In 1961 when a Times correspondent wrote, "It is possible that Mr. Cooper is the busiest of British dramatists," Giles Cooper was unknown to British theatergoers. Only a small but loyal band of radio listeners knew him then as the gifted and witty creator of wickedly comic private worlds, each a sinister microcosm of a larger contemporary society, lost, embittered, half-crazed. Cooper would soon extend his enclosed worlds from disembodied radio to the peopled stage in three underrated, nearly forgotten plays of striking originality--Everything in the Garden (1962), Out of the Crocodile (1963), and Happy Family (1966)--which never attracted the audience that a fellow dramatist with similar strengths, Harold Pinter, was beginning to command. When Cooper, eventually the author of nearly fifty original pieces for radio and television and a dozen plays for the stage, was named best writer in 1961 by the Guild of Television Producers and Directors, ironically the...