The New English Realism

Extract

Ever since John Osborne dropped his dramatic H-bomb on the complacent British middle-class theatregoer in April 1956 in the shape of Look Back in Anger, critics and public alike have been looking to London for a steady flow of new plays of revolt, plays that would be leavened with the yeast of a new social criticism and rooted in the new post-war realism. This new realism is, to my mind, best described as a compound of two elements. The first represents an involuntary and instinctive resistance to the irksome class structure of British society and the other, in one form or another, the universal dilemma which has split the world down the middle in an age of threatening nuclear destruction and exacerbated the rivalries inherent in class, in nation, or in industrial or commercial power. The technological complexities of our new era are hardly touched on in the new drama.