ABSTRACT
Meanwhile the English Stage Company had come somewhat tortuously into existence. Duncan, whose own plays sank without trace, remained disgruntled, chuntering that The Entertainer was not his kind of play and Live Like Pigs was exactly what the English Stage Company should not be doing. It employed a kind of theatricalised realism to depict the harsh, optimistic world of a working class young woman with astonishing clarity, humour and honesty, though it must be added that Littlewood did much to focus the raw first version submitted when Delaney was only eighteen. It was George Devine's Royal Court, however, more than any other agent, which made the playwright the focus of the theatrical experience. Cobbold banned it, whereupon Devine turned the Royal Court into a club, and it was performed to large enthusiastic 'private' audiences. Orton wrote anarchic and irreverent plays which took farce to a new level.
