ABSTRACT
The new plays of the 1950s blew open the cosy assumptions of commercial drawing-room theatre. As has already been mentioned, it was very much a director-sponsored theatre; radical directors, exploring new methods, searched for new playwrights, as well as encouraging novelists or actors to write plays (both Arnold Wesker and John Osborne had been actors before becoming writers). Relatively radical though this new theatre was, it retained an unquestioned male bias. Even Joan Littlewood’s energies at Stratford East went mainly into working with male writers, while in the twenty years from 1956-75 the Royal Court produced only seventeen plays (out of over 250) which were written and/or directed by women. Some of these 250 plays form the core of a canon of modern theatre classics, continually reprinted, on examination syllabuses, performed round the world. Some of them have been filmed and subsequently televised, so that what was once startlingly avant-garde, seen by a minority audience, is now accepted as a major contribution to twentieth-century drama, and has been seen by millions.
