old stories, and theactors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality.
The medievalmystery plays andmorality plays, which dealt with Christian themes, were performed at religious festivals. The most important work of literature surviving from the Middle Cornish period isAn Ordinale Kernewek ("The CornishOrdinalia"), a 9000-line religious drama composed around the year 1400. The longest single surviving work ofCornish literature isBywnans Meriasek (The Life of Meriasek), a play dated 1504, but probably copied from an earlier manuscript.
There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays from the latemedieval period; although these collections are sometimes referred to as "cycles," it is now believed that this term may attribute to these collections more coherence than they in fact possess. The most complete is theYork cycle of forty-eight pageants. They were performed in the city ofYork, from the middle of the fourteenth century until 1569. There are also theTowneley plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true 'cycle' of plays and most likely performed around theFeast of Corpus Christi probably in the town ofWakefield, England during the lateMiddle Ages until 1576. TheLudus Coventriae (also called theN Town plays" orHegge cycle), now generally agreed to be a redacted compilation of at least three older, unrelated plays, and theChester cycle of twenty-four pageants, now generally agreed to be an Elizabethan reconstruction of older medieval traditions.
These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as theFall of Lucifer, theCreation and Fall of Man,Cain and Abel,Noah and the Flood,Abraham and Isaac, theNativity, theRaising of Lazarus, thePassion, and theResurrection. Other pageants included the story ofMoses, theProcession of the Prophets,Christ's Baptism, theTemptation in the Wilderness, and theAssumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medievalcraft guilds.[1][2]
Having grown out of the religiously basedmystery plays of the Middle Ages, themorality play is agenre ofMedieval andearly Tudor theatrical entertainment, which represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without amoral theme.[3] Morality plays are a type ofallegory in which theprotagonist is met bypersonifications of variousmoral attributes who try to prompt him to choose a Godly life over one of evil. The plays were most popular inEurope during the 15th and 16th centuries.
The reign ofElizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. Perhaps the most famousplaywright in the world,William Shakespeare, wrote around 40 plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day. They include tragedies, such asHamlet (1603),Othello (1604), andKing Lear (1605); comedies, such asA Midsummer Night's Dream (1594–96) andTwelfth Night (1602); and history plays, such asHenry IV, Part 1. The Elizabethan age is sometimes nicknamed the "Age of Shakespeare" for the influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights includeBen Jonson,Christopher Marlowe, andJohn Webster.
The English playwrights were intrigued by the Italian model as a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London. The linguist and lexicographerJohn Florio (1553–1625), whose father was Italian, was a royal language tutor at the Court ofJames I, and a possible friend and influence on William Shakespeare, had brought much of theItalian language and culture to England. The earliest Elizabethan plays includesGorboduc (1561) bySackville andNorton as well asThe Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again,[4]Elizabethantragedy written byThomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time,The Spanish Tragedy established a newgenre in English literature theatre, therevenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters apersonification ofRevenge.The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to, or parodied, in works written by other Elizabethanplaywrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements ofThe Spanish Tragedy, such as theplay-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and aghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare'sHamlet. Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypotheticalUr-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources forHamlet.
George Chapman (c. 1559–1634) was a successful playwright who produced comedies (his collaboration onEastward Hoe led to his brief imprisonment in 1605 as it offended the King with itsanti-Scottish sentiment), tragedies (most notablyBussy D'Ambois) and court masques (The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn).
