the well-bred sneers that would stifle talent &amp;hellip; . by Bernard Levin . long , long ago , Mr Noel Coward wrote an autobiography called present indicative . in part five he is invited to a house-party , where he meets some of the bright young people of the time . their shirts and flannels were yellow and well used against which mine seemed too newly white , too immaculately moulded from musical comedy . their socks , thick and carelessly wrinkled round their ankles , so unlike mine of too thin silk , caught up by intricate suspenders . their conversation , too , struck a traditional note in my ears . I seemed to know what they were going to say long before they said it . I sensed in their fledgling jokes and light , unsubtle badinage a certain quality of youthfulness that I had never known . and although I was the same age , if not younger than many of them , I felt suddenly old , over-experienced and quite definitely out of the picture . no change . that was in 1922 , and Mr Coward has n&apos;t changed a bit . for this last couple of weeks he has been shooting off his predictably pursed mouth on the British theatre of today , in the Sunday Times . and Mr Coward is still obsessed by the immensely important fact that other people do not dress exactly as he does . he still feels old and over-experienced . he still has the air of resentful superiority to more successful people . and he is still terribly , terribly , definitely out of the picture . in fact , the only advance - and that a slight one - is that he seems to have stopped writing sentences with no verbs in them . now a man who was too old in 1922 can hardly be expected to have much idea of what is going on in 1961 . and from Mr Coward &apos;s petulant , bewildered , inaccurate , and shabby attack on the playwrights and players of today anyone foolish enough to trust him as a guide to the current theatrical scene would get a quite lunatic idea of what was going on in it . success . they would not learn , for instance , that our stages are fuller of good stuff , and our auditoriums of enthusiastic audiences , than for many years . they would have no idea that the current British theatrical renaissance is having an effect far beyond the West End of London , so that Broadway is heavily influenced by the highly successful plays of today that it has imported from Britain . they would never discover that our writers and players are exciting as well as excited , that they speak in tones of passion and belief and deep , proud faith . they would not be told that the technical accomplishment displayed by some of these members of our new wave is astonishing in its range and completeness . above all , they would never , never know that the new wave - and it is the one thing that Mr Coward can no more forgive than he can understand - is supremely successful , or that his own latest offering to Britain &apos;s ungrateful stage ( waiting in the wings ) is being withdrawn shortly , having failed , as they say in the profession , to attract an audience . so nice . yet it is Mr Coward - too old nearly 40 years ago , mark you - who offers himself as the man to lead the poor , stumbling audiences out of the theatrical dark and into the bright , brave noonday where it is always perfect anyone-for-tennis weather , and where nothing as vulgar and squalid as a stove is ever mentioned , but where lots of nice , jolly , fun-giving adultery - to the immense , brittle amusement of the master - is . I think it is time that the case for the British theatre of today was made , and made loud and clear . hitherto it has had nothing but its talent and its success to speak for it against the well-bred sneers ( getting a little tight around the jaw-muscles by now ) of those whom the new wave has been washing higher and drier up the beach . it is ridiculous , to begin with , to speak in the same breath of such vastly diverse talents and outlooks as those of John Osborne , Robert Bolt , Arnold Wesker , John Mortimer , Shelagh Delaney , John Arden , N F Simpson , Harold Pinter , Lionel Bart , Peter Shaffer , Willis Hall . they write about a gigantic range of different people , classes , and situations . Mr Bolt in a man for all seasons , took us to the court of Henry 8 , and in the tiger and the horse to an Oxford college . in the one , a dark , rich portrait of a saint wrestling with his conscience ; in the other , an agonisingly brilliant study of a half-man who grows whole under the impact of tragedy . exquisite . Mr Wesker , in his exquisite trilogy , ranges from the pre-war East End of London to the post-war Norfolk , from the semi-literate old Jewish immigrants to the intense and musical young Ronnie , from the dying of the old to the rebirth of the young . Mr Shaffer , in his mercilessly observed five finger exercise , and Mr Mortimer , in his the wrong side of the park , explored the hearts of characters middle-class enough to satisfy even Mr Coward . from Mr Mortimer and Mr Simpson we have come to expect wit , style and elegance - three things that the false prophets of decay try to tell us have disappeared from our stages . and Mr Simpson &apos;s lunatic logic has a freshness , a lightness about it that would make waiting in the wings seem bad even if it were n&apos;t . from Miss Delaney we get the authentic accents of the young ; and from Mr Bart we get a large number of very good tunes , which some more traditional quarters have found hard to come by lately . in short , from them all we get a huge , bursting cornucopia of every kind of writing , every kind of plot , every kind of setting , every kind of character . belief . and to all this theatrical richness , the poor darling dodos can only squeak kitchen sink and dustbin drama . in fact , only one play in the last few years has had a dustbin in it , and that was by an Irishman who writes in