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In May 1956 , writing in the Sunday pages of The Observer , theatre critic Kenneth Tynan reviewed a play that permanently shattered the polite , drawing - room complacency of British drama : John Osborne's " Look Back in Anger " at the Royal Court Theatre . Confronted by Jimmy Porter's raw working - class fury , older establishment critics recoiled in distaste , dismissing the production as vulgar self - pity . Tynan recognised that this theatrical rupture demanded an equally aggressive prose style . To dramatise the play's transformative cultural significance , he deployed the wh - cleft , or pseudo - cleft construction . By packaging whole propositions into nominalized relative clauses ( " What Osborne has done is . . . " ) , Tynan built acute rhetorical anticipation before dropping his revolutionary aesthetic judgments . The grammatical mechanics of the wh - cleft permitted Tynan to separate background consensus from polemical revelation . Rather than writing the flat declarative sentence " Osborne brought post - war youth onto the stage , " Tynan restructured the claim : " What Osborne has created is a young man whose blistering dissatisfaction indicts an entire empire . " The wh - clause packages the broad artistic phenomenon into an accepted thematic subject , while the post - copular predicate delivers the critical blow . This syntactic separation turns standard critical observation into an event . The reader must travel through the interrogative pronoun before receiving the predicate , experiencing the exact shock that Osborne's dialogue inflicted upon his West End audience . Furthermore , pseudo - cleft structures allowed Tynan to articulate cultural ultimatums . He famously asserted : " What British theatre needs is not another polite French drawing - room comedy , but the stench of real sweat and working - class defiance . " By balancing negative and positive complements across the copular verb , the wh - cleft forces a decisive aesthetic choice upon the theatrical establishment . The construction denies neutrality ; it frames the critic's personal artistic preference not as a speculative opinion , but as an inevitable historical necessity that sweeps aside outmoded traditions . The enduring power of the wh - cleft resides in its sophisticated information packaging . By strategically delaying the focal assertion until the final syntactic beat of the sentence , the critic transforms grammatical word order into dramatic suspense , ensuring that decisive aesthetic verdicts land with the full force of theatrical revelation . When you draft critical reviews , strategic recommendations , or analytical appraisals , do you employ wh - clefts to orchestrate intellectual anticipation before delivering your core conclusions ? How can pseudo - cleft structures help you cleanly demarcate established situational context from your boldest , most provocative institutional claims ?
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