1956 and All That

1956.jpg

Rebellato, Dan. 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama.  London: Routledge, 1999.

The ‘revolution’ at the Royal Court, marked by the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, is one of the main supporting pillars of modern British theatre historiography. 1956 and All That is an attempt to revise that judgment; not by doubting the significance of that date but offering a quite different account of what was at work in that epochal year and offering a challenging vision of the values on which British theatre’s post-war renaissance was built. It's a sustained challenge to the standard accounts of the theatrical revolution of 1956. It argues that the simple process of artistic revitalization was dependent on a host of complex attitudes to funding, empire, work, audiences, politics and sexuality.

‘Provocative and perverse’ Michael Billington, The Guardian.