Theatre after World War II: the Rest of Continental Europe and the U.K.

ITALY

Giorgio Strehler (1921-2002) established his Teatro Piccolo di Milano in 1947.  It was given free rent by the city 

of Milan and a subsidy from the Italian government. Strehler brought together a group of strong actors, began a training school, invited foreign directors, and focused largely on Shakespeare, Goldoni, and Brecht in innovative, daring productions.  He produced several versions of The Tempest and King Lear and used techniques learned from Copeau in brilliant productions of Goldoni’s comedies such as The Servant of Two Masters, taking a Brechtian approach. Strehler created the Théâtre de l’Europe, an organization of theatres that offers productions of the finest European theatre.  

Franco Zeffirelli (1923- ) is a free-lance director who is probably best known for his work in opera (several of his productions are in the rep at the Metropolitan Opera, see image below) and for Shakespeare and for his films of Romeo and Juliet and Taming of the Shrew. Zeffirelli's style is larger than life and lush. He has more control of his productions than most directors primarily because frequently designs his own sets and costumes for them.

Dario Fo (1926-  ) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997 for his satirical political plays. This brilliant comic 

performer directs as well, and performs with his partner, 

Franca Rame, in pieces that offer a socialist message infused with a biting sense of humor.  His most important work is Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), a slapstick mockery of police brutality. In 2003, Fo, then aged 77, wrote and performed The Two-Headed Anomoly, which lampooned former (finally!) Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

         

Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic now)

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) made history in a number of ways, as dissident playwright jailed repeatedly during the 

communist era, as president of the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and as an intellectual and moral essayist. Havel’s plays are absurdist in style. An early example is The Garden Party (1963), a Kafka-esque fantasy on the Czech bureaucracy. Later in his career he wrote Temptation (1986), a version of the Faust story. He left politics early in 2003 and became active in the theatre again. This great humanitarian (as well as man of the theatre) passed at the end of 2011. Dr Jack was lucky enough to be in Prague to see all the tributes to Havel in the days following his passing.

Internationally known designer Josef Svoboda (1920-2002) also made his reputation in Prague. His designs for operas and plays at the Czech National Theatre made extraordinary use of light and space.  Svoboda experimented with still and moving projections at the Laterna Magika, a unique space that he constructed in 1958.  He created flexible stages in which platforms and steps move vertically, horizontally, and laterally to alter spatial relationships. As his work became known, Svoboda was asked to design throughout Europe.

Poland

Playwrights such as Slawomir Mrozek (1932-2013) turned frequently to absurdism. In Police (1958), Mrozek the secret police have become so successful that they fear they’ll be abolished. In order to stay in business one of their own men pretends to be an enemy agent. His play Tango (1964) enjoyed several productions through Europe and the United States. In this darkly comic play, the liberal idealism of youth gradually corrodes into a brutal totalitarianism. 

Another playwright known outside of Poland is Janusz Glowacki (1938-  ). He moved to America and wrote about exiles in the United States in absurdist, comic style.  His play Hunting Cockroaches (1985) shows a Polish couple trying to cope with living in Manhattan.  The Fourth Sister, performed at the Vineyard Theatre in 2003, is a dark comedy based loosely and irreverently on Chekhov’s Three Sisters – in it a family uses outrageous methods to get out of Moscow. You may remember that in the Chekhov the sisters want to get TO Moscow, but of course do not.

Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) was a Polish director/ theoretician  and one of the most vital men of the 

experimental theatre in the 1960s, and influential far beyond that decade. In his book, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) he advocates a theatre that moves as far away as possible from film and television screens, and from theatre that is filled with expensive tricks and spectacle.  For Grotowski, the center of theatre is the actor and the audience.  Instead of using a proscenium arch theatre, Grotowski sets up an 

environment in which actors and audience gather.  In his Faustus, for example, actors and audience sat together at three tables, where the events of the play took place, physically and vocally supple actors creating all the special effects.  Akropolis was a devastating look at concentration camps, and The Constant Prince was based on Calderon’s seventeenth century Spanish play performed at his Polish Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw. After 1970, Grotowski broke from theatre and explored a communion with the natural world through celebratory ritualized experiences.  However, he was best known for his renowned company that toured Europe and the United States in the 1960s and became a model for experimental theatres throughout the world.

