1. “Reevaluation, Decentralization, and Subsidization” The Essential Theatre

2. Postwar American Theatre
The United States (perhaps because it was geographically removed from the fighting and gained , rather than lost , in optimism ) saw little change in theater during and immediately following the war years .
Psychological realism dominated plays of the postwar period .

3. Cat on Hot Tin Roof(1)
Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1995) is a
play about mendacity – deception and lying , both to
oneself and others.
The occasion that ostensibly has brought all of the characters together is Big Daddy’s sixty-fifth birthday , which coincides with receipt of results of Big Daddy’s clinical tests for cancer.

4. Cat on Hot Tin Roof(2)
Brick has no interest in Big Daddy’s wealth, but his wife does . Having escaped a background of genteel poverty , Maggie is determined not to return to it ; she sees having a child by Brick as her only hope of avoiding that fate .

5. Cat on Hot Tin Roof(3)
The play concentrates primarily on three characters : Maggie , Brick , and Big Daddy .
The first act is devoted almost entirely to Maggie and Brick as she tries to make him understand their precarious position in relation to Big Daddy’s
The second act is devoted primarily to Brick and Big Daddy .

6. Cat on Hot Tin Roof(4)
The final act is taken up with a gathering of all the characters except Big Daddy , during which they reveal the truth to Big Mama .
There is an alternative third act to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , written at the insistence of Elia Kazan the original director of the play on Broadway .
Despite its great power , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof can , from today’s perspective , be faulted on two scores-gender and race-though both were treated in ways typical of their time .

7. The Musical in Postwar America
Along with the modified realism of spoken drama , the musical was the most popular form in postwar America .
Even so , musical comedy did not bedin to emerge as a distinct type until the late nineteenth century .
By 1940 , the musical , according to many critics , had become distinctively American and America’s most significant contribution to world theatre .

8. Postwar Europe
These American musicals and plays were quite the theatrical fare of post war Europe .
During and following World War II , a group of philosophers and dramatists , the existentialists , adopted a more radical version of Pirandello’s views .
Sartre was echoed by Albert Camus( ) whose description of the human condition as absurd.

9. Absurdism
The absurdist, who emerged in France around 1950, accepted the views of Sartre and Camus about the human condition, but unlike those two writers, they saw no way out because rational and meaningful choices seemed impossible in such universe.

10. Absurdism (2)
Among the absurdist playwrights, who included Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, the most influential was Samuel Beckett ( ), whose Waiting for Godot (1952) first gained international recognition for absurdism.

11. Happy Days (1)
One major theme is the isolation and loneliness of human beings.
The play suggests that human beings organize their days around routines to convince themselves that they are in control of their lives.

12. Happy Days (2)
Another theme is the ability of human beings to endure and to consider their lives as normal and happy despite all evidence to the contrary

13. Happy Days (3)
The role of Winnie who makes great demands on an actress, because she alone must hold the interest of the audience.
In the plays, Beckett increasingly reduces the scope of action and means to those absolutely essential for projecting his vision.

14. Happy Days (4)
In many ways, absurdism extended the relativist view as far as it could go, because it implied that we have no way of proving or disproving the validity of any position.

15. Decentralization and Subsidization (1)
The Postwar period also brought interest in making the theatre more readily available beyond established theatre centers.

16. Decentralization and Subsidization (2)
Subsidization is as old as the theatre. Starting from Greek times to our days theatre always got financial help from the state.

17. Decentralization and Subsidization (3)
The Germanic and Scandinavian countries consider state or municipal funding for the arts as cultural responsibility like that for education.
At the end of WW II France had four state theatres but all in Paris. In 1947 in an effort to decentralize French theatre, the government began to establish dramatic centers in cities throughout France.

18. The Postwar British Theatre (1)
England, unlike most of the European countries, had never awarded government subsides on the premise that theatre is a business that must be self-supporting.
But after war more than fifty cities and towns in Great Britain came to subsidize theatres.

19. The Postwar British Theatre (2)
Equally important, Parliament authorized the formation of National Theatre, which, after numerous delays, was inaugurated in under the direction of Sir Laurence Oliver, perhaps England’s foremost actor.

20. The Postwar British Theatre (3)
Although it does not have a title, the Royal Shakespeare Company is often looked upon as England’s second national theatre.

21. The Postwar British Theatre (4)
A third English group, the English Stage Company (ESC), founded in 1956, made its mark by assisting new playwrights.

22. The Postwar British Theatre (5)
Among the playwrights who reshaped the English theatre, some of the most important are Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and Caryl Churchill.

23. The Postwar British Theatre (6)
Edward Bond has long been one of the England’s most controversial playwrights because of such plays as Saved (1965), in which a baby is stoned to death onstage.

24. The Postwar British Theatre (7)
Harold Pinter, often considered England’s greatest living dramatist, opened up still another path.
Peter Shaffer has been writing plays since the 1950s. He is best known for the stage and film versions of Equus and Amadeus.

25. The Postwar British Theatre (8)
Tom Stoppard won recognition first with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), focusing on two minor characters from Hamlet.

26. The Postwar British Theatre (9)
Among Britain’s more recent dramatists, several began their careers either in the provincial theatre or in the fringe theatre (comparable to Off-Broadway and Off- Off-Broadway) that mushroomed in number once censorship was removed.

27. The Postwar British Theatre (10)
David Hare began his career in fringe theatres with such plays as Slug, which focus on the deprivations and emptiness of working-class life.
Alan Alyckbourn, England’s most popular playwright, is often compared to America’s Neil Simon.

28. The Postwar British Theatre (11)
Most of Caryl Churcill’s plays have originated in fringe theatres. She has written primarily about the effect of socioeconomic forces on human relationships, especially those of women.

29. The Postwar British Theatre (12)
More recent playwrights include Patrick Marber with Closer, Mark Ravenhill with Mother Clap’s Molly House, Joe Penhall with Blue/Orange, Sarah Kane with Blasted and Michael Frayne with Copenhagen.