British Neo-naturalism

Extract

Naturalism wasn't a label any of the early new-wave British dramatists would have chosen deliberately, but a shape for which they reached instinctively: it happened to meet many of the demands which they were beginning to make on the English theatre. It served as a convenient vehicle for direct social comment, as opposed—very much opposed—to that poeticism in symbolic drawing-rooms which delighted the cultural establishment, and which was being vaunted abroad by the British Council as a renaissance of verse drama. Eliot's high toryism was as much out-of-tune politically with the new dramatists as his sugar-coated cadences were stylistically ill-adapted to their themes. Conversely, naturalism was a time-honored form for the problem play, and well suited to the semi-autobiographical idiom in which the new-wavers tended to play with their problems.