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. One of the mums is an upper-class teenager, who claims to have been raped but can’t explain why her parents haven’t rallied to her side. A nice middle-class mother announces that her husband is working in America. No one believes her. The central character, Vivianne, is expecting a baby, whose father used to be an actor before he turned to crime. He’s now facing three murder charges at the high court. If convicted he’ll swing for it, and Vivianne will be left as the cast-off mother of an executed killer’s child.

These were tough times and Rayman’s script spares us none of the horrific details. The lodging house is administered by the imperious, shifty Helen, who runs a side project supplying unwanted babies to rich, childless couples.