Editing English drama (section)

==The theatre: 1901–45==
[[Edwardian musical comedy]] held the London stage (not together with foreign operetta imports) until [[World War I]] and was then supplanted by increasingly popular American [[musical theatre]] and comedies by [[Noël Coward]], [[Ivor Novello]] and their contemporaries. The motion picture mounted a challenge to the stage. At first, films were silent and presented only a limited challenge to theatre. But by the end of the 1920s, films like ''[[The Jazz Singer]]'' could be presented with synchronized sound, and critics wondered if the cinema would replace live theatre altogether. Some dramatists wrote for the new medium, but playwriting continued.

Irish playwrights [[George Bernard Shaw]] (1856–1950) and [[J. M. Synge]] (1871–1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career began in the last decade of the nineteenth-century and he wrote more than 60 plays. Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth century. Synge's most famous play, ''[[The Playboy of the Western World]]'', "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907.<ref>''The Oxford Companion to English Literature.'' (1996), p.781.</ref> George Bernard Shaw turned the [[Edwardian]] theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women.<ref>"English literature." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/188217/English-literature>.</ref> In the 1920s and later [[Noël Coward]] (1899–1973) achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as ''[[Hay Fever (play)|Hay Fever]]'' (1925), ''[[Private Lives]]'' (1930), ''[[Design for Living]]'' (1932), ''[[Present Laughter]]'' (1942) and ''[[Blithe Spirit (play)|Blithe Spirit]]'' (1941), have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. In the 1930s [[W. H. Auden]] and [[Christopher Isherwood]] co-authored verse dramas, of which [[The Ascent of F6]] (1936) is the most notable, that owed much to [[Bertolt Brecht]]. [[T. S. Eliot]] had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama with ''[[Sweeney Agonistes]]'' in 1932, and this was followed by ''[[The Rock (play)|The Rock]]'' (1934), ''[[Murder in the Cathedral]]'' (1935) and ''[[The Family Reunion]]'' (1939). There were three further plays after the war.