Nigel Dennis came to prominence as a playwright in 1956 at the same time as John Osborne. In fact, George Devine, director of the Royal Court Theatre, in summing up the successes of his first season, named Dennis and Osborne as the two important writers the company had discovered and brought to the stage. Perhaps because of these circumstances, the names of these playwrights were for some time linked; Dennis has even been labeled, quite incorrectly, as one of the Angry Young Men. Dennis's play Cards of Identity (1956) may have suffered from the great popular success of Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which preceded it in 1956, and Laurence Olivier's acting triumph in Osborne's The Entertainer, which succeeded it in 1957. Osborne, the better playwright, has had a career in the theater; Dennis has not. Nonetheless, Cards of Identity and, to a lesser degree, August for the People (1961) rest on their...