ABSTRACT

This chapter explores a number of key impulses and trends in the period 1956-99 but John Osborne's play introduces an environment which informs explicitly or implicitly a British preoccupation with the shape of national identity in the latter half of the twentieth century. Osborne's Look Back in Anger signalled what appeared at the time to be a radical change in British theatre. Osborne's achievement was to articulate post-war British dilemmas and creates for them a domestic metaphor. In the enclosed world of the stages, Osborne captured a historical moment for a post-imperial nation. Ayub Khan-Din's East is East examines the impact of immigration and post-colonial experience through an Anglo-Pakistani family, the Khans. In a structure that echoes and acknowledges Arnold Wesker's Trilogy, the Khan family exists uneasily within and outside of British identity. Wesker's Kahn family translates into the Asian Khans signalling, clearly, a similarity of cultural dilemma.