Bernard Kops, who has died aged 97, was an East End-born playwright, poet and novelist whose first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957), enjoyed worldwide success and saw him rated alongside Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney as part of the late 1950s British new wave. Yet while he typically selected “realistic” domestic settings for his fiction, poetry, and plays, he rarely touched on political unrest or class prejudice; instead he often incorporated surrealistic