Blakey off of On the Buses and radical theatre

In Kibworth the other day, I visited Daker Books and bought a second-hand copy of John Russell Taylor's Anger and After, a book about the British theatre in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

I think the Fifties were a more interesting decade than we now imagine - the centrality of live theatre to the culture being just one reason. 

As Sebastian Millbank pointed out in an article on The Critic, it's noteworthy that the modern left shows no affection for a decade that saw full employment, widespread union membership and rising wages.

When I got Anger and After home, I looked up one minor writer in the index and was directed to a pleasingly chunky passage:

Another improvisation along rather the same lines was Stephen Lewis's Sparrers Can't Sing, a lackadaisical picture of Stepney life revolving round the return from jail after nearly ten years of the paterfamilias to meet again the wife he hit with a poker. There was no plot to speak of, but the characters who wandered in and out, particularly the two old derelicts locked in deadly combat with the National Assistance, made pleasant enough company while they were around and lent a certain colour to the assertion by their ex-electrician's mate creator that "The world as seen through the bottom of a pint pot is much more entertaining than that usually seen through opera glasses, and less distorted." 

The play, after a not very successful transfer to the West End, became the basis of Joan Littlewood's first foray into the cinema; slightly retitled as Sparrows Can't Sing and almost completely reworked by Joan Littlewood and the author, it emerged as the story of a randy young sailor's return from the sea to find his pretty young wife living with a bus driver in a rebuilt East End of towering modern flats, most of the material about the old people, the National Assistance and so on having disappeared somewhere along the way. 

Subsequently Stephen Lewis has written Wagger, a subdued television piece in a very similar style about a crippled cobbler and the tentative beginnings of his romance with a girl who works in the baker's across the road, sat against a background of bitter family bickering.

Stephen Lewis could act as well as write. He appeared at Stratford East and the Royal Court, and his turn as the caretaker of a new block of flats who relishes all the regulations he has to enforce is one of the best things in Sparrows Can't Sing.

Anger and After was written before be became famous as Blakey in On the Buses.