Theatre - Robert Hewison looks back in admiration on the cultural revolution of 1956
The coterie of Young British Artists that emerged in the mid-1990s was not the first arts movement in this country to be created - and sustained - by deft public relations and the convenient outrage of the right-wing press. In 1956, a press officer at London's Royal Court Theatre coined the phrase "Angry Young Men" to define a group of challenging young writers, mostly from working-class backgrounds, who were emerging in the era of postwar austerity.
The Angries, who included the playwrights John Osborne and Harold Pinter and the novelists Alan Sillitoe and John Braine, were determined to puncture upper- and middle-class pretensions and write with brutal honesty about social, economic and sexual aspiration.
Now their work is celebrated in the exhibition "Unleashing Britain: ten years that shaped the nation (1955-1964)" at the Theatre Museum in London, marking the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the movement's founding text, Osborne's Look Back In Anger.
The year 1956 was also the time of the Suez crisis, along with uprisings in Poland and Hungary and the start of the final push in the Cuban revolution. Though these political upheavals fuelled the work of Osborne, Pinter and others, the Angry Young Men movement was equally influenced by cultural developments on the Continent. British playwrights were increasingly falling under the influence of European experimental theatre, and radical productions hopped across the Channel in quick succession.
In 1955 Peter Hall had staged the first English-language version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, bringing the theatre of the absurd to London and paving the way for Pinter's The Birthday Party (1958). Early in 1956, the Royal Court Theatre put on the first British production of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera; Brecht's own East German Berliner Ensemble played an important season in London later that year. Led by theatre but spilling over into music, dance and film, the cultural rev-olution of 1956 permanently reshaped Britain's artistic landscape.
Fifty years on, it has also revitalised the Theatre Museum, which has received its biggest-ever budget from its parent institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, to enable it to mount the new exhibition. But can yellowing cuttings convey the excitement of those years?
Well, they have a go. There's a piano to play show tunes on; there's a washboard to skiffle on. You can dress up as Laurence Olivier in Osborne's The Entertainer (Olivier's stage performance is captured in rare footage); you can listen to original recordings on headphones. All the main Angry Young Men texts are here, chained to the walls like Bibles. There are 15 video screens displaying interviews with the movement's surviving members; Peter Hall is an avuncular presence throughout.
But although the posters, programmes, set designs and photographs do conjure up that black-and-white era, the connections between the revolution in theatre and external events are not always made clear. For example, that these outrageous - for that time - theatrical experiments were taking place under the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain (recently seen starring in Stephen Frears's film about the Windmill Theatre, Mrs Henderson Presents) receives hardly any attention.
The real question is whether a museum can evoke the transience of live theatre at all. The Theatre Museum, home to a hundred tonnes of archives, costumes and props, is a valuable resource, but it needs to rethink what it is doing. A major refurbishment is planned for 2007, and it is to be hoped that this will bring light into its gloomy warren of displays.
"Unleashing Britain: ten years that shaped the nation (1955-1964)" is at the Theatre Museum, London WC2 (tel: 020 7943 4700) until June 2007. See www.theatremuseum.org.uk for tickets and further information
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