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Nigel (Forbes) Dennis |
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When Nigel Dennis turned from novel writing to the theater, the omens were good. His first play, Cards of Identity (1956), was part of the legendary first season--a season that included John Osborne's Look Back in Anger--of the English Stage Company under the directorship of George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre. Devine was a close personal friend and a champion of Dennis's work who recognized that Dennis's passionate skepticism and fascination with intellectual ideas made him just the kind of writer to raise the literary and intellectual level of contemporary British theater. Yet, Dennis did not become a major figure in the upheavals and transformations that followed in the wake of the "New Wave" of British drama, and his plays have been consistently marginalized in nearly every history of postwar theater since. One explanation for this obscurity is that he was from an older generation--he was forty-four years old when he wrote his first play--than the writers, directors, and actors who figure so largely in the mythology of "New Wave" theater.
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