Drama:
The Hamlet of Stepney Green, pr. 1958
Good-Bye World, pr. 1959
Change for the Angel, pr. 1960
The Dream of Peter Mann, pr., pb. 1960
Enter Solly Gold, pb. 1961 (music by Stanley Myers)
Stray Cats and Empty Bottles, pr. 1964 (televised), pr. 1967 (staged)
The Boy Who Wouldn’t Play Jesus, pr., pb. 1965
David, It Is Getting Dark, pr. 1966
It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow, pr. 1975 (televised), pr. 1976 (staged; with John Goldschmidt)
More out than In, pr. 1980
Ezra, pb. 1980
Simon at Midnight, pr. 1982 (radio play), pr. 1985 (staged)
Sophie (The Last of the Red Hot Mamas), pr. 1990
Playing Sinatra, pr. 1991
Dreams of Anne Frank, pr. 1992
Call in the Night, pr. 1995
Plays: One, pb. 1999
Plays: Two, pb. 2000
Plays: Three, pb. 2002
Long Fiction:
Awake for Mourning, 1958
Motorbike, 1962
Yes from No-Man’s Land, 1965
The Dissent of Dominick Shapiro, 1966
By the Waters of Whitechapel, 1969
The Passionate Past of Gloria Gaye, 1971
Settle Down Simon Katz, 1973
Partners, 1975
On Margate Sands, 1978
Teleplays:
I Want to Go Home, 1963
The Last Years of Brian Hooper, 1967
Alexander the Great, 1971
Just One Kid, 1974
Moss, 1975
Rocky Marciano Is Dead, 1976
Night Kids, 1983
Radio Plays:
Home Sweet Honeycomb, 1962
The Lemmings, 1963
The Dark Ages, 1964
Bournemouth Nights, 1979
Over the Rainbow, 1980
Trotsky Was My Father, 1984
Poetry:
Poems, 1955
Poems and Songs, 1958
An Anemone for Antigone, 1959
Erica, I Want to Read You Something, 1967
For the Record, 1971
Barricades in West Hampstead, 1988
Grandchildren, and Other Poems, 2000
Nonfiction:
The World Is a Wedding, 1963 (autobiography)
Neither Your Honey nor Your Sting: An Offbeat History of the Jews, 1984
Shalom Bomb: Scenes from My Life, 2000 (autobiography)
Bernard Kops was born in Stepney, a Jewish immigrant area in the East End of London, to a Dutch-Jewish immigrant cobbler and a Dutch-Jewish mother. He was the youngest of four sisters and two brothers. Among the experiences that found their way into his work were his growing up in an intense and cosmopolitan (yet impoverished) environment, Fascist demonstrations and counterdemonstrations of the pre-World War II period, life in wartime London, and cultural (rather than religious) Jewishness. In Kops’s adolescent years during World War II, his family moved around England attempting to avoid the German bombing of London.
After 1945, Kops acted in repertory theater and traveled in France, Spain, and Tangier. His mother’s death in 1951 deeply affected him, and he was committed to a psychiatric hospital; these experiences were recorded in his 1959 narrative poem An Anemone for Antigone. Kops’s concern with mental states is found in his novel On Margate Sands, a study of five former psychiatric hospital patients. His writing is inhabited by frenetic characters plagued by extreme mood changes. His central preoccupations are the borderlines between sanity and insanity, dreams and psychiatric disturbance, and creativity and madness.
Stability came into Kops’s life with his meeting Erica Gordon, whom he married in 1956. They had four children. Beginning in the 1950’s, Kops made his living as a professional writer; he also taught and served as a writer-in-residence. Theatrical writing has been Kops’s main form. The early autobiographical play The Hamlet of Stepney Green used music to evoke nostalgia and to provide a melancholic and ironic commentary on the action. The central figure of the drama Enter Solly Gold is a charlatan, rather than–as in The Hamlet of Stepney Green–an oedipally obsessed working-class figure. David, It Is Getting Dark focuses on a reactionary writer plagiarizing the work of a poor Jewish writer. Ezra Pound is the subject of Kops’s well-known radio and theatrical play Ezra; at the drama’s core is Pound’s imprisonment and release. Irving Wardle noted in his London Times review that “no other living” dramatist matched Kops in the virtuoso handling of dream logic. In Playing Sinatra, an obsession with Frank Sinatra dominates the thoughts of the protagonists. Dreams of Anne Frank, a drama for children, is similarly preoccupied with flights of imaginative fantasy from the harsh realities of everyday existence. Call in the Night is concerned with the plight of childhood genius, memories, and the fate of the prodigy unable to perform. Sophie (The Last of the Red Hot Mamas) is about the great Yiddish music hall singer Sophie Tucker, and it juxtaposes song, dance, and memory to evoke atmosphere and to continue Kops’s explorations into memory, experience, and fantasy.
Radio was a natural medium for Kops’s explorations of lyrical dream fantasy; Ezra, for example, was originally written for the radio. Among his other radio plays was Trotsky Was My Father, which used a historic figure as the vehicle for reflections on dreams and disillusionment. Kops also wrote frequently for television; he adapted plays and wrote documentaries about the wartime bombing of London. Night Kids focused on contemporary social problems–child runaways in London, drugs, and prostitution.
Kops, highly skilled in many genres, was largely unswayed by the literary or political fashions of the second half of the twentieth century. Surrealism, fantasy, and the problems of identity pervade his novels. For example, in The Passionate Past of Gloria Gaye, presented through the use of first-person narrative, an evocative representation of the urban landscape of London is juxtaposed with surreal passages and images to convey the psychological disintegration of a suburban housewife. A nonfiction work, the autobiographical The World Is a Wedding, contains some of Kops’s most powerful and sustained writing focusing on childhood experiences and family conflicts; it eloquently depicts financially impoverished East End London Jewish life. Kops’s poetry, punctuated with lyricism and surrealism, frequently celebrates his love for his wife and concern for his children.