Kops, Bernard
Entry updated 4 March 2024. Tagged: Author, Theatre.
(1926-2024) UK playwright, poet, screenwriter and author, whose first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (performed 1958; 1959 chap), remains the best-known of his many dramas. As with much of his work, supernatural elements – in this case the ghost of the protagonist's father – easefully interact with the 1950s "kitchen sink realism" he popularly embodied. Happy endings in dramas of working-class life in London may be difficult to attain; in Hamlet, an elixir of love (see Drugs) does the trick. In The Dream of Peter Mann (performed 1960; 1960), the Angel of Death bans a young man based on the eponym of Peer Gynt (1867) by Henrik Ibsen (1829-1906) from a world-destructive quest.
Kops is of more direct sf interest for The Odyssey of Samuel Glass (2012), a novel whose (as usual) frustratedly questing protagonist engages in Time Travel to come to terms with his family in 1881, when it turns out he is expected to assassinate Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881). Kops's use here and elsewhere of some of the strategies of Fantastika to explore his central issues is arguably peripheral, but at the same time clearly enabling. [JC]
Bernard Kops
born London: 28 November 1926
died London: 24 February 2024
works (highly selected)
- The Odyssey of Samuel Glass (London: David Paul, 2012) [hb/]
plays
Various acting/reading editions with differing texts may exist for any of Kops's plays; no attempt is made here to track full publication histories.
- The Hamlet of Stepney Green: A (Sad) Comedy in Three Acts (London Evans Brothers Limited, 1959) [play: chap: first performed 19 May 1958 The Playhouse, Oxford: in the publisher's Evans Plays series: pb/B G S]
- The Dream of Peter Mann (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1960) [play: first performed September 1960 Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh: pb/nonpictorial]
- Four Plays: The Hamlet of Stepney Green: Enter Solly Gold: Home Sweet Honeycomb: The Lemmings (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964) [coll: The Hamlet of Stepney Green here reprinted with possible revisions: other plays may be original to this volume: hb/B G S]
links
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