English drama the stage. Again In the 1950s, the absurdist play "Waiting for Godot" (1955) (originally "En attendant Godot", 1952), by the French resident, Irishman Samuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. The Theatre of the Absurd influenced Harold Pinter (1930-2008), (The Birthday Party, 1958), whose works are often characterised by menace or claustrophobia. Beckett also influenced Tom Stoppard (1937-) ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead",1966). Stoppard's works are, however, also notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays. Both Pinter and Stoppard continued to have new plays produced into the 1990s. Michael Frayn
Polish postmodernism national theatres in seven metropolitan cities including primary TV broadcast in 1971. His "En attendant Godot" in translation premiered as far back as 1957 both in Warsaw (at "Teatr Współczesny") and in Kraków ("Teatr 38"). Polish postmodernism can be identified in the work of prolific poet and playwright Tadeusz Różewicz, philosophers Leszek Kołakowski, Stanisław Lem, Tadeusz Kantor, or in the output of various Polish émigré writers such as the Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz ("The Captive Mind") and his contemporaries including Witold Gombrowicz. The basis for the distinctiveness of Polish postmodernism were established avant la lettre already in the Interbellum through