French . only one has a kitchen sink in it , and that one - Mr Wesker &apos;s - was the one which above all proclaimed its faith in beauty , goodness , and truth , and turned savagely to rend squalor and those who perpetuate it . which brings me to what I think is the clue - the common factor shared by many of our younger playwrights , and the element which above all produces uncomprehending rage in Mr Coward . in a single word , it is belief . poets without appointments . by Peter Chambers . at the top of 14 uncarpeted stairs in a Notting Hill mews lives Christopher Logue , poet . come up and have a drink , he yelled out of the window . I went up and lay down . this was obligatory , because Logue owns one typewriter , 500 books , and almost no furniture . I lay on the bed . Logue lay on the floor . the only chair in the room was occupied by Burns Singer , a Scottish poet who chain-smoked cigarettes made out of loose tobacco , and remarked from time to time : do ye not find the whisky in London terrible ? nobody seems to care about any modern poet nowadays except John Betjeman , who writes agreeably in praise of buttered toast and railway stations , and became a best seller almost by appointment after Princess Margaret said she liked his verse . but what are the other fellows up to ? how do they live ? I got some interesting answers from Logue and Singer , and later from an American , Theodore Roethke , who has actually made poetry pay . money . Christopher Logue is a dark , narrow , energetic man of 34 . if he were an actor , I would type-cast him as Shakespeare &apos;s Iago . he has published half a dozen books of poetry and achieved a wider reputation when he wrote the lyrics for the royal court Theatre musical the lily-white boys . I actually made quite good money then , said Logue . for the eight weeks the show ran I earned &amp;pound;85 a week . but that represented six months &apos; work , do n&apos;t forget . average it out and you see I was really getting less than a waiter . noisy . a current book of poetry , songs , has earned Logue &amp;pound;100 . he was paid exactly that for one article in the American teenage magazine Mademoiselle . Christopher Logue writes fierce , noisy poems about war , love , and Logue . son of a Southampton civil servant , he was brought up by Jesuits . I now believe in the total abolition of private property , he said . he got up off the floor , rattled some coal into the stove , and lay down again . a gleam of gold shone in the front teeth of Burns Singer as he lit his fifth home-made cigarette . he said : of course , Christopher believes that propoganda and politics are part of poetry . for me , it &apos;s different . it &apos;s almost like psychoanalysis . I &apos;ll do no work for weeks and then write solidly for 12 hours . I think what I &apos;m really seeking all the time is the source of original sin in myself . Logue leaped to his feet at this heresy and shouted : original sin ! what are you talking about ? Logue looks like a man who would punch anybody on the nose . but then who could punch Burns Singer ? a mass of gold hair frames his face , he has the air of a spiritualised Viking whom the bigger men left at home when they set out in their long-prowed ships to raid England . flames . Jimmy to his friends , Burns Singer is actually the son of a Glaswegian mother and a Jewish salesman from Manchester . I count him the most inflammable poet on the English scene , because the way he showers burning tobacco strands on his flossy gold beard he is bound to go up in flames one day . in love , he wrote : - I can not see smiles in another . and every tear I brush aside I find you hidden within it like a bride . he wrote that for Marie , the woman he made his bride five years ago . she is a New York-born Negress with a Harley-street practice in psychotherapy . dreamers only part of the time , poets show an acute interest in money , mainly because of the difficulty they have in laying their hands on it . most magazines pay &amp;pound;10 10 s for a short poem , and the rates at the B.B.C go down to 10 d a line for longer broadcast works . poets write reviews and do journalism to make a living . I &apos;m never sloppy about money , said Christopher Logue in a raging voice . I want a car . I want to eat out in restaurants . you know who I &apos;d like to be ? I &apos;d like to be president of U.S steel ! Burns Singer , once a fish-chasing zoologist at Aberdeen marine laboratory , said : I &apos;d like to be Spyros K Skouras . I just fancy the glamour of working in films . Professor . the world does not owe poets a living , but it pays more than a modest competence to Theodore Roethke ( pronounced ret-key ) , a great shambling American poet big as a house and earning enough money to live in one in smart Belgravia during his London visit . dwarfing a glass of sherry with his big hand , 52-year-old Roethke told me : my great year was 1958 , when I picked up &amp;pound;10,000 in various prizes , including an award from the Ford foundation . as a working Professor of English at the University of Washington , Seattle , I teach poetry for &amp;pound;4,500 a year . but the amount he gets by actually writing poetry and getting it published is only about &amp;pound;1,000 a year . journey . Roethke &apos;s best man when he married , was W H Auden , who sang his songs for more than sixpence as the best-known British poet of the 1930s . but even Auden can n&apos;t make a living just writing poetry , said Roethke . I doubt if anybody does , except maybe Robert Frost . let &apos;s face it , poems will never be as popular as football coupons , and what America offers is just bigger subsidies . as characters , poets range from rhyming layabouts to saintly travellers who have embarked on the greatest journey of all : the journey into the mind and spirit of man . 