John Arden
The center of the play is a conflict between two families in adjoining semi-attacheds on a new housing estate. The families nearly represent two different, incompatible ways of life: the Jacksons are good, solid, respectable, impeccably conventional members of the lower middle class; while the Sawneys, who are moved somewhat against their will into an ordinary little house next door, are essentially nomadic vagrants, the last descendants of the Elizabethan sturdy beggars now barely existing on the fringes of a society which has no place for them. Difficulties arise immediately as they run up against all sorts of contradictions and complications, as Mr. Arden refrains from limiting his characterizations of these two separate 'individuals' into any general thesis.
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