The real original kitchen-sink drama

Rewrite the history books! Tradition tells us that kitchen-sink drama began in 1956 with Look Back in Anger. A season of lost classics at the White Bear Theatre has unearthed a gritty below-stairs play that predates John Osborne’s breakthrough by five years. Women of Twilight by Sylvia Rayman (which has transferred to the Pleasance) was a thumping West End hit in the early 1950s. It spawned several touring productions, one of which featured the young June Whitfield. When the script was filmed in 1952 it became the first British feature to attract the enticing ‘X’ certificate (over 18s only).

The setting is a lodging house in Hampstead where unmarried mothers are crammed together, three to a room. While the babies are cared for in a squalid crèche, the desperate mums go out to find work, cash or husbands. In those days, single motherhood was a scourge that could affect a woman’s life for ever, and the marital code was no respecter of wealth or privilege.