Kitchen Sink Drama

Up until the 1950’s, most English theatre was concerned with middle-class dramas and society. In 1956 British playwright John Osborne introduced a different type of drama Look Back In Anger that was one of the first plays to use a working-class setting with working-class characters. The lead character Jimmy was seen by many to represent disillusioned youth, the ‘angry young man’, thus spawning a whole new breed of playwrights similar to Osborne, who became known as the Angry Young Men. Plays of the genre typically used dull settings in working-class houses and it soon earned the title of Kitchen Sink Drama. Some critics called the new drama domestic realism, where the realities of the characters and plots were not necessarily as polite as the English dramas that preceded it.