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) began his career at the Stary Theatre in Kracow. In the 1970s Kantor’s company toured, 

shocking the world with what he called the Theatre of Death. His work featured non-realistic scenery and actors who performed like mannequins, while Kantor himself appeared as the master of ceremonies, literally conducting the performance. In The Dead Class (1975) the characters, elderly, corpse-like people, sit in a schoolroom and confront their younger selves, which are represented as effigies.  Kantor’s visually stunning pieces attempted to come to terms with time, death, and memory.

The former soviet satellites freed themselves in 1989-90. Ironically since that time theatre in Eastern Europe has become less meaningful. During Soviet rule, playwrights encoded information and critiques that made theatre vital and relevant to audiences.  Now theatre there is often seen as mere entertainment, though experiment is still evident.

Russia

Josef Stalin died in 1953. In 1956, Premier Nikita Khrushchev publically denounced his former leader.  After this a period known as “the thaw” arrived. One of the first indications was a revival of interest in Meyerhold, the avant-garde director. Still, the predominant mode of production remained socialist realism. Few recent Russian playwrights have been produced abroad but several Russian directors became known throughout the world by creating experimental, engaging, and exciting theatre under oppressive conditions.  Anatoly Smeliansky, author of The Russian Theatre after Stalin (Cambridge 1999), referred to these men as “heroes,” because each innovation the directors attempted could have proved dangerous, or even fatal.

Oleg Efremov (1927-2000) created the Contemporary (Sovremennik) Theatre, which acted as the voice of the post-thaw generation. In addition to current Russian plays, Efremov directed western plays such as Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1966). His productions for the Sovremennik often mocked the Moscow Art Theatre, which had become old-fashioned. Then in 1970 Efremov was made the head of the Moscow Art.

The most controversial theatre in Moscow was the Taganka, headed after 1964 by Yuri Lyubimov (1917-   ). He produced works using dynamic movement, masks, puppets and projections. His productions were especially popular with young audiences. They were however frequently censored or forbidden. While on tour outside of Russia in 1984, Lyubimov was stripped of his citizenship. Only in 1987, during Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, was Lyubimov was allowed back into Russia.

Anatoly Efros (1925-1987) took over at the Taganka when Lyubimov was exiled.  He mounted celebrated productions in a style uniquely athletic, reminiscent of 1920s constructivism.  Efros staged Bulgakov’s Moliére in 1967, which was repeated on Soviet television. In this play, Moliére’s relationship with Louis XIV was interpreted as Bulgakov’s nightmarish relationship with Stalin. Efros’s 1970 production of Romeo and Juliet featured violent youths opposing their spiritually corrupt parents. The set was dominated visually by wings of death.

In Leningrad (before the Revolution and after it St. Petersburg), Georgi Tovstonogov (1915-1989) used realistic set pieces that stood alone in space, not backed by walls or other details. He directed Soviet dramas and Russian classics, but also American musicals such as West Side Story. His most unique productions was adapted from a Tolstoy story in 1975. It examined man’s inhumanity to man from the point of view of a horse, enacted by a man. The play, called Stryder, was successfully produced throughout Europe and America.

More recently, Lev Dodin (1944-   ) has become well known not only at the Maly Theatre in St. Petersburg, where he has been directing since 1983, but also in the west, as he has toured extensively through Europe and the U.S.  In 1994 he produced Claustrophobia, a mixture of song, dance and dialogue about young people caught up in drunkenness, violence, sex and despair in the new Russia. He directs opera and plays in important theatres across Europe.  In 2000, Dodin was given the prestigious European Theatre Award.

Contemporary Russian theatre may never again be as relevant daring as it was during the Soviet era, but several recent directors and performers have made it an exciting place to see unique experiments in their productions. Three of the finest are  Konstantin Raikin, who runs the Satyrikon Theatre in Moscow, Yuri Butusov, who frequently works at the Moscow Art, and Dmitri Krymov, whose visual effects alone attest to his innovative vision.

THE U.K. & IRELAND

Moving across the channel to England, in London after the war Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson took over the management of the Old Vic and produced a string of elegant successes, establishing a school and a “young” company as well.  For ten years, however, British theatre, while often brilliantly produced, seemed trapped in tradition.

