Andizhan state university named after zakhiriddin mukhammad babur

ANALYSIS OF USING UNIQUE CLIMAX IN THE PLAY THE ENTERTAINER BY J.OSBORNE
John Osborne’s (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) most generous critics credit him with having transformed the English stage on a single night: May 8, 1956, when Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre. He is celebrated as the principal voice among England’s Angry Young Men of the 1950’s and 1960’s, who railed vindictively against Edwardian dinosaurs and the empty-headed bourgeoisie; it should be noted, however, that his antiheroes rebel against their own frustrations and futility more than they do in the service of any substantial social or political reform. Indeed, they betray their envy of the stability and the “historical legitimacy” of the very generation they condemn. Perhaps Osborne’s most profound influence has been his leadership in bringing authenticity into contemporary English theater; a member of what has loosely been defined as the kitchen-sink school, he helped institute a new receptivity to social issues, naturalistic characterization, and the vernacular, thereby revitalizing a theater scene that had been dominated by the verse elevations of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry and the commercial conventionality of Terence Rattigan.
In addition to his achievements as a playwright, Osborne was also an accomplished actor, director, and screenwriter. Testimonies to his popular and critical successes include three Evening Standard awards (1956, 1965, 1968), two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (1958, 1965), a Tony (1963), and an Oscar (1964). In the last twenty years of his life, Osborne devoted much of his energy to television plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Although some saw this as a confirmation of dwindling artistic resources, Osborne’s reputation as a prime mover of the postwar English stage held secure. He created some of the most arresting roles in twentieth century drama, and his career-long indictment of complacency is evident in every “lesson of feeling” he delivered to his audiences.
When the much-heralded John Osborne hero tore into an entire generation yet had no prospect for viable change, he discovered his own nakedness and vulnerability. He was inevitably a man in limbo, caught between nostalgia for the settled order of the past and hope for an idealized future he could not possibly identify. His rage was directed against his own inadequacy, not simply against that of his society. Because it was ineffectual, protesting against the ills of society became primarily a ritual complaint of the self against its own limitations.
Every Osborne play deals with reality’s raids on self-esteem. His characters, even those who are most hostile to outworn conventions, are all in search of some private realm where they can operate with distinction. Sadly, that very search, which leads to isolation and denies communication, is as important a contributor to the contemporary malaise as is any governing body or social system. Angry young men and scornful old men, alike, feel disaffiliated and frustrated by the meager roles they occupy, but their greatest failure comes from not making a commitment to anything other than the justification of those feelings. Osborne wrote of a world that is immune to meaningful achievement. The degree to which his characters can move beyond complaint toward some constructive alternative that welcomes other people is the best measure of their heroism.
The playwright David Hare wrote in 1991 that ìif you want to understand the social history of Britain since [World War II], then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the periodófrom The Entertainer and Separate Tables through to the present dayóthan by looking at any comparable documentary sourceî (Writing xii). Though its scope will be limited in a number of ways, my project here is the sort of study that Hare imagines. I have chosen for my project a group of plays that are, largely because of the strong political convictions of their authors, particularly responsive to social and political developments. My task has been to discover how the works Iíve chosen reflect changes in popular notions of British identity, and to examine how they narrate key moments in British history. I have also chosen plays that are representative of the vital leftist theatre movement that developed in the period. I focus on the leftist playwrights John Arden and Margaretta DíArcy, Howard Brenton, Hare and Caryl Churchill. Though I would not label him a leftist, I begin with an analysis of John Osborneís early plays in order to establish a context for my discussion of the later playwrights. Each of the playwrights I discuss draws attention to the relationships between specific formations of national identity and politics, both formal and informal. All except for Osborne seek, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, to suggest alternative ways of defining human collectivities. In order to make sense of these efforts, I consider how historical events and processes including decolonization, Commonwealth immigration and nationalist movements within the United Kingdom have affected the way people living in the UK identify themselves individually and collectively. My research into these and other events provides a framework for understanding the ways experiences of national belonging and difference are represented on the stage. I have examined historical, sociological, and cultural studies of the postwar period in order to understand how people have positioned themselves within society by either endorsing or resisting social and political identities that developed, for the most part, during Britainís years as an imperial power. This history shows that formations of state, nation, and people have never been congruent and that political and governmental structures have often been maintained in opposition to the opinion of large segments of the population. Contestations around these troubling concepts, as represented in the characters and events of the plays I analyze, will be a major focus of my work. It has been a revelation to discover in the course of my research just how recent many supposedly ancient national traditions in fact are. Equally striking was the variety and complexity of the relationships between conceptions of people, nation and stateóas well as the political ramifications of those relationships. My understanding of these concepts owes much to the work of Benedict Anderson, Linda 1 The essays in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, are exemplary on this topic. 