ABSTRACT
British theatre has changed rapidly and profoundly; but many of these changes cannot be assessed simply in terms of individual plays, productions, writers and companies. They are really changes of theatrical 'climate', by which the author mean something more than a fashion and less than revolution. One such change came with the abolition of stage censorship; another with the swing away from 'universal' themes towards topical ones and from 'formality' to 'informality' and from deliberately 'class-structured' theatres to 'community' or 'class-less' ones. The theatre system as a whole changed, together with its methods of financing, which in turn led to problems and opportunities which had not existed in the early 1950s. These climatic changes cannot be taken in isolation, neither from each other nor from the general development of the theatrical language. The gap between individual and individual within the theatre had thus narrowed almost to nothingness.
