Travails of a Naked Typist: the Plays of C. P. Taylor

Abstract

The retrospective season of plays by C. P. Taylor at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival marked a welcome revival of interest in the work of this prolific Scottish playwright, who had also put down roots in the North-East. Taylor, who was born in 1929 and died in 1981 still in his early fifties, was a committed socialist who wrote sophisticated working-class plays for working-class people – and this not only made much of what he wrote unacceptable in the West End, but also, for different reasons explored in this article, unsympathetic to such venues as the Royal Court. Thus, while the range of his work reflected certain trends in British post-war theatre – the drive for regional and community theatre, dissatisfaction with bourgeois naturalistic styles, and the growth of the fringe – in other respects Taylor was untypical as a left-wing writer. His work deserves the reappraisal here attempted in part because of previous critical neglect, and in part because the reasons for that neglect themselves merit attention for what they reveal about critical attitudes. The author, Susan Friesner, teaches in the Drama Department at St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill.