ABSTRACT
Stuart Hall, looking back at the new drama from the vantage point of 1961 in an article for Encore entitled ‘Beyond Naturalism Pure’, observed that ‘the crude thesis is that what we have managed to do best is either a kind of pastiche (e.g. The Hostage) or a specially British brand of naturalism’. But this, he went on to argue, was not really an adequate summary of what was actually a much more complex picture: ‘the pattern was never so clear-cut as the “kitchen-sink” school of critics would have had us imagine’ and the decisive trend in contemporary theatre was that which evinced a movement ‘beyond naturalism pure’ (Hall 1970:213). Hall’s argument is important, not least because it challenged the idea of a single dominant methodology. In doing so, it also reproduced some of the confusions over the terminology-especially over naturalism itself-in a way that is symptomatic of the period.
