SOURCE: Dalrymple, Theodore. “Reticence or Insincerity, Rattigan or Pinter.” New Criterion 19, no. 3 (November 2000): 12-20.

In the following essay, Dalrymple compares the work of Rattigan and Harold Pinter in order to illuminate the significant cultural shift that took place in England in the 1950s.

History is a seamless robe, of course, but there are nevertheless discernible tears in its fabric. One of these occurred in the 1950s, in the small world of the British theater. No doubt unimportant in itself, this quasi-revolution heralded, and perhaps even contributed to, a profound change in our culture.

The year in which the change started was 1956: the year, not coincidentally, of the Suez crisis, when it was unmistakably clear as never before that Britain, after two centuries of world influence, was now reduced to the status of a third-rate power, a kind of larger Belgium, which could disappear from the face of the...