Discovering the Body

Abstract Shelagh Delaney anticipated some developments in the period’s drama even more directly than John Osborne, Chapter 11 suggested. So did another woman playwright in the late 1950s, Ann Jellicoe. Though she seemed to share a renewed interest in contemporary society with Osborne and other dramatists emerging at the time, Jellicoe also had much wider aims. The Sport of My Mad Mother (Royal Court, 1958) topically depicted Teddy Boys and 1950s teenage violence, and The Knack (Arts, Cambridge, 1962) freer sexual behaviour at the start of the 1960s.