The Methuen Drama Book of Plays from the Sixties: Roots; Serjeant Musgrave's Dance; Loot; Early Morning; The Ruling Class

Five outstanding plays from the British theatre of the 1960s.

This volume contains major works by five of the most important playwrights ot emerge during the late fifties and early sixties. Bold, challenging and iconoclastic, these plays are landmarks of post-war British theatre.

Roots by Arnold Wesker focuses on the homecoming of young Beatie Bryant who returns to her family of Norfolk farm workers with stories of her boyfriend Ronnie.

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance by John Arden is set in a mining town in the 19th century, with a group of soldiers returned from a colonial war. But when Musgrave is asked to keep the peace with the colliery workers, he decides to do so in a rather unusual way.

Loot by Joe Orton is a brilliant parody of the skeleton-in-the-cupboard crime genre, exploding the very notions of English decency, good citizenry and traditional 'positions'.

Edward Bond's Early Morning re-imagines the time of Victoria and Albert caught up in a military coup plotted by Disraeli.

Peter Barnes' Ruling Class describes the fall out in an aristocratic family after the 14th Earl commits suicide and leaves his estate to a schizophrenic Franciscan friar who is under the illusion that he is Jesus.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) was an English playwright noted for his black comedies, which combine genteel dialogue with violent and shocking action. Orton left home at 16 to train as an actor. His subversive style of humour first revealed itself in a bizarre incident in 1962, when he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell were jailed for defacing library books. The two had carefully removed jacket blurbs from middle-brow novels and substituted their own, mostly scatological, counterfeits.
Orton delighted in shocking audiences by breaking taboos surrounding sexuality and death in conventionally structured 'black' farces involving epigrammatic dialogue and frenetic, convoluted plots. Thus, in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), a young lodger attempts to lure a woman and her brother into providing him with all he needs, only to find he has become each one's sexual plaything; Loot (1965) is a parody of a detective story involving much comic business with a coffin and a corpse; and What the Butler Saw (1969) stylishly turns farce on its head.
Orton was a homosexual in a period before the liberalization of British law, and this side of his life is described in detail in his posthumously published diaries. He was battered to death by Halliwell (who subsequently committed suicide) during a domestic argument at their home in Islington, North London.

John Arden (1930-2012) was a British dramatist, noted for his politically challenging and linguistically rich plays in the tradition of Brecht; he has written for radio and television as well as for the stage. After 1965 he collaborated on many works with his wife, the Irish playwright Margaretta D'Arcy.

Arden's first professionally produced play was a radio drama, The Life of Mars, broadcast in 1956. In the late 1950s Arden was associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where his stark anti-war play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance opened in 1959. The play was something of a commercial failure at the time, but has been frequently revived since. It was during the 1960s that Arden produced most of his major stage works; these include The Happy Haven (1960), The Workhouse Donkey (1963), which concerns municipal corruption in Arden's native Barnsley, Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964), which drew parallels between contemporary political events in the Congo and machinations in medieval Scotland, and Left-Handed Liberty (1965).

In 1972 Arden and D'Arcy had a major argument with the RSC about the staging of their Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty. The argument culminated in Arden picketing the theatre and vowing that he would not write for the British stage again.

He settled in Galway, Ireland, in 1971. He was elected to Aosdána in 2011, a year before his death.