Wesker and Utopia in the Sixties

Arnold Wesker's fIrst period of writing for the tbeatre, which closes with the play The Friends (1970), falls in the era of the legendary renewal of English drama in the late fifties and sixties. The social situation to which this drama responded has been repeatedly analysed. Samuel Beckett's existentialist confrontation with the loss of all metaphysical meaning, and the impossibility of continuing to live with this truth , finds a less cerebral and more emotional equivalent in John Osborne's dramatic revolt, which on the surface is aimed at an English, political and social situation devoid of perspectives and ideals. The Labour Party's unimaginative and pragmatic policy of reforms, its integration into the establishment once it had taken over the government, and its sacrifice of socialist ideals for the practical realization of the Welfare State — as well as the latter's bureaucratic excesses — generated not only a highly dissatisfied New Left, but also the New Drama.