Arnold Wesker Research Articles

Socialism and the Possibility of Utopia in Wesker Trilogy

Every modern epoch seems to produce a small number of artists whose work provides society with an antidote to the ignorance of its own exhaustion. Arnold Wesker is one of these writers who offer this therapeutic service to an ailing body. The Wesker Trilogy (1960) has charted the gradual fading of Communist faith and youthful energy among a group of Jews in the East End of London (1936-1959). In this article the author has applied sociological approach, remarkably moral and philosophical socialism, to The Wesker Trilogy in order to reveal Wesker’s most ambitious achievement and impressive contribution to the English New Wave Theatre and all his working-class audiences. Therefore, the quest for a radically reconfigured socialism, which Wesker articulates with force and passion in The Trilogy, appears by the late 1960s as a quest for survival, not only for the Left itself but for all humankind. Meanwhile, he works to protect human freedom and dignity and to promote a life worth living. Although he follows many of the goals of socialism, he willingly subordinates his socialist principles of solidarity and communal cooperation to defending the rights of the individual. In Wesker’s estimation, no political or religious cause―not even Judaism or socialism―is worth the sacrifice of individual liberty. Finally, what is discussed here is Wesker’s notion of utopia. He thinks that the belief in the utopian ideal could provide a meaning and order for life. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3s1p296

Caryl Churchill by Mary Luckhurst (review)

Mary Luckhurst. Caryl Churchill. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xiv + 208. $39.95. Caryl Churchill has been writing plays half century, during which time she has constantly experimented with dramatic form. Equally, as Mary Luckhurst amply demonstrates in Caryl Churchill, her plays have always responded to new social, political, and cultural challenges, especially as they affect women and those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Luckhurst's division of her book into chapters that focus on work decade by decade and her focus on one in production each decade illuminate both changing style and enormous range and versatility of her work. She never writes same twice. In part 1, Contexts, Luckhurst provides an overview of plays in to her life, her thought, and critical and historical contexts in which her work has been received. She notes well-known influence on Churchill of Brecht and of second wave feminism but concludes that while Churchill's significance to development of feminist political theatre is unmatched, her work is also informed by science, ethics, war, terror, climate and masculinity (24). Of particular interest is Luckhurst's discussion of an essay Churchill wrote in 1960, when she was only twenty-two: Ordinary, Not Safe: A Direction Drama? In this essay Churchill attacks new wave of Royal Court realistic drama by male dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker and calls instead, in Luckhurst's words, for utopian quest to explore socialist agendas in ways that provoke change (12), using experimental forms and language, such as juxtapositions of song, prose and poetry, spectrum of emotional moods and cumulative effects of powerful stage pictures (13). Luckhurst demonstrates that throughout her career Churchill has followed her own agenda. In part 2 Luckhurst begins by reviewing Churchills early work, mostly radio plays, of 1960s, and also her six little-known plays television written between 1972 and 1981. Typical of political topicality of these plays is The Legion Hall Bombing (1979), documentary drama about boy accused without evidence of planting bomb in Northern Ireland. Churchill took her name off credits after BBC censored some of its content. Luckhurst's discussion of Churchills stage plays of 1970s begins with helpful account of The Hospital at Time of Revolution (1972, finally produced in 2013), based on writings of Algerian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, whose complex self-knowledge Churchill admired; dramatizes the colonised victim's dilemma of complicity (50). Analyses of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Vinegar Tom (1976) follow. Luckhurst is very good at providing succinctly historical information that is essential to our understanding of carefully researched plays: example, concerning English Civil War and various religious and political movements that inform Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Given Luckhurst's care in providing such instructive background material, it is unfortunate that in her discussion of Vinegar Tom she focuses on reliance on Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's polemical and essentialist Witches, Midwives and Nurses, which ties to 1970s feminism, and omits to mention at all use of Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, which underpins play's still-relevant socialist understanding of economic dynamics at work among different kinds and conditions of individual women. Luckhurst does offer critique of her chosen key production decade, Cloud Nine (1979), suggesting that from perspective of more recent views about gender, it may have become a history play as relation between biology, gender identity and sexual orientation is no longer assumed to be straightforward (80). …

Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography by Theresa Robbins Dudeck (review)

Reviewed by: Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography by Theresa Robbins Dudeck Alexis Riley Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography. By Theresa Robbins Dudeck. London: Blooms-bury Methuen Drama, 2013. pp. 232. $25.95 cloth. In Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography, Theresa Robbins Dudeck provides a rich and much-needed exploration into one of improvisational theatre’s most influential figures. While readers interested primarily in Johnstone’s philosophy of improvisation will find a wealth of information pertinent to nonscripted performance, Dudeck investigates her subject across various dimensions, including [End Page 148] playwright, director, and above all, teacher. The resulting chronological history of Johnstone’s life culminates in a critical analysis of his pedagogy, casting Johnstone as an ever-evolving educator whose spontaneity, imagination, and commitment to risk continue to shape contemporary theatre practice. As an experienced teacher of improvisation herself, Dudeck deftly weaves Johnstone’s pedagogic theories together with examples from his workshops, effectively balancing the more cut-and-dried elements of a strictly biographical approach. Furthermore, as a personal friend of Johnstone who he has named the literary executor of his estate, there is perhaps no one else so well qualified as Dudeck to conduct such an in-depth study. Dudeck is quick to acknowledge her distinctive position in relation to her subject, as well as the potential complications this closeness may pose. However, readers will be happy to find a well-rounded critique that benefits from her unique perspective while maintaining critical acumen. Of particular interest is the host of primary source documents from Johnstone’s personal papers included throughout the book that will certainly prove generative of further scholarship. To draw attention to the development of Johnstone’s pedagogy, Dudeck employs the classroom as a metaphor to structure her analysis. While her study is largely rooted in the physical spaces in which Johnstone trained, created, and taught, she also extends this metaphor to include “conceptual spaces which informed his pedagogy” (1). To this end, each chapter focuses on a designated “classroom” space, moving the reader from Johnstone’s early childhood, to his teaching career, and, finally, into the present. Dudeck’s classroom frame is helpful in positioning Johnstone as both teacher and student simultaneously, connecting his artistic theories to the circumstances that informed their growth. While those already acquainted with Johnstone’s theories may find that the metaphor pulls focus from her rich analysis of Johnstone in order to devote attention to the frame, newcomers to his philosophy will certainly benefit from Dudeck’s careful hand-holding. After setting up this classroom metaphor, chapter 1, “Introducing Keith Johnstone and His Impro System,” does just what the title promises. By adding the word “system” to “impro,” Dudeck provides a term that connects the various spheres of Johnstone’s practical and theoretical work, including but not limited to the improvisatory work for which he is best known. Dudeck defines the Impro System as “an approach to actor training and theatre practice that encourages spontaneous, collaborative creation using the intuitive, uncensored imaginative responses of the participants” (2). This definition not only highlights the various applications of Johnstone’s theory but also grounds his work squarely in the realm of theatrical practice. Drawing on Johnstone’s claim that the theatre [End Page 149] itself is an informal classroom, Dudeck moves to his work as the author of Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979), giving a brief overview of each chapter that effectively acquaints unfamiliar readers with the core tenets of his System. Building on this foundation, chapter 2, “The Formative Years,” details Johnstone’s early childhood, homing in on what he describes as “damage inflicted mostly by secondary school education” (20). Framing Johnstone’s later insistence on spontaneity as redressive action, Dudeck works meticulously to chart the development of his philosophy. She then devotes the balance of the chapter to Johnstone’s work at the Royal Court Theatre. Here, Dudeck contextualizes Johnstone’s role in British theatre of the 1950s and 1960s, exploring in particular his relationships with influential theatremakers including George Devine, William Gaskill, Ann Jellicoe, Arnold Wesker, Wole Soyinka, Edward Bond, and Samuel Beckett. “All the World’s a Classroom,” chapter 3, tracks the end of Johnstone’s activity at the...

