ABSTRACT
In the mid-1960s John Arden looked, according to the theatre critic, Harold Hobson, like ‘a romantic minor prophet come hot foot from Sinai’. When Armstrong’s Last Goodnight was produced in Glasgow in 1964, the theatre magazine Encore recorded ‘the eagerness with which the metropolitan pens swarmed up into derelict Gorbals’, and added that this was ‘an indication that anything Arden does is now taken seriously and regarded as important’. The formidable Harold Hobson decided that the ‘reason why Mr Arden’s work is rarely appreciated properly at a first hearing is that what Brecht pretended to do, Mr Arden actually does’,12 comparing Arden, infuriatingly enough, with Brecht again, though not to Arden’s detriment. In 1960 the Royal Shakespeare Company had given Arden a commission for the play which became Ironhand.