David Lyndsay'sAne Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552), is a surviving example of aScots dramatic tradition in the period that has otherwise largely been lost.James Wedderburn is recorded as having written anti-Catholic tragedies and comedies in Scots around 1540 before being forced to flee into exile. Although the propaganda value of drama in theScottish Reformation was important, the Kirk hardened its attitude to such public entertainments. In 1599 James VI had to intervene to overturn a prohibition on attending performances by a visiting theatre troupe from England. Scottish drama did not succeed in becoming a popular artform in the face of religious opposition and the absence of King and court after 1603. As with drama in England, only a small proportion of plays written and performed were actually published, and the smaller production in Scotland meant that a much less significant record of Scottish drama remains to us.[5] The ribald verse play in Scots,Philotus,[6] is known from an anonymous edition published in London in 1603.[7]
Drama inWales as a literary tradition dates tomorality plays from north-east Wales in the second half of the 15th century. The development of Renaissance theatre in England did not have great influence in Wales as the gentry found different forms of artistic patronage. One surviving example of Welsh literary drama isTroelus a Chresyd, an anonymous adaptation from poems by Henrysoun and Chaucer dating to around 1600. With no urban centres to compare to England to support regular stages, morality plays and interludes continued to circulate ininn-yard theatres and fairs, supplemented by visiting troupes performing English repertoire.[8]
During theInterregnum 1642–1660,English theatres were kept closed by thePuritans for religious and ideological reasons. When the London theatres opened again with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they flourished under the personal interest and support ofCharles II (reigned 1660–1685). Wide and socially mixed audiences were attracted by topical writing and by the introduction of the first professional actresses (in Shakespeare's time, all female roles had been played by boys). Newgenres of the Restoration wereheroic drama,pathetic drama, andRestoration comedy. The Restoration plays that have best retained the interest of producers and audiences today are the comedies, such asWilliam Wycherley'sThe Country Wife (1676),The Rover (1677) by the first professional woman playwright,Aphra Behn, andJohn Vanbrugh'sThe Relapse (1696). Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for itssexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II personally and by therakisharistocratic ethos of hiscourt.
Although documented history ofIrish theatre began at least as early as 1601, the earliest Irish dramatists of note were:William Congreve (1670–1729), author ofThe Way of the World (1700); late Restoration playwright,George Farquhar (?1677–1707),The Recruiting Officer (1706); as well as two of the most successful playwrights on the London stage in the 18th century,Oliver Goldsmith (?1730–74),She Stoops to Conquer (1773) andRichard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816),The School for Scandal (1777).Anglo-Irish drama in the 18th century also includesCharles Macklin (?1699–1797), andArthur Murphy (1727–1805).[9] Thomas Sydserf was behind the establishment in Edinburgh of the first regular theatre in Scotland, and his 1667 playTarugo's Wiles: or, The Coffee-House, based on a Spanish play, was produced in London to amazement that a Scot could write such excellent English.[10] Scottish poetJohn Ogilby, who was the first IrishMaster of the Revels, had established theWerburgh Street Theatre, the first theatre in Ireland, in the 1630s. It was closed by thePuritans in 1641. TheRestoration of the monarchy in Ireland enabled Ogilby to resume his position as Master of the Revels and open the firstTheatre Royal in Dublin in 1662 in Smock Alley. In 1662Katherine Philips went toDublin where she completed a translation ofPierre Corneille'sPompée, produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and printed in the same year both in Dublin and London. Although other women had translated or written dramas, her translation of Pompey broke new ground as the first rhymed version of a French tragedy in English and the first English play written by a woman to be performed on the professional stage.Aphra Behn (one of the women writers dubbed "The fair triumvirate of wit") was a prolific dramatist and one of the first English professional female writers. Her greatest dramatic success wasThe Rover (1677).
Theatre began to spread from the United Kingdom to the expanding British Empire. Farquhar'sThe Recruiting Officer was the first play to be staged inNew York City on December 6, 1732.[11] It was also the first play to be staged in theColony of New South Wales,[12] which is nowAustralia.
The age ofAugustan drama was brought to an end by the censorship established by theLicensing Act 1737. After 1737, authors with strong political or philosophical points to make would no longer turn to the stage as their first hope of making a living, and novels began to have dramatic structures involving only normal human beings, as the stage was closed off for serious authors. Prior to the Licensing Act 1737, theatre was the first choice for most wits. After it, the novel was.
In the 18th century, the highbrow and provocative Restoration comedy lost favour, to be replaced bysentimental comedy, domesticBourgeois tragedy such asGeorge Lillo'sThe London Merchant (1731), and by an overwhelming interest in Italianopera. Popular entertainment became more important in this period than ever before, with fair-booth burlesque and mixed forms that are the ancestors of the Englishmusic hall. These forms flourished at the expense of legitimate English drama, which went into a long period of decline. By the early 19th century it was no longer represented by stage plays at all, but by thecloset drama, plays written to be privately read in a "closet" (a small domestic room).
