The Plays of John Whiting

Extract

Only recently has the new drama begun to catch up with John Whiting, who if he were alive would now be almost fifty. He was out of sympathy with the social commitment of the early days. Whiting was not one of the cultural knight-errants who crusaded for working-class culture and against the bomb; rather, he belonged instinctively to the older tradition of the intellectual elite, writing difficult plays for a discriminating audience—an audience with which he never truly made contact, and which perhaps had long ceased to exist.

Yet his lifelong preoccupations with the nature of violence and of personal responsibility foreshadowed the concern of a younger generation of dramatists with issues more elemental than the kitchen sink.