Post-War Drama and the Realist Imagination

The article provides a comparison of the situation of theatre in post-war Slovenia and Spain, presenting Slovenian and Spanish post-war drama, which was critical of the respective post-war governments. Specific Slovenian and Spanish dramatic works are used to demonstrate that, despite the geographical and ideological distance between them, post-war Slovenian and Spanish drama treated similar problems that emerged as a result of the post-war regime: problems of violence and ideological limitations on thought, the plight of the intellectual and the artist, the need of the authorities to preserve enemies of the state, the entrapment of the individual in the system, and the removal of opponents of the regime.

ABSTRACTThe issue of illegitimacy was relevant enough to Italian society to appear in a number of plays staged and/or published even after Eduardo de Filippo’s 1946 landmark work Filumena Marturano. This article addresses plays written by Italian women between 1950 and 1960, and treating conflicts arising from the birth of children out of wedlock or suspected to be the product of an extramarital affair. The discussion of the corpus develops with reference to debates regarding the place of illegitimate children in post-war Italian society. Analysis is provided of two plays that present the case of children conceived by unmarried women and a further two treating children who were born to (supposedly) adulterous wives. Through this review of the landscape of post-war drama and society, I isolate the aspects of illegitimacy that come to light in Italian women’s theatre of the 1950s and provide new insights specific to the female-authored corpus.

This essay recounts the Jewish journey of producer and director Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian refugee from Nazism who forged a new life in Britain from 1935 onwards, playing a pivotal role in the moulding of BBC television's post-war drama output. It also explores the journey of Jewish cultural texts and traditions as it discusses the production and reception of Carder's 1952 English—language adaptation for the small screen of Ansky's classic play The Dybbuk. The challenges Cartier perceived in completing this production and the responses of both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences reveal much about the limits of assimilation in an increasingly multicultural Britain.

The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.