Tony Harrison the Playwright

Abstract Whenever the litany of names is invoked to justify an asser tion of the vigour of post-war playwrighting in Britain, there is one name that is consistently absent, and it is the one name that seems to me to justify the claim that there is an unbroken tra dition in the British theatre going back to the fifteenth century. The missing name, of course, is Tony Harrison, who is as prolific a writer for the theatre as, say, his contemporary and fellow native of Leeds, Alan Bennett. You could make compar isons between the two writers, and they would not be invidi ous ones. Both write about sex, class, and death, even if Alan’s mordant wit provides an opaque filter which makes these themes less conspicuous than Tony’s. They share a common contempt for the merely fashionable, and they are thoroughly demotic-both making idiosyncratic films for television. Popular without being populist, they are thoroughly accessible, and thoroughly and unapologetically elitist-if that means believing in the absolute values of good and bad art and refusing to talk down to people from the class you were borninto.