Anti-Realistic Schools

Angry Theatre movement

Angry Theatre movement,  various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.

The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.

John Osborne

John Osbourne, who died in 1994, is remembered as a playwright who liberated modern British drama from genteel explorations of upper-middle class life. His work is said to have opened doors to English social and political realities that few authors since Shaw have presented on stage.

Arnold Wesker

is a prolific British dramatist, his plays have been translated into 17 languages and performed worldwide. Wesker develops a critical realism animated by his socialist ideology.

Harold Pinter

was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet, left-wing political activist, and Nobel laureate. He was one of the most influential and imitated of modern British dramatists. Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts between ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past. Stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory.