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Unit 2: Literary Terms: Problem Play, Kitchen Sink Drama, and Angry Young Man

17. The Kitchen Sink Drama were significant for the way they depicted the most intimate Notes
aspects of ...........

State whether the following statements are true or false:
18. Whether social or domestic, the Kitchen Sink drama changed the trajectory of British
theater.
19. The chief characteristic of the Kitchen Sink drama was the way in which its
characters expressed their unvarnished emotion and dissatisfaction with the working
class.
20. The kitchen-sink drama is placed in an ordinary domestic setting and typically
tells a relatively mundane family story.

2.3 Angry Young Men

2.3.1 Meaning

The term Angry Young Man often applied to the British ‘kitchen sink’ playwrights of the 1950s and
also anyone, particularly young men obviously, who rails against the establishment.
Angry Young Men were various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and
expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their
impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and
mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.
The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of
lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the
state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the
British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and
Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar
welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar
reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.

2.3.1 Origin

The term was applied most notably to John Osbourne and it was from comments about his Look
Back in Anger, first performed in 1956, that the phrase became known. That wasn’t its first use
though. In 1941, the writer Rebecca West used it in her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: the Record of a
Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937.

Example: Their instinct is to brace themselves against any central authority as if it were their
enemy. The angry young men run about shouting.
West wasn’t using the phrase in the quite specific way it became used in the 1950s. She was just
referring to young men who were angry.
John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first performed in 1956. The term doesn’t appear in the
play but it was in the reporting of it later that it became known. In October 1957 George Fearon,
Press Officer for the Royal Court Theatre, wrote this piece for the Daily Telegraph: “I had read John
Osborne’s play. When I met the author I ventured to prophesy that his generation would praise his
play while mine would, in general, dislike it... ‘If this happens,’ I told him, ‘you would become
known as the Angry Young Man.’ In fact, we decided then and there that henceforth he was to be
known as that.”

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