Bernard Kops belongs to that group of playwrights (Arnold Wesker is another notable example) whose work began appearing in the late 1950s and whose statements of generalized protest against life as they found it and politics as they saw it were drawn largely from backgrounds in poverty and lower-class Jewish family life in England. Kops uses the idiom of this background with great sensitivity, mixing it with humor and fantasy, to achieve, in several of his plays, telling effects. Directly or indirectly, his work shows the influences of a wide group of predecessors: Sean O'Casey, Bertolt Brecht, Shalom Aleichem, Brendan Behan, and even Karel Capek and Samuel Beckett. He is a peculiarly controversial figure among critics in that there is as yet little agreement as to his proper stature as an artist or upon the precise category of drama to which his work belongs.

Remarkably enough for a...