Kitchen sink realism

Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sinkdrama) is a British cultural movement that

A Taste of Honey is an influential "kitchen sinkdrama". In this photo of the 1960 Broadwayproduction, Joan Plowright plays the role of Jo, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who has a love affair with a blacksailor (played by Billy Dee Williams).

developed in the late 1950s and early1960s in theatre, art, novels, film, andtelevision plays, whose protagonistsusually could be described as "angryyoung men" who were disillusioned withmodern society. It used a style of socialrealism, which depicted the domesticsituations of working class Britons, livingin cramped rented accommodation andspending their off-hours drinking in grimypubs, to explore controversial social andpolitical issues ranging from abortion tohomelessness. The harsh, realistic stylecontrasted sharply with the escapism ofthe previous generation's so-called "well-made plays".

The films, plays and novels employing thisstyle are often set in poorer industrialareas in the North of England, and use theaccents and slang heard in those regions.The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)is a precursor of the genre, and the JohnOsborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) isthought of as the first of the genre. Thegritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger,for example, takes place in a cramped,one-room flat in the English Midlands.Shelagh Delaney's 1958 play A Taste ofHoney (which was made into a film of thesame name in 1961), is about a teenageschoolgirl who has an affair with a blacksailor, gets pregnant, and then moves in

with a gay male acquaintance; it raisesissues such as class, race, gender andsexual orientation. The conventions of thegenre have continued into the 2000s,finding expression in such televisionshows as Coronation Street andEastEnders.[1]

In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a termused by critic David Sylvester to describepainters who depicted social realist–typescenes of domestic life.[2]

The cultural movement was rooted in theideals of social realism, an artistic

History

movement, expressed in the visual andother realist arts, which depicts workingclass activities. Many artists whosubscribed to social realism were painterswith socialist political views. While themovement has some commonalities withSocialist Realism, another style of realismwhich was the "official art" advocated bythe governments of the Soviet Union andother Eastern Bloc countries, the two hadseveral differences. While social realism isa broader type of art that realisticallydepicts subjects of social concern,[3]

Socialist realism is characterized by theglorified depiction of socialist values, such

as the emancipation of the proletariat, in arealistic manner.[4]

Unlike Socialist realism, social realism isnot an official art produced by, or under thesupervision of the government. Theleading characters are often 'anti-heroes'rather than part of a class to be admired,as in Socialist realism. Typically,protagonists in social realism aredissatisfied with their working class livesand the world, rather than being idealisedworkers who are part of a Socialist utopiain the process of creation. As such, socialrealism allows more space for thesubjectivity of the author to be displayed.

Partly, social realism developed as areaction against Romanticism, whichpromoted lofty concepts such as the"ineffable" beauty and truth of art andmusic, and even turned them into spiritualideals. As such, social realism focused onthe "ugly realities of contemporary life andsympathized with working class people,particularly the poor." (The quotation isfrom George Shi, of the University of FineArts, Valencia).[5]

Kitchen sink realism involves workingclass settings[6] and accents, including

Trademarks

accents from Northern England.[7] Thefilms and plays often explore taboosubjects such as adultery, pre-marital sex,abortion, and crime.[8]

In the United Kingdom, the term "kitchensink" derived from an expressionistpainting by John Bratby, which containedan image of a kitchen sink. Bratby didvarious kitchen and bathroom-themedpaintings, including three paintings oftoilets. Bratby's paintings of people oftendepicted the faces of his subjects asdesperate and unsightly.[9][10] Kitchen sink

Origins of the term

realism artists painted everyday objects,such as trash cans and beer bottles. Thecritic David Sylvester wrote an article in1954 about trends in recent English art,calling his article "The Kitchen Sink" inreference to Bratby's picture. Sylvesterargued that there was a new interestamong young painters in domestic scenes,with stress on the banality of life.[1] Otherartists associated with the kitchen sinkstyle include Derrick Greaves, EdwardMiddleditch and Jack Smith.

1950s to 1960s

Before the 1950s, the United Kingdom'sworking class were often depictedstereotypically in Noël Coward's drawingroom comedies and British films. Kitchensink realism was seen as being inopposition to the "well-made play", the kindwhich theatre critic Kenneth Tynan oncedenounced as being set in "Loamshire", ofdramatists like Terence Rattigan. "Well-made plays" were a dramatic genre fromnineteenth-century theatre which found itsearly 20th-century codification in Britain inthe form of William Archer's Play-Making: AManual of Craftmanship (1912),[11] and inthe United States with George PierceBaker's Dramatic Technique (1919).[12]

Kitchen sink works were created with theintention of changing all that. Theirpolitical views were initially labeled asradical, sometimes even anarchic.

John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger(1956) depicted young men in a way thatis similar to the then-contemporary "AngryYoung Men" movement of film and theatredirectors. The "angry young men" were agroup of mostly working and middle classBritish playwrights and novelists whobecame prominent in the 1950s. Followingthe success of the Osborne play, the label"angry young men" was later applied byBritish media to describe young writers

who were characterised by adisillusionment with traditional Britishsociety. The hero of Look Back In Anger isa graduate, but he is working in a manualoccupation. It dealt with social alienation,the claustrophobia and frustrations of aprovincial life on low incomes.

