"Denial," "Bofors Gun" and the London Revival of Rage Graham Michael John McGrath's "Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun" is among the shows not shy about rage on London stages. "I HOPE you don't cut out my anger," says the oppressively maternal-looking woman, a therapist being interviewed by a television reporter. You don't see much anger on telly these days. Everyone's too eager to be loved. Don't worry, pet. You're in an Arnold Wesker play, aren't you? His characters have been raging, ranting and kvetching with intent on British stages for more than half a century. Rest assured that everyone in "Denial," which recently ended its run at the King's Head Theater in Islington, will have plenty of occasions to beat up the furniture, make accusations and yell their heads off. And by the way, they aren't the only ones in town behaving this way. In London theater, it seems, rage is once again all the rage. That's good news for Mr. Wesker, who has complained in interviews of neglect and contempt of his work by the theater establishment. In the late 1950s and "60s he was grouped with iconoclasts like John Osborne as one of those darling, shocking Angry Young Men. But when the shouting of the "60s was succeeded by more measured, ironic voices, Mr. Wesker inevitably fell out of fashion. He continued to write (more than 40 plays to date), but his work was often treated with the condescension afforded an obstreperous relative who doesn't know when to leave the party. All fashions are cyclical, though, in theater as much as in hemlines. And after a couple of years of celebrating the gentlemanly stoicism and buttocks-clenching repression of Terence Rattigan, the London stage is now embracing its vintage ragers. Mr. Wesker's early, socially conscious plays "Chicken Soup With Barley" (1958) and "The Kitchen" (1957) were revived to acclaim last year at the Royal Court and the National Theaters. And the tiny but fecund King's Head is holding a Wesker festival, honoring his 80th birthday, which included the hot-ticket production of the seldom-seen "Denial," from 1997. Across town at the Finborough, another small but potent pub theater, a rare revival of John McGrath's "Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun" (1966) is stirring and shaking sellout audiences. You haven't heard of McGrath? To be honest, I was only dimly aware of his existence. Yet when he died in 2002, at 66, McGrath, who founded the populist 7:84 theater company, was widely described as having been one of the most influential forces in the British theater of the 20th century. "He was Britain's Brecht, Scotland's Dario Fo," Brian Logan wrote in The Guardian. In the same article, the directors Jude Kelly and Richard Eyre were quoted as mourning not only the passing of McGrath but also of the theater of political vision he embodied. "People in theater lost the courage and sense of political immediacy that prompted agitprop," Ms. Kelly said. But on the evidence of "Bofors Gun," McGrath was far more than an agitprop agitator. At first glance this play - which has been given a tight, testosterone-fueled production by Robert Hastie - feels like a fouler-mouthed variation on "Journey's End," R. C. Sherriff's paradigmatic antiwar drama of the 1920s that enjoyed a superb Broadway revival in 2007. In McGrath's play an all-male cast embodies a spectrum of types of soldiers, who chaff, chafe, cajole and lash out at one another while anxiously sharing cramped quarters. These surly men, though, have even more reason to question what they're doing than did their stiff-upper-lipped counterparts in "Journey's End," who were at least engaged in bona fide warfare. The year is now 1954, and these soldiers are stationed in British-occupied Germany. Their sole task is to protect artillery, the guns of the title, from the Russians; it turns out said artillery has been obsolete for at least a decade. That their job is superfluous - and the likelihood of outside attack infinitesimal - doesn't mean that these men aren't in danger. There will be blood before the play's end. But the violence is generated by an existential rage. These men variously regard their futile duties with indifference, careerist cynicism, time-marking contempt and, in the case of one combustible Irish lad (harrowingly played by Charles Aitken), howling desperation. McGrath stokes the furnace of his play to the point of explosion with little more than the fuel of everyday ritual and irritations, and without a single imposed cliché. In the context of a meaningless task, military protocol and discipline seem like some exotic absurdist religion. But it's hard to laugh when you're all sealed off together in one small box. The size of the Finborough (which seats fewer than 100) works to the play's advantage. We're all experiencing cabin fever. And while you may not particularly like any of the men onstage (and there's not one dud performance in the nine-member cast), you can't help identifying with them. When I left the theater, I really was mad as hell - on behalf of the characters, I mean. I also felt relieved and, paradoxically, surprisingly energized.