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PAR TIS
AN
REV lEW
one has already been made once or twice by critics. But on the whole
it is fair to them and not wholly deceiving of ourselves to hope.
The portents, as anyone may see who reads the plays under review
here,
*
are mixed. Most of these new plays really see England as it is
now, and that is something; though the theater requires more than up–
to-date documentation to hope for salvation. It may, of course, be asked
how authors, most of them still under thirty, can make a virtue of por–
traying the world around them in any other guise than the only one they
have known, if realism be their aim. In any medium but the theater
the question would be legitimate, but we have been so long used to
playwrights, even quite young ones, producing successful stereotypes of
life as it has never been known except upon the West End "realistic"
stage, that we must congratulate authors even upon having such rudi–
mentary equipment for writing as eyes and ears. Then, the great middle–
class strangle-hold upon the English play seems to have been broken;
not in its audiences who still remain largely a certain sort of under–
occupied middle class, but in the life portrayed upon the stage. For the
first time the great percentage of new writers for the stage are work–
ing class in origin, and more importantly, not yet so strayed into either
professional coffeebarism or into success to have lost an immediate feel–
ing of their background. I am not suggesting that the British working
class is more intrinsically interesting than any other class-although I
fear some of the new dramatists do suffer from that sentimental illusion.
It is a class, however, that for long-almost for fifty years-has been
represented in our literature mainly by a stereotype invented by middle–
class writers, and even that stereotype has become increasingly dated.
I t so happens also that the working class is changing very rapidly in
England at the moment and the new dramatists on the whole reflect
this change. An unexplored social territory and one that may stand as
a symbol for the general stir and unrest of contemporary England-this
is a good deal on the credit side of the new dramatists to start with.
Yet I cannot help thinking that to an American reader or audience the
ambience-urban Jewish proletarian-reflected in Mr. Wesker's
Chicken
Soup with Barley
and in Mr. Kops'
The Hamlet of Stepney Green–
will hardly seem fresh. The New York stage, I should suppose, had all
this in the nineteen-thirties. It is true that the message is no longer
naively Marxist-but, alas, there are other messages as naive or more
*
A Taste of Honey. By Shelagh Delaney. Grove Press. $3.95.
New English Dramatists: Each His Own Wilderness. By Doris Lessing.
The Hamlet of Stepney Green. By Bernard Kops.
Chicken Soup With Barley. By Arnold Wesker. Penquin Books. $.95.
