Analysis Of The Angry Young Men

Since the 1950’s, many groups of working class/middle class writers, novelists and playwrights have been pushing to get their views and politics onto the stage; they became conspicuous at that time and were coined as the ‘Angry Young Men’. Two of the most distinctive members of the Angry Young Men were Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote Lucky Jim) and John Osbourne (who wrote Look Back In Anger).

After the Theatres Act of 1968 had abolished censorship on stage, some of the plays that hit the stage were highly political, brutally direct and very controversial. People were writing about issues that had been ignored by the government and it was ‘bubbling away for some time in British society’ to the point in which, when the censorship of the stage was taken away, new controversial plays burst onto the stage every decade like Saved (originally performed before the censorship in 1965), Blasted (1995), Cloud Nine (1979) and Shopping and Fucking (1996). When the Theatre Act abolished the censorship, the issues of Britain flooded onto the stage in a very controversial manner; each play was addressing a different issue in Thatcher’s Britain or just generally about Britain’s problems or history. I’m going to talk about one of the plays that looked at the society in Victorian times (in which a British family live in Africa) and then how different that society was to the same characters but in 1979; or what would have been the ‘modern day’ when the play was released. I’m going to talk about the ideologies and themes in the play, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill.

Before the play begins, Churchill has written a note called ‘Casting and Doubling’ on what type of person needs to play what type of character. For example, she says “It is essential for Jos...

... middle of paper ...

...could push these political ideologies and issues to the stage; especially after the censorship was removed. Churchill, like the other politically fuelled writers, obviously had a sour taste in her mouth about Thatcher and the way she and the Conservative Party ran Britain. She even went on to write Top Girls that was a double sided view on Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power.

Politics had started to bubble as there was a more prominent line beginning to form between social classes. There were distances between older generational views and the view of the youths. Cultures were beginning to divide because of racism in politics. Billington was correct in saying that people did not think these barriers and divisions were necessary and they took the necessary actions to destroy these barriers; starting with showing people just how bad society was at the time; using theatre