THE ENGLISH AUDIENCE AND PLAYHOUSE

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The Modern Audience

Until 1950s, the audience dictated the nature of the English drama to a very great extent. In pre-war English theatre, playwrights laboured to gratify the expectations, interests, and needs of the audience, sometimes,

pandering to their base taste as was the case during the Restoration period. However, from the 1950s, Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, and the “angry young men” of the British theatre, turned the movement of the theatre anti – clockwise by giving the audience, which comprised of the cross-section of English society, plays that provoked their dissent because they poked fun at their dramatic sensibility and their preconception of what drama should be.

They shocked their audience by presenting depersonalised characters that have lost touch with the mechanism of society as a result of an acute mental breakdown. The idea of merely being alive without actually living greatly perturbed an audience who was aware of the British imperial authority now being consigned to once upon a time.

It is no longer time to pander to the base taste of the audience. No, the audience is now led by the hand and compelled to enter the world of the playwrights. The production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in London in 1955, and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, caused a major stir in the British theatre. While the first is seen as denying all dramatic meaning, the second is viewed as a surge into nihilism. A London critic of the premiere of Waiting for Godot finds many faults with it. According to him, the play’s dramatic progression “does not lead to climax but perpetual postponent”. For him:

‘Waiting for Godot’ has nothing to seduce the sense. The dialogue is studded with words that have no meaning for normal ears (Hobson, p.27).

The British drama “was in the doldrums” before the appearance of Look Back in Anger. It failed to move with the time, merely gratifying “the prejudices and preferences of the middle-class, middle-ages patrons who were the typical West-End audience, a segment of society allied with the ruling class, complacent about their way of life, and likely to be hostile to new ideas as unmannerly if not subversive”.

The bursting of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on the stage was a rude shock to the audience because “Jimmy Porter lashed out against all social icons: authority, tradition, class distinctions, and Tory politics, among others”. In fact, Osborne’s play changed the composition of the modern British audience at least temporarily. Cornish and Ketels state that:

While respectable matrons and their mates quit the theatre, offended as much by the bluntness of the language as by its sentiments, other theatre – goers, especially the young cheered. Jimmy Porter was mean, but he was absolutely alive. And there was an audience for what he has to say. The Renaissance of the British theatre was on.

It does not take long for the audience to realise that the “angry young men” actually present authentic picture of their disintegrating society and to find out that their plays, indeed, showcase the major function of the theatre, showing us actually what being entails.

The English Playhouse

Before the establishment of permanent playhouses, theatrical performances were given in the courtyards of Inns such as The Boar’s Head, The Bull Inn, The Red Lion, The Cross Keys, The Bel Savage, and the The Bell Inn, among others. Performances were given in itinerant fashion. The idea of a permanent playhouse was engineered by professional performers during the Elizabethan period, Nicoll (1966: 97) explains:

During the later 60 of the century we have evidence that their success with the public was such as to permit them to expand their acting personnel, and by 1576 they had reached position when they could determine no longer to be itinerants but to have homes of their own. Thus came the epoch – making creation of The Theatre in that year, followed by the building of other and better playhouses up to the close of the century: the appearance of the Globe and the Fortune marked the climax of their efforts.

These first theatres constructed by the actor – carpenter, James Burbage and Philip Henslowe took after the courtyards of inns but with a modification influenced by the bear-baiting garden, bear-baiting being a prominent English sport at the time. MacGowan and Melnitz (1965: 161) elaborate that:

South of the Thames there were buildings that may have suggested to Burbage a way of improving on the inn yards. These were the structures for bear – baiting. This popular pastime consisted in watching one or more mastiff dogs attack a tethered animal. Maps of 1560 and earlier show two circular buildings used for those purposes, and each appears to have galleries from which the spectators could watch in safety. The close relation of the baiting places and the theatre is obvious, for when Henslowe made the Hope theater out of his Bear Garden, he installed a movable stage, and used the building both for plays and for what the Elizabethan called “sport”.

The most popular playhouse of the time, the Globe, was built by James Barbage, in 1599, for the plays of William Shakespeare. The first theatres were built at the outskirts of the city because of the hostility of the city fathers who regarded the theatre as an immoral institution. It was also reasoned that “large gatherings were excellent means of speeding disease, inciting riot, and creating fire hazards”. Whatever is the case, it is on record that the city council never tolerated the idea of sitting any public theatre within the city for many years.

The Elizabethan playhouse is octagonal in shape and as Downer (1950: 67) details:

It was a large building, nearly a hundred feet in diameter and three stories in height. It was topped by a thatched roof, and at one end, above the stage, there was a cupola from which a flag was flown in the days of performance. The single entrance for the public was through the wall opposite the stage beside a sign which exhibited the symbol of the playhouse: Hercules bearing a globe.

The stage is divided into inner and outer part which projected into the yard. The groundlings stand in the open yard throughout the play, while those who could pay extra money for the galleries stay there. As we have earlier pointed out, the rich often pay to stay on stools placed on the stage to the annoyance of the people. There was a general entrance fees for everyone before the status symbol fees discussed above.

The galleries, the open yard, the inner and outer stages, as well as the many trap doors encouraged multiple acting. Scenery in the contemporary sense was clearly absent. Descriptive words were used to denote locales of action. The only aspect of the technical elements of production that was paid adequate attention to, was costume. Apropos of this, Downer writes:

In addition to exciting scripts, the theater specialised in gratifying spectacle. As in modern theaters, much money was regularly expended upon costumes than upon the plays themselves. This was partly due to the spirit of the age – the Elizabethans delight in gaudy display was not limited to stage performances. Non – professional costume was fantastic both in cut and in value, and the professionals were driven to the extremes to outshine their audiences.

The outlook of the English playhouse began to change during the Restoration era. MacGowan and Melnitz note that “the Restoration replaced the Globe – type playhouse with the proscenium – type in a roofed – over theaters”. This was as a result of the exotic taste acquired by King Charles II in France. It is important to emphasise that what emerged as the Restoration playhouse was an entirely new creation because all the existing theatres were demolished following the edit of 1647 which outlawed all theatrical performances.

During the Restoration, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant who were granted the monopoly of theatrical production in London constructed the Duke’s Theatre and The Theatre Royal (Drury Lane) after the image of the Italianate theatre that had come into vogue in Europe. The theatres had ample devices for scene – change, with scenery built of flats and which can be struck. Davenant’s The Duke Theatre was said to gratify spectacle through marvelous scenic effects. Unlike its French counterpart, the English stage has an acting platform that thrust into the auditorium. Brockett and Hildy (1999: 250) argue that, “In combination of features of the pre-commonwealth and Italianate stages, it foreshadowed in many respects the thrust stage of the 20th century”.

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