Percy Bysshe Shelley andLord Byron were the most important literary dramatists of their time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in the century). Shakespeare was enormously popular, and began to be performed with texts closer to the original, as the drastic rewriting of 17th and 18th century performing versions for the theatre (as opposed to his plays in book form, which were also widely read) was gradually removed over the first half of the century.
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Melodramas, light comedies, operas, Shakespeare and classic English drama,pantomimes, translations of French farces and, from the 1860s, French operettas, continued to be popular, together withVictorian burlesque.
Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage. The existing repertoire of Scottish-themed plays includedJohn Home'sDouglas (1756) and Ramsay'sThe Gentle Shepherd (1725), with the last two being the most popular plays among amateur groups.[13]Douglas elicited the famous "Whaur's Yer Wullie Shakespeare Noo?" jeer from a member of one of its early audiences, and was also the subject of a number of pamphlets for and against it. It also arguably led toJames MacPherson's Ossian cycle.[14][15] Home was hounded by the church authorities forDouglas. It may have been this persecution which drove Home to write for the London stage, in addition toDouglas' success there, and stopped him from founding the new Scottish national theatre that some had hoped he would.[14]Walter Scott was keenly interested in drama, becoming a shareholder in theTheatre Royal, Edinburgh.[16] Baillie's Highland themedThe Family Legend was first produced in Edinburgh in 1810 with the help of Scott, as part of a deliberate attempt to stimulate a national Scottish drama.[17] Scott also wrote five plays, of whichHallidon Hill (1822) andMacDuff's Cross (1822), were patriotic Scottish histories.[16] Adaptations of the Waverley novels, largely first performed in minor theatres, rather than the larger Patent theatres, includedThe Lady in the Lake (1817),The Heart of Midlothian (1819), andRob Roy, which underwent over 1,000 performances in Scotland in this period. Also adapted for the stage wereGuy Mannering,The Bride of Lammermoor andThe Abbot. These highly popular plays saw the social range and size of the audience for theatre expand and helped shape theatre going practices in Scotland for the rest of the century.[13]
In 1847, a critic using the pseudonymDramaticus published a pamphlet[18] describing the parlous state of British theatre. Production of serious plays was restricted to thepatent theatres, and new plays were subjected to censorship by theLord Chamberlain's Office. At the same time, there was a burgeoning theatre sector featuring a diet of lowmelodrama and musicalburlesque; but critics described British theatre as driven by commercialism and a 'star' system. Kotzebue's plays were translated into English andThomas Holcroft'sA Tale of Mystery was the first of many English melodramas.Pierce Egan,Douglas William Jerrold,Edward Fitzball,James Roland MacLaren andJohn Baldwin Buckstone initiated a trend towards more contemporary and rural stories in preference to the usual historical or fantastical melodramas.James Sheridan Knowles andEdward Bulwer-Lytton established a "gentlemanly" drama that began to re-establish the former prestige of the theatre with thearistocracy.[19]
For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was restricted by a licensing system to the Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could perform only musical entertainments (although magistrates had powers to license occasional dramatic performances). By the early 19th century, however,music hall entertainments had become popular, and provided a loophole in the restrictions on non-patent theatres in the genre ofmelodrama which did not contravene the Patent Acts, as it was accompanied by music. The passing of theTheatres Act 1843 removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres, enabling local authorities to license theatres as they saw fit, and also restricted theLord Chamberlain's powers to censor new plays. The 1843 Act did not apply to Ireland where the power of theLord Lieutenant to license patent theatres enabled control of stage performance analogous to that exercised by the Lord Chamberlain in Great Britain.[20]
James Planché was a prolific playwright. He revolutionised stage productions of Shakespeare and the classics by introducing the use of historically appropriatecostume design, working with antiquarians to establish what was known about period dress.[21]
Dion Boucicault (1820–90) made the latest scientific inventions important elements in his plots and exerted considerable influence on theatrical production. His first big success,London Assurance (1841) was a comedy in the style of Sheridan, but he wrote in various styles, including melodrama.T. W. Robertson wrote popular domestic comedies and introduced a more naturalistic style of acting and stagecraft to the British stage in the 1860s.
