David Edgar

As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up, like Fay Wray, squeezed in its paw. A.M. Gibbs spends most of the introduction to Bernard Shaw: A Life justifying his decision to return to a very well-ploughed furrow. But by citing no less than...

From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits. At the time, the play and its message were anatomised in leading articles, discussed by school debating societies, and worried at in the pulpit. In retrospect, its first production at the Royal Court has become, in the words of Mark Ravenhill, the creation myth of the contemporary British theatre.

“When my father, Barrie Edgar, joined the BBC in 1946, its television service consisted of two studios at Alexandra Palace, and two outside broadcast units. Rising quickly from studio manager to the rank of outside broadcast producer, he spent his early years, in London and then in Birmingham, producing anything and everything: from seaside summer shows and circuses to race meetings and general election counts, from Muffin the Mule to the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. Rejecting a good financial offer to move to ITV in 1955, he saw many of his programmes hived off from outside broadcasts to specialised (and centralised) BBC departments; over the years, he lost the King’s College Christmas carols to Music, Songs of Praise to Religion and Come Dancing to London. He spent the last years of his 33-year BBC career producing a programme that might have seemed a broadcasting backwater, but which anticipated the trend towards the lifestyle shows that have dominated BBC2 for ten years: Gardeners’ World.”

“Thirty years on, the miners’ triumph in 1974 looks hubristic, an ironic prologue to the tragedy of 1984-85. On the other hand, the Angries’ libertarian socialist critique of consumerism appears surprisingly, if not uncomfortably pertinent. This is a world in which challenges to oppression have been downgraded into lifestyle choices, the political process has been turned into a form of shopping, and (to quote a Situationist slogan) the ideology of consumption has become the consumption of ideology. In the paranoid atmosphere of the early 1970s, libertarian socialists all too easily slid into moral self-righteousness, mutual intimidation and witch-hunting. But today’s anti-globalisation protests look a lot more like the political theatrics of the libertarian movement than the solemn cadre-building of the neo-Bolsheviks.”

“In his 1987 autobiography, Arthur Miller tells of a conversation with a Kentucky farmer about the Holy Ghost. Pressed to give a definition of the most mysterious element of the Trinity, the farmer replied: ‘I figure it’s sort of an oblong blur.’ In a later interview, Miller used the same phrase to describe the political mood of the late 1970s: ‘We were living in what to me was a kind of oblong blur. There was simply no definition to the society.’ At a stretch, the metaphor could also stand for the conventional view of Miller’s career: a sturdy quartet of well-carpentered plays that caught the spirit of mid-century America, followed by a long, increasingly unfocused, foggy tail.”