ABSTRACT
In 1960 National Service required of every young man ended. It came just at the moment when the consumer society of the 1950s – ever more cars on the road, washing machines, television sets and refrigerators in the home – turned into the ‘swinging sixties’ – Carnaby Street, the Beatles, the contraceptive pill. Touring reps were going out of business with astonishing rapidity and theatres were closing. No new theatres were built in London between 1945 and 1959 when the Mermaid opened at Puddle Dock, and by the 1970s more than a fifth of West End theatres were ‘dark’. Mostly, however, the commercial theatre sought safety in revivals or in plays which tended to be, as Kenneth Tynan complained in 1957, ‘written on the assumption that there are still people who live in awe of the Crown, the Empire, the established Church, the public school and upper classes’.
