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Poet and playwright Bernard Kops dies peacefully aged 97
The Jewish Londonder wrote more than 40 plays for television, theatre and radio, several novels and poetry collections
February 26, 2024 13:30
By, Elisa Bray
1 min read
The Jewish Londonder wrote more than 40 plays for television, theatre and radio, several novels and poetry collections
February 26, 2024 13:30ByElisa Bray, Elisa Bray
The poet and playwright Bernard Kops, whose works explored the Jewish community of London’s East End, died peacefully aged 97 on Sunday surrounded by his family.
Born in 1926 in the East End to Dutch-Jewish parents, Kops left school as a teenager and wrote more than 40 plays for television, theatre and radio, several novels and poetry collections, and two autobiographies throughout his career.
A statement from his family said: “Poet and playwright Bernard Kops died peacefully Sunday surrounded by his great love, Erica, and the many family members who never found themselves far from the embrace of his smile or his words.”
Kops’ first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green – in which a working-class community is portrayed through the relationship between a sick father and his grown-up son, a reversal of the family relations in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – catapulted him to recognition in the late-50s and made him as successful as other then-up-and-coming playwrights Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter and John Osborne. The play became a key work in the “kitchen-sink” drama style instigated by Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.
His work has explored the Holocaust, as well as his love for his wife Erica and his family, and he wrote the script for the 1974 film Just One Kid, in which a Jewish Eastender tells of community life and growing up in poverty in the 1930s.
His publisher David Paul said he became acquainted with the writer late in his career when he published his 2010 poetry anthology This Room In The Sunlight, which included his famous work Shalom Bomb.
In a tribute, Paul said: “Sad to learn of the death of Bernard Kops death this morning. He was the last of the celebrated crop of Jewish writers that emerged in the 1950s out of the Jewish East End such as (Harold) Pinter and (Arnold) Wesker, and he was prolific with a cornucopia of plays, novels and poetry.”
On the reasons for the emergence of Jewish writers such as Wesker, Pinter and Peter Shaffer in the 1950s, Kops said in an interview with the JC that it was a reaction to theatre having been “very upper middle-class”.
“We brought our backgrounds, our experiences and our traditions,” he said. “We were writing about the kind of things we knew or felt or dreamed of. An authenticity came and wiped away the middle-class, like [Terence] Rattigan – a marvellous writer, but the audiences didn't want that anymore.”
Kops also wrote the 1991 psychological drama Playing Sinatra, and the surrealistic Ezra, based on the character of American poet Ezra Pound.