This penetrating survey covers the most creative of the Anglo-Irish modern playwrights, beginning with George Bernard Shaw and including the avant-garde dramatists of the 1960s. Emil Roy, an expert in British drama, is the author of Christopher Fry, previously published in this series.
Roy devotes individual chapters to Shaw, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey. He discusses T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry together, since Fry is Eliot’s disciple in poetic drama. And in his concluding chapter, entitled “The Moderns,” he provides an examination of John Osborne, John Arden, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, and John Whiting.
Up-to-date and concise, the book thus affords a view of the best of modern British drama.