A change came in the late 19th century with the plays on the London stage by the IrishmenGeorge Bernard Shaw andOscar Wilde and the NorwegianHenrik Ibsen, all of whom influenced domestic English drama and vitalised it again. TheShakespeare Memorial Theatre was opened in Shakespeare's birthplaceStratford upon Avon in 1879; andHerbert Beerbohm Tree founded anAcademy of Dramatic Art atHer Majesty's Theatre in 1904.
ProducerRichard D'Oyly Carte brought together librettistW. S. Gilbert and composerArthur Sullivan, and nurtured their collaboration.[22] AmongGilbert and Sullivan's best knowncomic operas areH.M.S. Pinafore,The Pirates of Penzance andThe Mikado.[23] Carte built theSavoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works, and through the inventor of electric lightSir Joseph Swan, the Savoy was the first theatre, and the first public building in the world, to be lit entirely by electricity.[24][25] The success of Gilbert and Sullivan greatly expanded the audience for musical theatre.[26] This, together with much improved street lighting and transportation in London led to a late Victorian and Edwardian theatre building boom in the West End.
At the end of the century,Edwardian musical comedy came to dominate the musical stage.[27]
Irish playwrightsGeorge Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) andJ. M. Synge (1871–1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career as a playwright began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth century. Synge's most famous play,The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907.[28] George Bernard Shaw turned theEdwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women.[29]
In the 1920s and laterNoël Coward (1899–1973) achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such asHay Fever (1925),Private Lives (1930),Design for Living (1932),Present Laughter (1942) andBlithe Spirit (1941), have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. In the 1930sW. H. Auden andChristopher Isherwood co-authored verse dramas, of whichThe Ascent of F6 (1936) is the most notable, that owed much toBertolt Brecht.T. S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama withSweeney Agonistes in 1932, and this was followed byThe Rock (1934),Murder in the Cathedral (1935) andFamily Reunion (1939). There were three further plays after the war.
Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), writer in Welsh, was above all a dramatist. His earliest published play wasBlodeuwedd (The woman of flowers) (1923–25, revised 1948). Other notable plays includeBuchedd Garmon (The life of Germanus) (radio play, 1936) and several others after the war.
James Bridie, the pseudonym used by Osborne Henry Mavor (1888–1951), was a Scottish playwright, screenwriter and surgeon, considered to be a founding father of modern Scottish theatre, following his involvement with the founding of both theCitizens Theatre and Scotland's first college of drama, now known as theRoyal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
TheEdinburgh Festival Fringe started life when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the inauguralEdinburgh International Festival in 1947. Seven performed in Edinburgh, and one undertook a version of the medieval morality play "Everyman" inDunfermline Abbey, about 20 miles north, across theFirth of Forth, in Fife. These groups aimed to take advantage of the large assembled theatre crowds to showcase their own, alternative, theatre. The Fringe got its name the following year (1948) afterRobert Kemp, a Scottish playwright and journalist, wrote during the secondEdinburgh International Festival: ‘Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before ... I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!’.[30] The artistic credentials of the Fringe were established by the creators of theTraverse Theatre,John Calder,Jim Haynes andRichard Demarco in 1963. While their original objective was to maintain something of the Festival atmosphere in Edinburgh all year round, the Traverse Theatre quickly and regularly presented cutting edge drama to an international audience on both theEdinburgh International Festival and on the Fringe during August.
Sadler's Wells, underLilian Baylis, nurtured talent that led to the development of an opera company, which became theEnglish National Opera (ENO), a theatre company, which evolved into the National Theatre, and a ballet company, which eventually became the EnglishRoyal Ballet.
TheRoyal Shakespeare Company operates out of Stratford-upon-Avon, producing mainly but not exclusively Shakespeare's plays. The RSC was formally established on 20 March 1961 with the royal announcement that the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre would henceforth be known as theRoyal Shakespeare Theatre and the company as the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1962 the RSC established theAldwych Theatre as its London base for productions transferred from Stratford to London, its stage redesigned to match the RST's apron stage. In 1982, the company took up London residence in both the Barbican Theatre and The Pit studio space in theBarbican Centre under the auspices of theCity of London. The RSC was closely involved in the design of these two venues. Since 2002 the RSC has had no regular London home, concentrating its work in Stratford at theSwan Theatre and the redeveloped Royal Shakespeare Theatre (re-opened in 2010).
