Introduction

Abstract

Between 1956 and 1961, the Royal Court Theatre made about £50,000 producing the plays of John Osborne and lost £14,857 producing those of John Arden. Both dramatists received notices which ranged from the vituperative to the lyrical. Both won Evening Standard awards for the most promising playwright of the year, Osborne for Look Back in Anger in 1956 and Arden for Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance in 1959, an award he shared with Arnold Wesker whose play Roots was also produced at the Royal Court. Both were widely regarded as major figures in the so-called New Wave of British dramatists that changed the face of the English theatre in the mid-1950s. It is not the intention of this book to examine the financial side of Arden’s work; but to look at those two sums of money is to learn a good deal about the theatrical context in which his early work was set.