ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Errol John portrays the concerns of the 1940s' and 1950s' era and suggest that an understanding of the play's production history and an analysis of its reception by theatre critics can be used to ascertain how a narrative capturing the post-war moment has remained significant in the almost sixty years since its first production. John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl won the Observer newspaper's playwriting competition in 1957, and a production soon followed at the Royal Court Theatre, opening on 4 December 1958, just two years after John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was produced at the same venue and widely believed to have altered the themes and style of British playwriting in the post-war period. The form of the play can easily be read as falling within the generic conventions of European naturalist theatre and post-war British playwriting, portraying a range of stock characters in narrative form that unfolds in conventional linear three-act structure.