3Colley, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn and Edward Said, among others. In Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Colley explains that If we accept Benedict Andersonís admittedly loose, but for that reason invaluable definition of a nation as an ëimagined political communityí, and if we accept that, historically speaking, most nations have always been culturally and ethnically diverse, problematic, protean and artificial constructs that take shape very quickly and come apart just as fast, then we can plausibly regard Great Britain as an invented nation superimposed, if only for a while, onto much older alignments and lo yalt ies. (5) Though I would quibble with Colleyís implication that in Britain ìolder alignments and loyaltiesî might emerge undisturbed from the collapse of more recent political structures, this passage contains an insight about British history that is crucial not only to my own study, but also to the work of the playwrights I discuss. Colley is speaking here primarily of regional differences within the United Kingdom during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, and particularly since the 1950s, increasing nonwhite immigration and persistent controversy about the meaning of Britainís imperial history has made the situation even more complicated. In this setting, the playwrights I discuss seek to depict the historical roots of contemporary events and controversies, most often in an effort to imagine a more egalitarian society in Britain with more humane and democratic political and economic systems. Perry Anderson has shown that ìIn Britain the organizing definition of the national was inescapably imperialóthe ëBritishí people, strictly speaking, emerging as an artifact of the empire-stateî (ìForewordî 10). Recognizing this genealogy helps to explain Britainís current problems regarding issues of race and nationality. Taking the lead of Colley and like-minded historians, I began my historical inquiry with the notion that British history, at least since the eighteenth century, is in large part a record of the material and ideological mechanisms employed to support the territorial ambitions of empire and maintain social hierarchies at home. These two goals are, as several of the plays I examine show, interdependent; as Tom Nairn argues, throughout the age of empire and until World War II, Britainís ìascendancy over its competitors in colonization accompanied the crystallization of its internal formsî . Nairn goes on to explain that ìA regime so largely concerned with overseas and naval-based exploitation required, above all, conservative stability at homeî . It is also crucial to recognize the small degree to which the British imperial power was maintained by force (or even the threat of force). More crucial to the long-term maintenance of a worldwide empire was an extensive and unceasing ideological effort to legitimate exploitative relationships. This project necessitated the creation, in the minds of both the colonizers and their subjects, of a clearly defined British identity. Here ideology functioned both to create an illusion of identity (among the colonizers) and of difference (between colonizer and colonized). These processes ensured that a narrow class within the imperial state would benefit immensely from the imperial enterprise. Several of the playwrights I examine see at the root of this ideological project a process of subject formation by which individuals are made to conform to and accept their roles in the mechanisms of empire. As early as the 1870s politicians and historians began to speak openly of Britainís inevitable decline. Contemporary historians most often locate the beginning of decline in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Rarely do they date it later than the First World War. The period immediately following World War IIówith Churchillís fall from power, economic austerity, and the ìlossî of India in 1947óhas marked for many commentators the rapid acceleration of this historical decline. Some observers see continuing decline manifest in Britainís membership in the European Union, the messy situation in Northern Ireland, and Scottish and Welsh devolution. Though the political culture of the fifties and sixties is often described as a ìconsensusî politics, many historians see World War II as the last moment of real consensus among the British people (despite the fact that this consensus was produced by the, largely voluntary, suppression of political differences and the quieting of social grievances in the face of an external enemy). This loss of consensus, sometimes linked to a failure of national will, is for many commentators another index to Britainís decline. 22 The discussion of decline has its discontents. Though he recognizes the changes Britain has undergone, David Cannadine argues that ìBritainís decline has not only been relative, in a contemporary sense; it has also, in historical terms, been relatively gradual and relatively gentleî (Britain 29). More importantly, Cannadine shows that ìthe age of decline is also an age of affluenceî and that ìToday [1997], for most people, life in Britain is more rich, abundant, and secure than ever it was for their late-Victorian forbearsî (Britain 30, 5). That notions of decline remain so widespread despite this improved standard of living reveals two things: first, that people (especially historians) see .At the same time, it is very important for my work to recall the hope many Britons, especially on the left, saw in Labourís postwar ìNew Jerusalemî and their expectation during the war and immediately after that Britainís economic and social hierarchies, and even traditional forms of Britishness, would be subject to radical revision. The experience of this period, and later the historical memory of it, account for the nostalgia that a number of the plays I examine express for that time. David Hare and Howard Brenton in particular see this moment of hope and widespread consensus, rather than the height of imperial power, as the point from which Britain has declined. This alternative conception of decline, as I will show, has a political import that reflects the authorsí leftist political commitments. In the 1940s about 5,000-10,000 nonwhite people were living in the UK. By 1992 there were approximately 2.6 million. The demographers David Coleman and John Salt explain that The arrival after the 1940s of large numbers of immigrants from third world countries with populations which differed sharply by colour and race and (with the exception of the West Indians) by language and religion as well, was a break with the past. These multiple cultural differences, relative poverty, and hostility to the newcomers on the Britainís international political and economic standing as the main standard by which decline can be measured; second, Cannadineís argument showsóthough he doe not say so explicitlyóthat the currency of notions of decline reflects the deteriorating fortunes of a small, wealthy class rather than the experience of the majority of the population. Other commentators, like Nairn in The Break-up of Britain (1978; revised 1981) have very different, sometimes celebratory, responses to Britainís apparent decline.