Episode Detail: 1956 - Changing Stages
In Part 4, host Richard Eyre traces British theater from Noel Coward's “revolutionary days” in the 1920s to the arrival of “angry young man” John Osbourne in 1956. Osbourne's play, “Look Back in Anger,” “erupted into the monochromatic grayness of the 1950s,” says Eyre. British commercial theater was censored at the time, and its major playwrights, Coward and Terence Rattigan, were past their prime. Osbourne filled the void, as did such plays as Brendan Behan's “The Quare Fellow” and Shelagh Delaney's “A Taste of Honey.” But later, Osbourne conceded: “The theater simply went on dying.”
