The facts are well enough known. On April 2, 1956, a new company began a term of management at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It called itself the English Stage Company, and announced its intentions of becoming a writer's theatre, playing new English plays and contemporary classics from abroad in repertory. This sounded brave and worthy, though enough similarly brave and worthy ventures had foundered in the years since the war for the few interested people to have no great confidence in the new company's survival. The first repertory season was to consist of five productions: first a play by the novelist Angus Wilson, The Mulberry Tree, which had already been tried out at Bristol, then the first British production of The Crucible, then Look Back in Anger, a new play by a young actor, then a double bill of poetic dramas about Don Juan by one of the company's directors, Ronald Duncan, and finally Nigel Dennis's adaptation of his novel Cards of Identity.