If the British playwrights of the '50s and '60s were Angry Young Men, then those of the '70s and '80s are Furious. Writers like David Hare have brought a new passion to their plays that has often discomfited and shocked audiences, but has carried their work from the little "fringe" theaters to the West End commercial houses and the subsidized battlements of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. This passion is neither narrowly political nor personal; Hare and his generation are fiercely concerned for the quality of life as it touches everyone in his most intimate or public aspects, from sex to socialism, from economics to anxiety. Strongly individual, these writers also feel a common bond, symbolized in the controversial play about a sensational rape case, "Lay By," which was written collectively by seven of them—Hare, Howard Brenton, Brian Clark, Trevor...