The impact of this work inspired ArnoldWesker, Shelagh Delaney, and numerousothers, to write plays of their own. TheEnglish Stage Company at the Royal CourtTheatre, headed by George Devine andTheatre Workshop organised by JoanLittlewood were particularly prominent inbringing these plays to public attention.

Critic John Heilpern wrote that Look Backin Anger expressed such "immensity offeeling and class hatred" that it altered thecourse of English theatre.[1] The term"Angry theatre" was coined by critic JohnRussell Taylor.[13]

This was all part of the British New Wave—a transposition of the concurrent nouvellevague film movement in France, some ofwhose works, such as The 400 Blows of1959, also emphasised the lives of theurban proletariat. British filmmakers suchas Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson(see also Free Cinema) channelled theirvitriolic anger into film making.

Confrontational films such as SaturdayNight and Sunday Morning (1960) and ATaste of Honey (1961) were noteworthymovies in the genre. Saturday Night andSunday Morning is about a youngmachinist who spends his wages atweekends on drinking and having a goodtime, until his affair with a married womanleads to her getting pregnant and himbeing beaten by her husband to the pointof hospitalisation. A Taste of Honey isabout a 16-year old schoolgirl with anabusive, alcoholic mother. The schoolgirlstarts a relationship with a black sailor andgets pregnant. After the sailor leaves onhis ship, Jo moves in with a homosexual

acquaintance, Geoffrey, who assumes therole of surrogate father. A Taste of Honeyraises the issues of class, race, gender andsexual orientation.

Later, as many of these writers anddirectors diversified, kitchen sink realismwas taken up by television directors whoproduced television plays. The single playwas then a staple of the medium, andArmchair Theatre (1956–68), produced bythe ITV contractor ABC, The WednesdayPlay (1964–70) and Play for Today (1970–84), both BBC series, contained manyworks of this kind. Jeremy Sandford'stelevision play Cathy Come Home (1966,

directed by Ken Loach for The WednesdayPlay slot) for instance, addressed the then-stigmatised issue of homelessness.

Kitchen sink realism was also used in thenovels of Stan Barstow, John Braine, AlanSillitoe and others.

Look Back in Anger (1959)

Room at the Top (1959)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning(1960)

The Entertainer (1960)

A Taste of Honey (1961)

List of films

A Kind of Loving (1962)

The L-Shaped Room (1962)

The Loneliness of the Long DistanceRunner (1962)

This Sporting Life (1963)

Billy Liar (1963)

A Place to Go (1963)

Bitter Harvest (1963)

Sparrows Can't Sing (1963)[14]

The Leather Boys (1964)

The Comedy Man (1964)

This Is My Street (1964)

Alfie (1966)

Georgy Girl (1966)[15]

The Family Way (1966)

Poor Cow (1967)

Up the Junction (1968)

Kes (1969)

Bronco Bullfrog (1969)[16]

Spring and Port Wine (1970)

Look Back In Anger (1956)

My Flesh, My Blood (Radio play, 1957)

A Taste Of Honey (1958)

Sparrows Can't Sing (1960)

Alfie (1963)

Up the Junction (TV play, 1965)

List of plays

Ashcan School – equivalent Americanart movement

Italian neorealism

Naturalism

Cathy Come Home (TV play, 1966)

1. Heilpern, John. John Osborne: TheMany Lives of the Angry Young Man,New York: Knopf, 2007.

See also

References

2. Walker, John. (1992) "Kitchen SinkSchool" . Glossary of Art, Architecture& Design since 1945, 3rd. ed. Retrieved20 January 2012.

3. Todd, James G. "Social Realism". ArtTerms. Museum of Modern Art, 2009.

4. Korin, Pavel, “Thoughts on Art”,Socialist Realism in Literature and Art.Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p.95.

5. "Social Realism" . Retrieved2008-05-04.

�. "Everything you need to know aboutKitchen Sink Dramas - Reader'sDigest" . www.readersdigest.co.uk.

7. MacCabe, Colin. "A Taste of Honey:Northern Accents" . The CriterionCollection.

�. Ford, Lynsey. "11 Films That ExploreThe British Class System" . CultureTrip.

9. Ian Chilvers; John Glaves-Smith(2009). A Dictionary of Modern andContemporary Art. Oxford UniversityPress. p. 259. ISBN 978-0-19-923965-8

10. "John Bratby 1928–1992". Tate.Retrieved 6 January 2014.

11. Archer, William (January 1, 2004)."Play-Making: A Manual ofCraftsmanship" – via ProjectGutenberg.

12. J L Styan, Modern Drama in Theoryand Practice I, quoted by Innes (2000,7).

13. John Russell Taylor. Anger and After,1962, London: Methuen.

14. "A ★★★½ review of Sparrows Can'tSing (1963)" . letterboxd.com.

15. "Georgy Girl" . Empire. April 5, 2006.

1�. "Where to begin with kitchen sinkdrama" . British Film Institute.

Last edited 26 days ago by 88.111.175.116

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"Beyond the Kitchen Sink" on BBCRadio 4 (2017)

BFI: British New Wave

Tucker, David, ed. British Social Realismin the Arts Since 1940, London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2011.

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