kitchen sink realism

Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, mainstream and independent cinema, and television, whose protagonists usually could be described as "angry young men" who were disillusioned with modern society. It used a style of social realism that depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation, and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore controversial social and political issues ranging from abortion to homelessness. The harsh, realistic style stood in sharp contrast to the escapism of the previous generation's so-called "well-made plays". The films, plays, and novels employing this style are often set in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the accents and slang heard in those regions. The films It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and The Blue Lamp (1950) are precursors of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the genre. The gritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Kitchen sink realism”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

kitchen sink realism is British social realist artistic movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 6 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