In his book Anger and After (1962), John Russell Taylor summarised this new generation of playwrights: “Arnold Wesker is the son of a Jewish tailor in the East End, and Harold Pinter, too, comes from an East End Jewish family; Shelagh Delaney . . . comes from Salford and did not even manage to scrape into the local grammar school; Alun Owen is Liverpool-Welsh . . . he and several others, John Osborne, Clive Exton, and Harold Pinter among them, have worked their way up from the ranks, as it were, after periods spent with varying degrees of success as humble repertory actors.” This was a world away from the drawing-room drama of Somerset Maugham, Rattigan and Coward, all born before the First World War. In just a few years British theatre moved from the drawing room to the kitchen (a crucial room in every early Wesker play).

The late 1950s didn’t just see the emergence of a new generation of working-class playwrights. It saw new theatres and critics, keen to champion the new wave. Each play of Wesker’s trilogy was produced at the brand-new Belgrade Theatre in Coventry (which had opened in 1958). They then transferred to the Royal Court, home of the new English Stage Company (based at the Royal Court since 1956), which is where John Osborne’s breakthrough plays were first put on. Wesker saw Look Back in Anger in a touring Royal Court production before he had written a single play. It was the Court which still championed Wesker late in his career: Stephen Daldry revived The Kitchen in 1994 and Dominic Cooke directed Chicken Soup with Barley there in 2011.

New critics like Kenneth Tynan at the Observer, Harold Hobson at the Sunday Times and Bernard Levin championed Wesker and the new generation of playwrights. Levin was barely 30 when he wrote a rave review of Roots in the Daily Express: “I have seen this great shining play three times, and it seems to have grown visibly in stature each time. Beatie Bryant’s betrayal by her Ronnie is still poignant beyond the reach of anything but the very greatest poetry, and her final triumphant budding is still the most heart-lifting single moment I have seen upon a stage.” Tynan was in his early thirties when he praised Chips with Everything. Hobson, the oldest of the three, called it “the left-wing drama’s first real breakthrough, the first anti-establishment play of which the establishment has cause to be afraid. This is something to be discussed and re-discussed, admired, feared.”

Young critics and young audiences warmed to Wesker’s preoccupation with generational conflict and the voice of the young, Beatie Bryant and Ronnie Kahn, as much as Jimmy Porter in Look Back with Anger. When Ronnie turns on his mother, Sarah Kahn, and when Beatie rebels against her family and finds her own voice at the end of Roots, they were speaking for a new generation, rather young than angry. Looking back, 60 years later, Kops told me: “Things were changing and we felt part of that rolling wave of change. The posh people who once ruled — this was all ending.”