ABSTRACT
That there was a close relationship between theatre and cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s has often been remarked, even if comparative analyses of plays and films are rare. It has been a characteristic of post-war culture that writers as well as actors, directors and other theatre practitioners have worked not only in theatre but in film and television as well; however, at this cultural moment, the relationship between theatre and film was more than just a particular example of a more general drift towards the new possibilities of the electronic media. Not only did some of the central figures in the debates around New Wave theatre also work in the cinema, but the two media had several key objectives in common, not the least of which was the ambition to work outside (at least, partially) the dominant institutions of each medium. And it is in the cinema that the moment of Working-Class Realism finds its most coherent expression.
