Charles Wood has earned an established reputation in the "New Wave" British drama, which began in 1956 with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger . A strong emphasis on class conflict is endemic to the movement, and Wood, along with Osborne, Arnold Wesker, David Storey, and others, has explored the possibilities of the English working-class experience, previously ignored by major playwrights. While Wood is best known for his studies of enlisted men in the modern army, he also has examined the lives of theater people and professional writers. His style has progressed from a straightforward realism-with-message to a freer, subtler blend of metaphorically expressed ideas and dazzling theatrical devices.

Born in St. Peter Port, Guernsey, to itinerant actors, John Edward and Catherine Mae Harris Wood, Wood as a youth worked in provincial theaters and learned practical lessons of set design and stage management, which served him well at the beginning...