Then British theatre received a savage kick that catapulted it into a new existence.  In 1956 George Devine (1910-1965) established the English Stage Company at the Royal Court 

On either side of the logo is John Osborne

Theatre. Devine discovered John Osborne (1929-1994), whose play Look Back in Anger attacked the complacency and inertia of postwar England through its protagonist, trumpet player Jimmy Porter.  This “angry young man” denounced the complacent upper middle class.  The play infuriated traditionalists but delighted a new generation of 

Literal "kitchen sink" drama

theatre artists and playgoers, and Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer (1957), equated the collapse of music hall entertainment with the fall of the British Empire. Laurence Olivier, symbol of the old guard, played the lead, connecting the old order to the new.  Osborne provided inspiration for many new playwrights, and Devine’s English Stage Company inspired others to produce fresh new drama. 

One of these was the Theatre Workshop, created earlier than Devine’s company, but gaining prominence after the exciting events at the Royal Court.  Joan Littlewood (1914-2002) was its guiding force, directing plays such as Shelagh 

Delaney’s (1939 --  ) A Taste of Honey (1958) and Brendan Behan’s (1923 -- 1965) The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958).  Littlewood used Brechtian staging devices and elements of music hall along with a Stanislavskian performance style performed by an excellent group of actors.  One of the finest creations of the workshop was Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963), This biting satire on World War I depicted the war as music hall entertainment. The company created this piece collectively, a model for future collaborative experiments in Britain.

The most important playwright of this period was Harold Pinter (1930-2008). He began by writing absurdist one-acts, including The Room and The Dumbwaiter  (1957), and then 

moved into longer, more complicated pieces such as The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1970) and Betrayal (1978).  Pinter creates mundane and tedious everyday situations that gradually to take on an air of mystery and menace. He has become famous for the “Pinter pause.” In Pinter’s plays pauses and subtext are often more important than the words spoken on stage.  He influenced writers as diverse as David Mamet and Caryl Churchill, as well as younger writers like Martin McDonagh. In 2005 Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Other writers who emerged at this time include Joe Orton 

(1933-1967), Peter Shaffer (1926-  ) and Tom Stoppard (1937-  ).  These playwrights work in very different styles.  Orton’s plays are hilariously grotesque. Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964) tells of a violent young thug who murders a man, then is blackmailed into becoming the sexual pet of both the son and daughter of the man he murdered; Loot (1966) features a comic detective, a corpse, and lots of money.

Peter Shaffer’s plays grapple with important questions, such as the divide between reason and passion, man and the gods.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) is about Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, Equus (1973) about a psychiatrist who is not certain that he should cure a boy who blinds six horses, and Amadeus (1979) about the experienced court composer Salieri who has to deal with the young natural genius Mozart. Shaffer’s plays are known for theatricality. In Equus, horses are portrayed by young men in symbolic masks and buskins, providing a stunning visual image of horse-gods central to the plot.

Tom Stoppard’s combination of a highly theatrical imagination and a daunting intellectual capacity made him 

one of England’s most respected writers.  He started by using absurdist techniques in Rozenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967). Stoppard’s plays include Travesties (1974), in which Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, and Lenin all manage to meet up in Zurich, and Arcadia (1993), in which the values of romanticism and neoclassicism are examined by characters from the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, all in the same room, often on stage at the same time.  His most ambitious piece is the trilogy Coast of Utopia, which ran at Lincoln Center in 2006-07.

Caryl Churchill (1938-  ) is one of the most recent innovative British writers. She created such smart theatre 

pieces as Top Girls (1982), where famous women from different periods of history all dine together, celebrating a modern woman’s promotion at an employment agency. Later the play darkens, showing the emptiness of the woman’s life. Churchill’s recent work is more compact. In Far Away (2000) she depicts a bleak world in which man’s inhumanity to man begins to affect all of nature. In A Number (2002), a man is confronted by three “sons,” two of them cloned, all three played by the same actor.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, completely re-vamped in 2011

Two powerful theatres created in 1960s England dominate the classical and contemporary repertoire. The Royal 
Shakespeare Company was formed in 1960 by director Peter Hall (1930-  ). This company subsidized by the government focuses on the works of Shakespeare.  Half the 
year the company plays Stratford, the other half it performs 

in London. By 1862 the company's focus expanded to include new plays as well and Peter Brook (1925-  ) and Michel St Denis, joined Hall in running the company. Brook’s bleak production of King Lear in 1962 and his Season of Cruelty in 1963-64, which included Marat/Sade, made the Royal Shakespeare Company London’s leading avant-garde theatre by the late 1960s.  Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), set in a great white box with fairies flown in on trapezes, revolutionized the playing and staging of Shakespeare.  In 1970 Brook formed his own international company and produced The Mahabharata (1985) and many other innovative works at his theatre in Paris, the Bouffes du Nord.  He is one of the finest directors of the late twentieth century.

