Blackwell Reference Online

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John Arden's and Margaretta D'Arcy's 1972 decision to withdraw from the ‘meaningless foam rubber of the jumbo-jet culture’ and the ‘international art hypermarket’ (Arden and D'Arcy 1988: 4) of British theatre poses a critical challenge. While their work can be located within British and Irish institutional and aesthetic contexts, it also resists the values and boundaries of both. Criticism that reads their plays within paradigms rejected by the playwrights themselves has often produced misunderstandings concerning the meaning of individual texts and the overall significance of their work in the theatre.Born in Yorkshire in 1930, Arden came to prominence as part of the new generation of British writers fostered by George Devine at London's Royal Court in the 1950s. His early plays, The Waters of Babylon (1957), Live Like Pigs (1958), Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (1959) and Soldier, Soldier (1960), contain many of the oppositional concerns that preoccupied the so-called ‘angry young men’. However, Arden always exceeded the limits of ‘kitchen-sink’ drama. His quest for a popular theatre led him to experiment with a variety of dramatic structures and styles, and he drew a great deal upon Brecht for inspiration. In particular, he is noted for his inventive use of the English ballad form and his exploitation of British and Irish histories to narrate stories about contemporary society.As ... log in or subscribe to read full text