Angry Young Playwrights With Respect of Three Representatives

Angry Young Men led a movement on the post-war English drama stage in 1956, expressed a mood of restlessness, disorganization and frustration that was not limited to the working class but was shared by young people throughout English society. This essay briefly introduces the Angry Young Men from three representatives: John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Alan Sillitoe, who brought an important fresh element into the literature by their subject matter and attitudes.

On Dunn’s <em>The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz</em>: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post‐War Britain

On Dunn's The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz: Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain. By Anthony J. Dunn. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2013. 266 pp., ISBN 978-0-85303-865-8 (hc). US $75.95.In a recent edition of the New Yorker (December 17, 2012), John Lahr writes a review of the recent revival of Clifford Odets's 1937 play Golden Boy, on the New York stage. The review can be read as Lahr's call for the reappraisal of Odets's position in the canon of twentieth-century American playwrights. Now, in the UK, we have Anthony Dunn's The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz, which attempts much the same thing for its subject in relation to postwar London writing. Wolf Mankowitz, like Odets, was Jewish, affiliated with the Left, and took a foray-in his case more than a foray-into the world of popular entertainment. From the mid-1950s to early 1960s-the peak of his career-Mankowitz steered a remarkably successful course between art and showbiz. As he put it, he looked up and down Piccadilly . . . stopping for material at the slightly heart-warm townships between O'Henry and Damon Runyan in the Far West and Sholem Aleichem in the Far (197).So who was Wolf Mankowitz? For many of his generation, this boy wonder from the wrong side of the tracks (namely, the environs of Fashion Street, Commercial Street, and Brick Lane) came to epitomize the London Jewish writer-impresario. In his heyday Mankowitz enjoyed enormous success with his novellas, plays, films, and TV dramas. Most famous perhaps was Mankowitz's evocation of a modern-day London shtetl, encompassing both the Jewish East End (The Bespoke Overcoat) and the Jewish West End (Expresso Bongo). All of the regulars were there: the nebbish, the mensch, the shmendrick, the shmuck, the fershtinkener, the gonif, the zaydeh, the shneider, the shiksa. Here was a world of tailors, wrestlers, crooked antique dealers, promoters, strippers-all with heaps of salt beef and pickle. He also wrote the initial draftof the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and contributed to the spoof version of Casino Royale (1967).It is interesting to contrast the writing of Mankowitz with that of another London Jewish writer, one also associated with the Royal Court at the time, Arnold Wesker. Like the prewar Odets, Wesker depicts a Jewish London defined by social realism. Mankowitz belongs to an altogether different tradition-that of the Jewish spieler. This is the narrative world of the parable, the myth, the UK equivalent of the Borscht Belt comic writers working on the other side of the Atlantic at the same time. Many of them went on to Hollywood careers, and so did Mankowitz, if not too successfully. Typical of his cross-Atlantic hits was a lifeless adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess (Anthony Asquith, 1960) with Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers.His lack of success in Hollywood, however, should not detract from his UK success, which was considerable: TV and stage productions with Orson Welles (including a West End production of Moby Dick-Rehearsed), co-productions at the Royal Court (including Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera), a hit screen adaptation of his book, A Kid for Two Farthings (Carol Reed, 1955), an Oscarwinning short film adaptation of his play, The Bespoke Overcoat ( Jack Clayton, 1956), and a hit screen adaptation of his musical, Expresso Bongo (Val Guest, 1959). …

But never mind about politics: Arnold Wesker's The Merchant and its critics

Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant (1983) is usually discussed as a response to its Shakespearean original, The Merchant of Venice, and criticized for being both too full of irrelevant historical detail and insufficiently attentive to history in the Marxist sense. The latter charge overlooks the fact that Wesker's play was not just about Shakespeare's supposed anti-Semitism, but also signalled his own disillusionment with radical politics. In his analysis of history, Wesker had concluded that capitalism was more likely to promote tolerance of minorities than alternative systems. His growing disillusionment with the left sprang from his experience of Communism in Eastern Europe, and from the Middle East wars, in which the capitalist West backed Israel. The play also reflects Wesker's quarrels with radical colleague John McGrath over cultural politics. The Merchant does not mark Wesker's farewell to politics, therefore, but a reorientation of his politics away from radical socialism.

Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays: the Challenge of Modernity?

Shakespeare’s works remain a reference when artists — either playwrights or stage professionals — aim at philosophising on human nature. These artists use the Shakespearean material to give vent to their own imagination and critical approach to the world they live in. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare’s plays have constantly been adapted on stage and in the cinema to comment upon contemporary facts and to voice either political or social concerns. But the same plays have also been the pretexts for other plays, written in modern English so as to serve new prospects. This study is based on the work of three twentieth-century writers – Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond and Tom Stoppard – who rewrote Shakespearean plays: The Merchant of Venice (The Merchant, 1977), King Lear (Lear, 1972) and Hamlet (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1967). This article explores the way these plays were elaborated with reference to the original versions and why their authors decided to adapt the Elizabethan text.

Arnold Wesker'in Dünyası ve Son Oyunlarından İki Örnek Boylam ve İnkâr Arnold Wesker's World and Two Examples From His Last Plays Longitude and Denial

Arnold Wesker, the writer of Longitude and Denial, belongs to the postwar English writers generation. Wesker, doing the philosophy of drama with his ideas about theatre, and with his independent and original tendency, is one of the prolific writers of English Drama feeding it with their works today. Wesker reflects his childhood and youth years, passed happily but with troubles, politic and concerning life experiences on his plays such as; The Wesker Trilogy (Chicken Soup With Barley, Roots, I’m Talking About Jerusalem), Chips With Everything, The Kitchen, The Nottingham Captain, The Four Seasons, Their Very Own And Golden City, The Old Ones, The Friends, The Journalists, Shylock, Love Letters On Blue Paper, Caritas, One Woman Plays, What happened To Betty Lemon, and Annie Wobler. Longitude and Denial are his last plays In his play Longitude, dramatized from Sobel’s book in 2002,Wesker tells the long, determined and brave struggle of John Harrison, a practical minded carpenter, tuner of bells, expert of clocks, against the status-quoits and conservative Board of Longitude. In his play Denial, he tells the tragedy of Jenny’s family and Jenny, who is forced to believe the lie that she was raped by her father, with the inciting methods of Valerie, who is a social worker turned therapist and believes False Memory Syndrome. Both of these two plays are compatible with actual and universal, giving rich possibility to theatrical creativity, and with their deep thoughts that full of hypothesis’.

Talking Back to Shakespeare

Appropriation and transformations that talk back to Shakespeare offer alternatives and fill in gaps while challenging what they see as the plays' ideological premises. Among the many works discussed here are relatively unknown plays (Arnold Wesker's the Merchant. Charles Marowitz's Shakespeare collages), fictional transformations of women writers (Mary Cowden Clarke's Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, Lillie Wyman's Gertrude of Denmark, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres), and the Shakespearean transformations of the 1960s.

Naturalism, Poetic Realism, Spectacle: Wesker's ‘The Kitchen’ in Performance

When Stephen Daldry took over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court in 1994, the first play he chose to direct was a revival of one of the great successes of the theatre's early occupancy by the English Stage Company, Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. In the following article, Stephen Lacey sees this as in part a defining statement of Daldry's own relationship to the theatre and its traditions, and he offers a detailed comparison between Daldry's production and John Dexter's original in 1959, as revived in 1961. Exploring in particular the directors' – and the designers' – differing perceptions of the elements of naturalism and theatricality which co-exist in the play, he also contrasts Dexter's end-on use of the Court's picture-frame stage with Daidry's reconstruction of the theatre to provide an in-the-round ambience. This, he suggests, is emblematic of a new relationship not only between the play and its audience, but of changed perceptions between the 'fifties and the 'nineties concerning the nature and potential of social realism in the theatre.