In 1968 Trevor Nunn (1940-  ) took over the RSC and added big musicals, most famously Les Miserables, to its repertoire, as well as adaptations of novels such as Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby.  Brilliant design became a hallmark of the company, including work by John Bury and John Napier. 

The Royal National Theatre came into being in 1963, with Laurence Olivier as the artistic director. The National attracted the most famous European directors and designers, but it was best known for its fine acting ensemble.  In 1973 Peter Hall took over from Olivier and in 1976 the great gray complex on the South Bank housing three performing spaces opened. More recently, artistic directors such as Richard Eyre (1943-  ) and Nicholas Hytner (1956- ) have encouraged an experimental approach. In 2004, under Hytner’s direction outrageous works like Jerry Springer: The Opera played in rep with Shakespeare and modern classics, for very inexpensive ticket prices. More recently War Horse, featuring amazing puppets by Handspring in South Africa, has become an international success for the RNT.

Since the 1960s, British writers have been produced regularly on both sides of the Atlantic. These include David Hare, Alan Ayckbourne, Peter Barnes and Timberlake Wertenbaker. A group of young writers in the early twenty-first century 

reflect a particularly bleak world that has been dubbed “in-yer-face” theatre. Patrick Marber (1964- ) among the best known of this group, wrote Closer (1997), which describes in a darkly humorous way two couples’ interrelationships. Scottish playwright Mark Ravenhill (1966- ) is in the vanguard of the “in-yer-face” movement. His play Shopping 

and Fucking (1996) is a bitter comic look at relationships and consumer society. It’s been produced all over the world. Sarah Kane (1971-1999) has gained the most notoriety in this group. Her first play, Blasted (1995), created a sensation and outrage in London as it moved brutally and violently from a rape to a civil war. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis (2000), a moving prose poem on depression that predicted Kane’s own suicide, was produced posthumously. 

Scotland hosts a great theatre festival, The Edinburgh Festival. Begun in 1947, shortly after the war, it began as a theatre festival, and has branched out into dance and classical music and opera as well.  A Festival “Fringe” formed early on, and is now the largest theatre festival in the world. 

In 1968, many new experimental groups, often called “fringe” theatres, emerged in London and other cities. These organizations have been dedicated to new and unusual work. In the 1990s exciting new London theatres surfaced. The Donmar Warehouse, the Almeida, the Gate and others encourage new work and re-examine plays from earlier eras. Scotland has several fine theatres that focus on new work as well, including The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.

Two of the most important festivals produced by the British Commonwealth have set up on the other side of the pond.  In Canada, Stratford Ontario started its Shakespeare Festival in 1952, and it has grown in size and length and importance.  At Ontario’s Niagara on the Lake, just across from the U.S. border, a similar festival is devoted to plays by Shaw and his contemporaries. Both Stratford and the Shaw feature fine companies of mostly Canadian actors.

A particularly prolific and talented group of recent playwrights come from Ireland. Brian Friel (1929-  ) writes 

plays that experiment with highly theatrical ways to tell moving stories. In Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964) the lead character is played by two actors, representing a public and private self. The Faith Healer (1979) tells a dramatic story using only monologues by the play’s three characters. Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) features a grown man narrating his youth with his mother and four aunts in a play that is both comic and heartbreaking.

More recent Irish playwrights include Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy, and Conor McPherson, but the best known is 

Martin McDonagh (1970- ). He gained a reputation as an enfant terrible when four of his plays were being performed simultaneously on stages in New York City before he turned 30! His first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) depicts the relationship of a middle aged single woman and her nightmarishly controlling mother. More recently, McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) is set in a police interrogation room; a writer of fiction is being grilled because his grotesque stories all too closely resemble real murders. McDonagh has become known for plays that leap from comic to terrifying in an instant, similar to the “in-yer-face” drama being written by so many of his contemporaries.