ABSTRACT
John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy first met in the autumn of 1955. When Arden had arrived in London late that summer to take up his post in Ronald Ward and Partner’s London office, he had lodged in a hostel. Contemporary intellectual and artistic life in Britain in the middle 1950s was frequently seen as passive and dull. The Royal Court was the theatre whose most significant earlier days had come fifty years before when Harley Granville Barker and J. E. Vedrenne had run it. Arden’s version of this is that at about this time he noticed a competition announced in The Observer. Arden felt at this juncture that the theatre had truly invited him to be a part of it. He felt his hopes and ambitions were within reaching distance.
