Before the 1950s, the United Kingdom's
working class were often depicted stereotypically in
Noël Coward's
drawing room comedies and
British films. Kitchen sink realism was seen as being in opposition to the "
well-made play", the kind which theatre critic
Kenneth Tynan once denounced as being set in "Loamshire", of dramatists like
Terence Rattigan. "Well-made plays" were a dramatic genre from
nineteenth-century theatre which found its early 20th-century codification in Britain in the form of
William Archer's
Play-Making: A Manual of Craftmanship (1912), and in the United States with
George Pierce Baker's
Dramatic Technique (1919). Kitchen sink works were created with the intention of changing that. Their political views were initially labeled as
radical, sometimes even
anarchic.
John Osborne's play
Look Back in Anger (1956) depicted young men in a way similar to the then-contemporary "
Angry Young Men" movement among film and theatre directors. The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working and
middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label "angry young men" was later applied by British media to describe young writers who were characterised by a disillusionment with traditional
British society. The hero of
Look Back In Anger is a graduate, but he is working in a manual occupation. It dealt with
social alienation, the claustrophobia and frustrations of a provincial life on low incomes. The impact of this work inspired
Arnold Wesker,
Shelagh Delaney, and numerous others, to write plays of their own. The English Stage Company at the
Royal Court Theatre, headed by
George Devine and
Theatre Workshop organised by
Joan Littlewood, were particularly prominent in bringing these plays to public attention. Critic
John Heilpern wrote that
Look Back in Anger expressed such "immensity of feeling and class hatred" that it altered the course of English theatre. The term "Angry theatre" was coined by critic
John Russell Taylor. This was all part of the
British New Wave—a transposition of the concurrent
nouvelle vague film movement in France, some of whose works, such as
The 400 Blows of 1959, also emphasised the lives of the urban proletariat. British filmmakers such as
Tony Richardson and
Lindsay Anderson (see also
Free Cinema) channelled their vitriolic anger into filmmaking. Confrontational films such as
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and
A Taste of Honey (1961) were noteworthy movies in the genre.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is about a young machinist who spends his wages at weekends on drinking and having a good time, until his affair with a married woman leads to her getting pregnant and him being beaten by her husband's cousins to the point of hospitalisation.
A Taste of Honey is about a 16-year-old schoolgirl with an abusive, alcoholic mother. The schoolgirl starts a relationship with a black sailor and gets pregnant. After the sailor leaves on his ship, Jo moves in with a homosexual acquaintance who assumes the role of surrogate father.
A Taste of Honey raises the issues of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Later, as many of these writers and directors diversified, kitchen sink realism was adopted by television directors producing television plays. The single play was then a staple of the medium, and
Armchair Theatre (1956–68), produced by the ITV contractor
ABC,
The Wednesday Play (1964–70) and
Play for Today (1970–84), both BBC series, contained many works of this kind.
Jeremy Sandford's television play
Cathy Come Home (1966, directed by
Ken Loach for
The Wednesday Play slot), for instance, addressed homelessness. Kitchen sink realism was used in the novels of
Stan Barstow,
John Braine,
Alan Sillitoe, and others. ==Since the 1960s==