Angry young people: The working class adolescent in contemporary English drama as portrayed in selected plays by Peter Terson, Barbie Keeffe, Nigel Williams, and Stephen Poliakoff

The purpose of this study was to examine the depiction of working-class youth in contemporary England as seen as a group of selected plays, in order to evaluate the extent to which the characterizations exemplify a new dramatic trend. The following fourteen plays, all written between 1967 and 1980, were chosen for the study: Peter Terson's Zigger Zagger, The Apprentices, and Spring-Heeled Jack; Barrie Keeffe's Here Comes the Sun, "Gotcha," Barbarians, and Frozen Assets; Nigel Williams's Class Enemy, Sugar and Spice, and Trial Run; and Stephen Poliakoff's "The Carnation Gang", Hitting Town, City Sugar, and American Days.;Characterizations of working-class teenagers in the above plays were examined individually, before being compared with each other using material gathered from Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and J. L. Styan's The Dramatic Experience. The comparisons included a discussion of the following topics: the working-class environment; home and family; "Them" and "Us" (teachers and school; policemen and 'the law'; race; class); mass culture; forms of escape; sex and violence.;The material was gathered together in two forms, the first of which was based on a chart suggested by Styan and included the following information: Origins (where born, parents, education); Social background (religion and politics; nature of work; income and social class); Temperament (the effects of mass culture; the desire to escape; views about sex; attitudes toward violence); Relations with other people and their environment (home and family; school and teachers; policemen and the law; people of a different color; people of a different class).;The second grouping of material consisted of a list of the following seven words: Disappointment, Disenfranchisement, Emptiness, Failure, Dissatisfaction, Isolation and Indifference.;Finally, these groups of characteristics were compared with character depictions from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Arnold Wesker's Roots, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, Brendan Behan's The Hostage, Edward Bond's Saved and Howard Brenton's Magnificence. This revealed that although Roots and Saved could be considered precursors of the works about working-class adolescents, the selected plays could fairly be considered examples of a new dramatic trend. The final chapter includes suggestions for further study.