An important cultural movement in the British theatre that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s wasKitchen sink realism (orkitchen sink drama), art (the term itself derives from an expressionist painting byJohn Bratby), novels, film, andtelevision plays.[31] The termangry young men was often applied members of this artistic movement. It used a style ofsocial realism which depicts the domestic lives of the working class, to explore social issues and political issues. Thedrawing room plays of the post war period, typical of dramatists likeTerence Rattigan andNoël Coward were challenged in the 1950s by theseAngry Young Men, in plays likeJohn Osborne'sLook Back in Anger (1956).Arnold Wesker andNell Dunn also brought social concerns to the stage.
Again in the 1950s, theabsurdist playWaiting for Godot (1955) (originallyEn attendant Godot, 1952), by the Paris-based Irish expatriateSamuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. TheTheatre of the Absurd influencedHarold Pinter (1930–2008), (The Birthday Party, 1958), whose works are often characterised by menace or claustrophobia.[32] Beckett also influencedTom Stoppard (1937-) (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,1966).[33] Stoppard's works are however also notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays. Both Pinter and Stoppard continued to have new plays produced into the 1990s.
Beyond the Fringe was acomedy stage revue written and performed byPeter Cook,Dudley Moore,Alan Bennett, andJonathan Miller. It played in London's West End and then onNew York'sBroadway in the early 1960s, and is widely regarded as seminal to therise of satire in 1960s Britain.
TheChichester Festival Theatre was Britain's first modern thrust stage theatre. It was inspired by the Festival Theatre of theStratford Shakespeare Festival launched byTyrone Guthrie in theCanadian city ofStratford, Ontario.[34] The inauguralArtistic Director of the Chichester Festival was SirLaurence Olivier, and it was at Chichester that the first National Theatre company was formed.Chichester's productions would transfer to the National Theatre's base at theOld Vic inLondon.
TheTheatres Act 1968 abolished the system of censorship of the stage that had existed in Great Britain since 1737. The new freedoms of the London stage were tested byHoward Brenton'sThe Romans in Britain, first staged at theNational Theatre during 1980, and subsequently the focus of an unsuccessful private prosecution in 1982.
The height ofAlan Ayckbourn's commercial success includedAbsurd Person Singular (1975),The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973),Bedroom Farce (1975) andJust Between Ourselves (1976), all plays that focused heavily on marriage in the British middle classes. Throughout his writing career, all but four of his plays were premièred at theStephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in its three different locations.[35] The Stephen Joseph Theatre was the first theatre in the round in Britain.
Other playwrights whose careers began later in the century are:Caryl Churchill (Top Girls, 1982),Michael Frayn (1933-) playwright and novelist,David Hare (1947- ),David Edgar (1948- ).Dennis Potter's most distinctive dramatic work was produced for television.
Translations byBrian Friel was first performed at theGuildhall, Derry,Northern Ireland, in 1980. An Irish-language version of the play has been produced.[36] The play has also been translated intoWelsh byElan Closs Stephens. The Welsh version has visited a number of venues in Wales and was first published byGwasg Carreg Gwalch, under its Welsh titleTorri Gair ("Breaking the Word"), in 1982. It is "a play about language and only about language", but it deals with a wide range of issues, stretching from language and communication to Irish history and cultural imperialism. Friel responds strongly to both political and language questions in modern-day Northern Ireland.
In 1970, American actor and directorSam Wanamaker founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust and the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, with the objective of building a faithful recreation of Shakespeare's Globe close to its original location at Bankside, Southwark.Shakespeare's Globe opened to the public in 1997. Performances are engineered to duplicate the original environment of Shakespeare's Globe; there are no spotlights, plays are staged during daylight hours and in the evenings (with the help of interior floodlights), there are no microphones, speakers or amplification.
