Although Harold Pinter and the Irish writer Brendan Behan also wrote plays set in a working-class environment, they stand apart from the angry young men. In such works as The Birthday Party (1957) Pinter seems to offer reasonable interpretations of his characters' behaviour, only to withdraw the interpretations or set them slightly askew in an effort to keep the audience intent on every least hint in the action on stage. Outside the literary mainstream was the Irish-born novelist-dramatist Samuel Beckett, recipient in 1969 of the Nobel Prize for literature. Long a resident in France, he wrote his laconic, ambiguously symbolic works in French and translated them himself into English (Waiting for Godot, play, 1952; How It Is, novel, 1964).
Both English and American audiences have enthusiastically received the plays of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969) are farces dealing with the perverseness of modern morality; dazzling verbal ingenuity distinguishes Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), and The Real Thing (1984).