[The appearance of Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry] has raised the usual question of whether here is at last a new writer of importance. (pp. 54-5)
There are overtones in Bolt's play which recall Osborne's The Entertainer…. What strikes one in the two plays is the attempt to imply something about contemporary England through a study of the middle generation…. Jim Cherry's empty job is set against the nostalgic recollection of life on the land. [The] lost middle generation is brought to crisis and self-destruction by the demand of its children for candor and clarity. In Bolt's play, where neither parents nor children quite come to understanding of their plight, it is a cruel adolescent girl who destroys illusions…. [There] is a kind of maudlin egocentricity growing into ruthlessly irresponsible use of others. The neurotic middle-aged man becomes … a symbol of that generation that stands between the old convictions which once fertilized life and a new ordering that will clear away their vestiges. It is a generation living on the patterns of the past without either believing in them or rejecting them—the generation, one might say, of the Suez crisis rather than the Battle of Britain. (p. 55)
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