Toward a theater of the oppressed: the dramaturgy of John Arden

Toward a Theater of the Oppressed is an engaging study of the dramaturgy of contemporary British playwright John Arden and the political implications of his work. Arden made his debut on the London stage in the wake of a powerful new wave of young, angry drama in England during the late 1950s. Javed Malick argues that in contrast to contemporaries like John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker, Arden offered a radically different approach to drama and theater, employing a long-neglected writing style that derived from pre-bourgeois popular traditions.Malick situates Arden's dramaturgy in the wider context of the radical alternative tradition in Western drama, drawing connections to Brecht, Piscator, the radical playwrights of the 1960s. He then explores the formal structure, ideological implications, and historical significance of Arden's work, treating his stage plays as one dramaturgically coherent opus- from the early Waters of Babylon to his and Margaretta D'Arcy's ambitious trilogy, The Island of the Mighty. Finally, he discusses the last phase of Arden and D'Arcy's political and artistic development, which led them to turn their backs on the professional theater circuit. He argues that Arden's rejection of the institutional stage was the logical outcome of his persistent search for alternative forms of political theater.Toward a Theater of the Oppressed will be invaluable reading for those interested in modern drama, political theater, and popular performance, as well as students of contemporary British drama.Javed Malick is Reader in English, Khalsa College, University of Delhi, India.

As much as I dare: an autobiography (1932-1959)

The son of a Russian refugee father and a Hungarian mother, Arnold Wesker was born in 1932 in the East End of London. After a state school education, he was first apprenticed to a furniture maker, and became in turn a bookseller's assistant, a farm labourer, a kitchen porter, and a pastry cook, with a spell in the RAF before turning to playwriting while attending a school of film technique. Along with John Osborne and Harold Pinter, Wesker was part of the explosion of theatrical talent in the late 50s that revolutionized playwriting in Britain. His autobiography is a personal history from the inside of modern British theatre.

Book Reviews

Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: 1890—1990, reviewed by Anthony W. Jenkins John Louis Digetani, ed., A Companion to Pirandello Studies, reviewed by Manuela Gieri Jane Palatini Bowers, "They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Melodrama, reviewed by Juliana Spahr Robert Wilcher, Understanding Arnold Wesker, reviewed by Heiner Zimmermann Annie Brisset, Sociocritique de la traduction: Theatre et alterite au Quebec (1968-1988), reviewed by Barbara Godard William W. Demastes, Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre, reviewed by Laura Morrow

Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist.

Introduction - re-interpreting Shakespeare parasitic comedy - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead a divergent view of human nature - Edward Bond, Bingo and Lear demythologizing Shylock - Arnold Wesker, Merchant, Charles Marowitz, Variations on The Merchant of Venice frustrating dramatic structure - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Endgame modern morality plays - Eugene Ionesco, Exit the King and Macbeth the Jacobean Pinter - Homecoming theatrical discontinuity - Charles Marowitz, Shrew, An Othello, Collage, Hamlet postscript - the modernized Bard.

Bums on Seats: Parties, Art, and Politics in London's East End

Roland Muldoon may be prone to comic exaggeration, but in this case he isn't kidding. In his view the plastic beer glass and the new theatrical ambience it affords have been key to the renaissance that's in full bloom in the neglected East End of London. The new glass permits an audience member to carry her drink back to her seat. This simple innovation sends a powerful message to those who might otherwise avoid legitimate theatres, thinking them stuffy and pretentious. The plastic beer glass is at once a practical measure and a radical gesture, a bold move toward the first objective of any politicized theatre company: to find and hold an audience. Or, to use the cockney phrase, to put bums on seats. It cannot be doubted that the Western theatre has assembled a system of very potent signs which indicate, among other things, that the working class is unwelcome-at least, on the other side of the footlights. Decor, dress, program language, curtain time, the espresso available at intermission-all strenuously confirm the bourgeois status quo, often in direct contrast to the sentiments expressed onstage. As director/writer John McGrath has noted in his lucid book, A Good Night Out, the wellintentioned voices of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and their descendants have been systematically swamped by the many other tongues of the event (I986:I6). And the celebrated English dramas of the working class have never managed to find working-class audiences. But there is another tradition in contemporary English theatre, one which seeks to explore social issues within a variety of popular frame-

