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Knowlesad032.Pdf Copyright by Adam Daniel Knowles 2003 The Dissertation Committee for Adam Daniel Knowles Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: MEMORIES OF ENGLAND: BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE RHETORIC OF DECLINE IN POSTWAR BRITISH DRAMA, 1956-1982 Committee: _____________________________________ Elizabeth Cullingford, Co-Supervisor _____________________________________ Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Co-Supervisor _____________________________________ Mia Carter _____________________________________ Alan Friedman _____________________________________ Wm. Roger Louis MEMORIES OF ENGLAND: BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE RHETORIC OF DECLINE IN POSTWAR BRITISH DRAMA, 1956-1982 by Adam Daniel Knowles, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2003 MEMORIES OF ENGLAND: BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE RHETORIC OF DECLINE IN POSTWAR BRITISH DRAMA, 1956-1982 Publication No. ___________ Adam Daniel Knowles, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2003 Supervisors: Elizabeth Cullingford and Elizabeth Richmond-Garza I take the near coincidence in 1956 of the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and the Suez crisis as a starting point for a study of the context, reception and politics of a selection plays by Osborne, John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, Howard Brenton, David Hare and Caryl Churchill. The end of my study is marked by Margaret Thatcher’s consolidation of power in the early eighties and the 1982 Falklands War. My analysis focuses on how these plays represent forms of British national identity that developed during the era of Britain’s imperial strength and how they show these formations changing after World War II. These identities are structured not only by nationality, but also by race, gender and regional loyalties. I am particularly concerned with occasions when the plays reflect the construction of the roles of colonizer and colonized. I also investigate how these playwrights accept or reject the commonplace thesis that Britain not only experienced economic and iv imperial decline in the twentieth century, but also suffered a spiritual, moral or cultural bankruptcy. The progress of decolonization and the changing demographics of Britain are important contexts for my analysis, as are nationalist movements within the United Kingdom and Scottish and Welsh devolution. I also consider how these playwrights narrate the history of the postwar period and earlier eras, and I identify parallels between these interpretations and trends in postwar-British historiography. Another important concern is the influence of Bertolt Brecht; each of the playwrights I discuss respond to Brecht in idiosyncratic and often conflicted ways, which illuminate their political and social thinking. Arts Council policies and the controversies surrounding governmental subsidy are also important for my analysis. Investigating these diverse contexts enables me to show what these playwrights, all of whom except for Osborne are or have been avowed leftists, were able to accomplish artistically and politically within the social and institutional constraints faced by theatre workers in postwar Britain. In doing so, I pay special attention to moments when these authors envision more egalitarian and pragmatic conceptions of Britishness for the future. v CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE John Osborne, Suez and the “Revolution” at the Royal Court 25 CHAPTER TWO Someone Else’s Land: Imperialism and Nationality in the Plays of 144 John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy CHAPTER THREE Howard Brenton and David Hare: The People’s War and the 273 Failure of the Left CHAPTER FOUR Caryl Churchill: Revolutionary Legacies, Hidden Histories, 405 and the Advent of Thatcherism CONCLUSION 542 WORKS CITED 556 VITA 578 vi INTRODUCTION Historical Contexts The playwright David Hare wrote in 1991 that “if you want to understand the social history of Britain since [World War II], then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the period—from The Entertainer and Separate Tables through to the present day—than by looking at any comparable documentary source” (Writing xii). Though its scope will be limited in a number of ways, my project here is the sort of study that Hare imagines. I have chosen for my project a group of plays that are, largely because of the strong political convictions of their authors, particularly responsive to social and political developments. My task has been to discover how the works I’ve chosen reflect changes in popular notions of British identity, and to examine how they narrate key moments in British history. I have also chosen plays that are representative of the vital leftist theatre movement that developed in the period. I focus on the leftist playwrights John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, Howard Brenton, Hare and Caryl Churchill. Though I would not label him a leftist, I begin with an analysis of John Osborne’s early plays in order to establish a context for my discussion of the later playwrights. Each of the playwrights I discuss draws attention to the relationships between specific formations of national identity and politics, both formal and informal. All except for Osborne seek, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, to 1 suggest alternative ways of defining human collectivities. In order to make sense of these efforts, I consider how historical events and processes including decolonization, Commonwealth immigration and nationalist movements within the United Kingdom have affected the way people living in the UK identify themselves individually and collectively. My research into these and other events provides a framework for understanding the ways experiences of national belonging and difference are represented on the stage. I have examined historical, sociological, and cultural studies of the postwar period in order to understand how people have positioned themselves within society by either endorsing or resisting social and political identities that developed, for the most part, during Britain’s years as an imperial power. This history shows that formations of state, nation, and people have never been congruent and that political and governmental structures have often been maintained in opposition to the opinion of large segments of the population. Contestations around these troubling concepts, as represented in the characters and events of the plays I analyze, will be a major focus of my work. It has been a revelation to discover in the course of my research just how recent many supposedly ancient national traditions in fact are.1 Equally striking was the variety and complexity of the relationships between conceptions of people, nation and state—as well as the political ramifications of those relationships. My understanding of these concepts owes much to the work of Benedict Anderson, Linda 1 The essays in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, are exemplary on this topic. 2 Colley, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn and Edward Said, among others. In Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Colley explains that If we accept Benedict Anderson’s admittedly loose, but for that reason invaluable definition of a nation as an ‘imagined political community’, and if we accept that, historically speaking, most nations have always been culturally and ethnically diverse, problematic, protean and artificial constructs that take shape very quickly and come apart just as fast, then we can plausibly regard Great Britain as an invented nation superimposed, if only for a while, onto much older alignments and loyalties. (5) Though I would quibble with Colley’s implication that in Britain “older alignments and loyalties” might emerge undisturbed from the collapse of more recent political structures, this passage contains an insight about British history that is crucial not only to my own study, but also to the work of the playwrights I discuss. Colley is speaking here primarily of regional differences within the United Kingdom during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, and particularly since the 1950s, increasing nonwhite immigration and persistent controversy about the meaning of Britain’s imperial history has made the situation even more complicated. In this setting, the playwrights I discuss seek to depict the historical roots of contemporary events and controversies, most often in an effort to imagine a more egalitarian society in Britain with more humane and democratic political and economic systems. 3 Perry Anderson has shown that “In Britain [. .] the organizing definition of the national was inescapably imperial—the ‘British’ people, strictly speaking, emerging as an artifact of the empire-state” (“Foreword” 10). Recognizing this genealogy helps to explain Britain’s current problems regarding issues of race and nationality. Taking the lead of Colley and like-minded historians, I began my historical inquiry with the notion that British history, at least since the eighteenth century, is in large part a record of the material and ideological mechanisms employed to support the territorial ambitions of empire and maintain social hierarchies at home. These two goals are, as several of the plays I examine show, interdependent; as Tom Nairn argues, throughout the age of empire and until World War II, Britain’s “ascendancy over its competitors in colonization accompanied the crystallization of its
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