In May 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened in London: herald to the greatest period of English drama since the closing of the theaters by the Puritans in 1642.

That, at least, is the commonplace view. It is also, in the humble experience of one playgoer, the right one. Though it needs to be refined and explained, nothing is likely to explain it away. What I want to attempt here is an explanation, even a diagram, and perhaps a refinement, of what has happened in the writing of English plays in London in the last 30 years, in the age of Osborne and Pinter and Stoppard.