''Afore Night Come'' is a

play Play most commonly refers to: * Play (activity), an activity done for enjoyment * Play (theatre), a work of drama Play may refer also to: Computers and technology * Google Play, a digital content service * Play Framework, a Java framework * P ...

by the

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playwright

David Rudkin James David Rudkin (born 29 June 1936) is an English playwright . Early life Rudkin was born in London. Coming from a family of strict evangelical Christians, he was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and read Mods and Greats at St ...

, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. The subject matter of the play meant that any production in a public theatre would probably have been vetoed by the

Lord Chamberlain The Lord Chamberlain of the Household is the most senior officer of the Royal Household of the United Kingdom, supervising the departments which support and provide advice to the Sovereign of the United Kingdom while also acting as the main c ...

, so the RSC mounted the play at the members-only

Arts Theatre The Arts Theatre is a theatre in Great Newport Street, in Westminster, Central London. History It opened on 20 April 1927 as a members-only club for the performance of unlicensed plays, thus avoiding theatre censorship by the Lord Chamber ...

. As a result of the widespread critical acclaim that the play received, Rudkin was awarded the ''Evening Standard'' Drama Award for most promising playwright of 1962.Lambert (1963, 10). The play is set in an

orchard An orchard is an intentional plantation of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit- or nut-producing trees which are generally grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of ...

in the Black Country region of

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

's Midlands. Two young men and a

tramp A tramp is a long-term homeless person who travels from place to place as a vagrant, traditionally walking all year round. Etymology Tramp is derived from a Middle English verb meaning to "walk with heavy footsteps" (''cf.'' modern English ''t ...

arrive one morning looking for work picking fruit, but as the day wears on there is violence and bloodshed. Rudkin harks back to a pagan era where the crops were fertilised by human blood.

Kenneth Tynan Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at ''The Observer'', he praised Osborne's ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956), and encouraged the emerging wave of ...

, reviewing the play in

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...

, wrote "Not since ''

Look Back In Anger ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956) is a realist play written by John Osborne. It focuses on the life and marital struggles of an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working-class origin, Jimmy Porter, and his equally competent yet i ...

'' has a playwright made a debut more striking than this." When writing programme notes for the revival of the play at the Young Vic in 2001, Rudkin explained that he was afraid that no-one would ever stage the play, firstly because of its coarse language, but also "because I needed to thread through this dark story a counter-element of desire and love to off-set the rage and hatred - and there weren't any girls working in this company, and in any case the rage and hatred were all very male, the desire had to be male as well, inevitably making it have to be homosexual, which according to the laws of the time meant that the play could never be publicly staged. And the logical moral outcome of the play's process would be a climactic act of violence of a sort that I don't think had been done on an English stage since the Jacobeans. So I had to choose: back off and not follow the logical implications of the play; or go through with it and be damned. If I was going to be a writer, there wasn't any choice."

Notes

References

* Lambert, J. W. 1963. Introduction. In ''New English Dramatists 7''. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 7-13. * Rudkin, David. 1963. ''Afore Night Comes''. In ''New English Dramatists 7''. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 73-139. * Taylor, John Russell. 1963. ''Anger and After''. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1962 plays British plays 1960s debut plays LGBT-related plays {{LGBT-fiction-stub