The Nature of Theatre Dialogue

‘What makes one sentence into a line of poetry and another sentence dull and lifeless?’ This was one of the questions Arnold Wesker set out to answer from the point-of-view of the practising playwright rather than the critical theorist, when he delivered the following pape; to the biennial conference of the International Association of Theatre Critics in Rome in 1985. He examines the constituent elements of stage dialogue in supposdly ‘raistic’ drama and th rigorous if not always conscious process of artistic selection and shaping diotated, in his own practice, by the natur of the originating experence. He illustrates his argument with extracts from his own works. including his most recently staged play in London, Annie Wobbler – the first in a now-completed cycle of four plays for on woman of which Four Portraits, Yardsal, and Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon? are the other parts. A frequent contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, Arnold Wesker's earliest works, the plays of the ‘Wesker Trilogy’ and The kitchen, were milestones in the creatior of the ‘now British drama’ of the late fifties, and he has continuec to write for the theatre in a wide range of styles – which have been known to disturb the ‘expectations of realism’ of some of the critics he was here addressing…

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.

Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama

Bertolt Brecht's theory and practice have had a strong influence on the British theatre, dating from the first visit of the Berliner Ensemble in 1956 and the English publication in 1964 of John Willett's compilation of the theoretical writings, Brecht On Theatre. Political theatre practice in England had benefited from the socialist movement as well as the impact of the Beveridge Report on the arts. Following Beveridge's mandated university grants, educated working-class men and women had found their theatrical voices in playwrights such as Shelagh Delaney, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker. The continuing search for a political form and technique led to Brecht who, in shaping a dramaturgy specifically suited to social critique, provided a path beyond social realism to the epic theatre. Brechtian techniques provided a methodology for embedding a materialist critique within the theatrical medium. Political theatre requires the ability to isolate and manifest certain ideas and relationships that make ideology visible, in contrast with the styles of realism and naturalism, wherein ideology is hidden or covert. Brecht's theorization of the social gest, epic structure, and alienation effect provides the means to reveal material relations as the basis of social reality, to foreground and examine ideologically-determined beliefs and unconscious habitual perceptions, and to make visible those signs inscribed on the body which distinguish social behavior in relation to class, gender, and history. For feminists, Brechtian techniques offer a way to examine the material conditions of gender behavior (how they are internalized, opposed, and changed) and their interaction with other socio-political factors such as class.

Bond, Shaffer, Stoppard, Storey: An International Checklist of Commentary

After the regenerating spark of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, the ensuing decade brought four English dramatists into world prominence: Osborne himself, Arnold Wesker, John Arden, and Harold Pinter. When their fortunes waned somewhat in the late sixties, a new cluster ofdramatists -John Russell Taylor dubbed them “the second wave” -coopted a large share of the limelight. Again, four major figures emerged: Edward Bond, Peter Shaffer, Tom Stoppard, and David Storey. The amount of critical attention given to this group, especially Bond and Stoppard, has escalated in recent years to the extent that more than half of the significant studies in print have been published since 1976. Ofthe eighty-plus that exist on Stoppard, for example, nearly fifty were issued in this period; of sixty-five on Bond, thirty-eight. A commendable bibliography that embraces these dramatists, Kimball King's Twenty Modern British Playwrights (New York: Garland, 1977), purports to cover international criticism through 1976, but it is already so out-of-date that it includes only a quarter of the noteworthy studies available by mid-198 I. A new bibliography is obviously needed.

Journalism

Phillip J. Tichenor, et al, Community Conflict and the Press (Beverly Hills, Ca.: Sage, 1980—$20.00/9.95) Roy Peter Clark, ed. Best Newspaper Writing (Modern Media Institute, 556 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, Fla, 33701—$4.95, paper which includes postage) M.J. Clark, ed. Politics and the Media: Film and Television for the Political Scientist and Historian (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1979—£10.50 or $24.00/£5.25 or $12.50) Arnold Wesker's The Journalists: A Triptych (London and Salem, N.H.: Jonathan Cape, 1980—£5.95/$14.95) Richard Weiner's Professional's Guide to Public Relations Services (New York: Richard Weiner, 1980—$60) Raymond Simon's Public Relations: Concepts and Practices (Columbus, Ohio: Grid Inc., 1980—$24.95)