Although once bracketed with Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, his fellow East End of London Jewish playwrights of the late 1950s, Bernard Kops, who has died aged 97, was a more fantastical, surreal writer than either. And while Pinter was always a political writer, Kops and Wesker, though committed socialists (and Kops a communist who sold copies of the Morning Star outside Whitechapel station), offered more sentimental portraits of Jewish family life in the context of local and European history.
Kops’s two early signature plays, which remain his best known – The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957) and Enter Solly Gold (1961) – established his main themes of emotional and material escape from the humdrum life. This “improvement” is invariably an illusion as Kops celebrates the durability of love, virtue and belonging.
