Straight Acting
Subtitle: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan (Lesbian & Gay Studies)
Publisher: Cassell; UNKNO; Orion Publishing Group, Limited
Published: November 1997
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 245
ISBN-13: 9780304328642
Subjects: Gay studies (Gay men); Plays & playwrights: 19th century; Plays & playwrights: from c 1900 -; Social Science; Plays / Drama; English; Cinema/Film: Book; Drama; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Gay Studies; Theater - General; English drama; Great Britain; History; History and criticism; Homosexuality and literature; Male authors; Popular literature
Description: Between the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the beginnings of legal reforms in the 1960s, the West End stage was dominated by the work of gay playwrights. In a book that covers both familiar and lesser-known works, Sean O'Connor examines the legacy of Wilde as a playwright and as a gay man, and explores in the works of Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan the resonance of Wilde's agenda for tolerance and his creed of individuality.

O'Connor contextualizes these plays against the enormous social and historical changes of the twentieth century. He also examines the legal restrictions which regulated the personal lives of these writers and required them to evolve sophisticated strategies in order to express on stage, albeit obliquely, their dilemmas as gay men.