Ordinary jobs in plays

Why do so few playwrights depict ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, wonders Philip Hensher in The Guardian.

In recent years, occasional dramatists have made an attempt to get away from the general tendency of English drama. Rather than setting a play in a domestic setting among the leisured, educated classes with not much else to do but swap epigrams and fall in and out of love, dramatists have sometimes tried to evoke a professional world. Influenced, perhaps, by more hard-nosed American dramatists like David Mamet, playwrights started to put major economic institutions on stage.