History is a seamless robe, of course, but there are nevertheless discernible
tears in its fabric. One of these occurred in the 1950s, in the small world
of the British theater.
No doubt unimportant in itself, this
quasi-revolution heralded, and perhaps even contributed to, a profound change
in our culture.

The year in which the change started was 1956: the year, not coincidentally,
of the Suez crisis, when it was unmistakably clear as never before that
Britain, after two centuries of world influence, was now reduced to the
status of a third-rate power, a kind of larger Belgium, which
could disappear from the face of the earth without anyone beyond
its shores noticing that anything very much had happened. Such
abrupt losses of status are apt to result in a reduction of
cultural self-confidence, both individually and collectively,
as well as in a change of sensibility amounting to a gestalt
switch. What previously appeared self-evidently good now
appeared self-evidently bad, and vice-versa: and in the process,
babies were thrown out with bathwater.

It was in 1956 that John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was produced at
the Royal Court Theatre in London. The living playwright who until then had
dominated the London stage, Terence Rattigan, recognized it at once as a
threat not merely to
his commercial supremacy, but to his whole conception of
the drama. Having attended the first night, Rattigan was asked by
a newspaper reporter what he thought of the play. He replied
that