Modern British Drama
The Teaching Company - Peter Saccio
(8 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)
Waiting for Godot. The Importance of Being Earnest. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead. Since Shakespeare's time, no period has produced more brilliant and varied theater in Britain than the last 100 years.
Changes in British society affected and were reflected in the theater of the times. Playwrights reacted to the social circles, governmental constructs, and economic conditions around them, using the essential elements of theater—characterization, set, dialogue—to exaggerate, parody, manipulate, or deconstruct them.
In modern London, plays matter. They are part of the cultural dialogue of the nation. They are important for Britain's idea of itself and for its self-presentation to the world. They have been exported with great success to America and the rest of the English-speaking world.
Professor Peter Saccio has selected the major British playwrights of the past century to cover in this course: Wilde, Shaw, Coward, Beckett, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Churchill, and Hare. His reasons for selecting them vary:
Some wittily celebrate (or satirize) the manners of an elite class.
Some explore the large or subtle changes in a kingdom that once ruled a quarter of the Earth and now produces royal soap opera.
Some assault the socio-political establishment.
Some probe the existential anxiety of the modern age.
All of them are enormously articulate, exploiting the verbal resources of the English language and the visual resources of the contemporary stage to hold up the mirror to our times.
Course Lecture Titles
British Theater—1890–1990
Comedy of Manners—Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward
George Bernard Shaw—Socialist and Prophet
John Osborne Looks Back in Anger
Samuel Beckett Waits for Godot
The Menace of Harold Pinter
The Inventions of Tom Stoppard
Political Theater—Caryl Churchill and David Hare