During the 1950s and 1960s, many major British playwrights either effectively began their careers with theBBC, or had works adapted for radio. Most of playwrightCaryl Churchill's early experiences with professional drama production were as a radio playwright and, starting in 1962 withThe Ants, there were nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973 when her stage work began to be recognised at theRoyal Court Theatre.[37]Joe Orton's dramatic debut in 1963 was the radio playThe Ruffian on the Stair, which was broadcast on 31 August 1964.[38]Tom Stoppard's "first professional production was in the fifteen-minuteJust Before Midnight programme on BBC Radio, which showcased new dramatists".[38]John Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955, with his adaptation of his own novelLike Men Betrayed for theBBCLight Programme. But he made his debut as an original playwright withThe Dock Brief, starringMichael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957 onBBC Radio'sThird Programme, later televised with the same cast, and subsequently presented in a double bill withWhat Shall We Tell Caroline? at theLyric Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to theGarrick Theatre. Mortimer is most famous forRumpole of the Bailey aBritish television series which starredLeo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister who defends any and all clients. It has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes.[39]
Other notable radio dramatists includedBrendan Behan and novelistAngela Carter. NovelistSusan Hill also wrote for BBC radio, from the early 1970s.[40] Irish playwrightBrendan Behan, author ofThe Quare Fellow (1954), was commissioned by the BBC to write a radio playThe Big House (1956); prior to this he had written two playsMoving Out andA Garden Party for Irish radio.[41]
Among the most famous works created for radio areDylan Thomas'sUnder Milk Wood (1954), which was later adapted into the 1972 film starringRichard Burton andGlynis Johns,Samuel Beckett'sAll That Fall (1957),Harold Pinter'sA Slight Ache (1959),Robert Bolt'sA Man for All Seasons (1954),[42] andTerence Rattigan'sCause Célèbre (1975), which earned starring actressGlynis Johns aVariety Club Award for Best Actress andLaurence Olivier Award nomination.[43]
Samuel Beckett wrote a number of short radio plays in the 1950s and 1960s, and later for television. Beckett's radio playEmbers was first broadcast on theBBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959, and won the RAI prize at thePrix Italia awards later that year.[44]
From the 1840s there was a demand to commemorate serious theatre, with the "Shakespeare Committee" purchasing the playwright's birthplace for the nation demonstrating a recognition of the importance of 'serious drama'. The following year saw more pamphlets on a demand for a National Theatre from London publisher, Effingham William Wilson.[45] The situation continued, with a renewed call every decade for a National Theatre. In 1879 the residency of theComédie-Française at theGaiety Theatre inspired further demands, including: a structure in the capital that would present "exemplary theatre"; that would form a permanent memorial to Shakespeare; a supported company that would represent the best of British acting; and a theatre school.[46] A London Shakespeare League was founded in 1902 to develop a Shakespeare National Theatre and – with the impending tri-centenary in 1916 of his death – in 1913 purchased land for a theatre inBloomsbury. This work was interrupted by World War I. Finally, in 1948, theLondon County Council presented a site close to theRoyal Festival Hall for the purpose, and a "National Theatre Act", offering financial support, was passed byParliament in 1949.[47] In July 1962, a board was set up to supervise construction of aNational Theatre on the South Bank site and a separate board was constituted to run a National Theatre Company and lease theOld Vic theatre. The company was to remain at the Old Vic until 1976, when the newSouth Bank building was opened.
The theatrical landscape has since been reconfigured, moving from a single national theatre at the end of the 20th century to four as a result of the devolution of cultural policy.[48] National theatre companies were founded in Scotland and Wales as complements to theRoyal National Theatre in London:Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh language national theatre of Wales, founded 2003),National Theatre of Scotland (founded 2006),National Theatre Wales (the English language national theatre company of Wales, founded 2009). Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru attempts to shape a distinctive identity for drama in Welsh while also opening it up to outside linguistic and dramatic influences.[49]
TheWest End of London has a large number of theatres, particularly centred aroundShaftesbury Avenue.
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres ofLondon's "Theatreland".[50] Along withNew York'sBroadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercialtheatre in theEnglish-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a commontourist activity in London.[50]
A prolific composer ofmusical theatre in the 20th century,Andrew Lloyd Webber has been referred to as "the most commercially successful composer in history".[51] His musicals have dominated the West End for a number of years and have travelled to Broadway in New York City and around the world as well as being turned into films. Lloyd Webber's musicals originally starredElaine Paige, who with continued success has become known as the First Lady of British Musical Theatre.[52]
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