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| John Osborne (source) |
Osborne's a challenging writer. Volume is one reason: Osborne authored 19 stage plays, excluding ephemeral lost works like The Great Bear, unproduced scripts like Jack and Jill and classical adaptations (including A Place Calling Itself Rome, a modern-dress update of Shakespeare's Coriolanus). Compared to Bolt, who penned just eight extant plays, Osborne requires considerable legwork and planning.
Osborne contrasts with Bolt and Rattigan, too, in that his work was revolutionary. When tasteful comedies and staid dramas dominated the English stage, Look Back in Anger (1956) was a revelation both in its youth focus and visceral rage. The Entertainer (1957) proved equally subversive, casting Laurence Olivier as a stand-in for post-imperial ennui. A Patriot for Me's (1965) homosexual content destroyed the Lord Chamberlain's censorship power. George Devine labeled Osborne's work "the bomb that [blew] a hole in the old theater and leave a nice-sized gap, too big to be patched up."
Finally, it's not easy to digest the plays themselves. Even Osborne's strongest works are deeply flawed, from his idiosyncratic style to near-nihilistic pessimism. His raw emotion and self-evisceration often overwhelm his literary gifts: one sympathizes with the critic who called Anger "a self-pitying snivel." Unpleasant too is Osborne's misogyny, rivaling August Strindberg in his unbridled hatred of women. Biographies of Osborne bear this out, from his contempt towards his mother to his disastrous marriages to Penelope Gilliatt and Jill Bennett.
Yet great art is often frustrating, frequently repulsive and always challenging. Osborne's plays are hard to "like" in the sense of enjoying, say, Shakespeare or Noel Coward. There's little catharsis in watching Jimmy Porter or Bill Maitland tear themselves apart. But underneath the nastiness lies a penetrating, often-perceptive look at personal dissatisfaction and cultural malaise. We can't ignore Osborne for being unpleasant.
Without further adieu, let's plunge into Osborne's plays. I'll sketch in biographical details where appropriate, but this will remain principally a literary analysis.
The Devil Inside Him (1950)
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| Iwan Rheom in Cardiff's New Theatre production, 2010. (source) |
Popular repute labels Osborne an overnight success with Look Back in Anger. Yet Anger was actually his fifth play. One, The Great Bear, remains lost to posterity; from available descriptions it sounds like an embryonic Anger. Another, Epitaph for George Dillon, wasn't produced until after Anger's success. Two others, The Devil Inside Him and Personal Enemy, were also believed lost until 2008, when the University of Sheffield's Theatre Archive Project uncovered their manuscripts among the Lord Chamberlain's Archive.
Osborne wrote The Devil Inside Him (1950) as a 21 year old struggling actor, with the help of theater director Stella Linden. Predictably, it's a formative work, identifiably Osborne for all its crude craftsmanship. Its main asset is remarkably powerful language, which commands attention even when the story doesn't hang together.
Huw is a working class Welshman scorned as an outsider. He befriends Dilys, the pregnant servant of the Prossers, a respectable couple who loathe him. Huw's only real friend is Burn, a medical student. Hounded by the Prossers and religious zealot Gruffyud, Huw confides his thoughts in a diary. Glancing through the book, Dilys discovers the truth: that Huw isn't merely discontent but a perverted maniac.
On one level at least, The Devil Inside Him impresses. Osborne produces reams of cutting dialogue, scarcely a dull or cloying phrase among them. If this makes his characters unreasonably articulate, it at least provides literary appeal. Gruffuyd's rants about atheist Huw facing a "black, terrible nothing," Mrs. Prosser denouncing her husband's complacent sexism ("I am your wife, but I am still myself") and especially Huw's climactic monologue all provide delicious phrasing. The play's worth reading if only for Osborne's denunciation of bourgeois morality:
"You have all been the devil inside me. Ever since I was a little boy... You make all the dirtiness and the meanness, you made ugliness out of the lovely things. You told me that the things I knew were inside me were wrong... You want the devil. The bad things."
Conversely though, this speech highlights Devil's puerility. The characters are too broadly drawn, even Huw; Prosser and Gruffuyd, in particular, say nothing that doesn't mark them as pious villains. However eloquent the language, the dramatic structure doesn't work. True, the murder scene is a shock, but the only payoff is raving about society's blame for Huw's psychoses. If Osborne's prose evinces youthful passion, the denial of personal responsibility smacks of callowness. Even as allegory, The Devil Inside Me is a shaky construction.
Personal Enemy (1953)
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| Karen Lewis and Peter Clapp in a 2009 off-Broadway revival. (source) |
Osborne next teamed with Anthony Creighton on Personal Enemy (1953). It's an explicit "issue" play, examining America's Cold War fear of deviancy political or sexual, more directly than domestic works like The Crucible. The play barely saw release, with the Lord Chamberlain protesting its implications of homosexuality. Again Osborne's authorial voice is firmly established, though the drama frequently sags.
The Constants are a middle class American couple. Their son Don flirted with left-wing politics but became a war hero in Korea; he's been captured, and soon to be repatriated by the Chinese government. But Don refuses to return home, shocking everyone and drawing the attention of government agents. Mrs. Constant takes out her rage on Ward Perry, a "subversive" librarian who might be gay - especially after her second son Art follows Don's lead.
Stylistically at least, Personal Enemy is far inferior to The Devil Inside. There's plenty of articulate speechmaking, especially in the final act as characters confront issues directly. But the oft-ludicrous dialogue reads suspiciously like Osborne using bad Western movies as a template for American speech. When Mrs. Constant announces she'll "rustle up some cookies" it's hard not to cringe.
That said, Enemy fits snugly within Osborne's oeuvre. It reads as a dry run for Luther and A Patriot for Me, showing individuals rebelling against sociopolitical forces. Indeed, Don anticipates Patriot's Redl, subsuming "deviant" behavior to military service. Osborne explicitly conflates McCarthyist witch hunts with England's 1954 prosecution of Lord Montagu for sodomy. To Osborne they're one and the same, punishing an individual for being different. Reiterating Devil's main argument, Osborne suggests that society's bullying conformity pushes people like Don and Art to deviancy.
Enemy also follows Devil in its tepid plotting. John Heilpern suggests Creighton was primarily responsible for the story, with Osborne contributing dialogue and characterizations. Whatever the case, Enemy neuters its incipient. The most important events occur offstage; only the brief appearance of a HUAC investigator provides a tangible threat. Beleaguered Mrs. Constant provides the only well-rounded characterization; she's easily the strongest woman in Osborne's work. Others are flat, with Constant's children screeching ciphers and Weber little more than a plot catalyst. Osborne still hasn't found his muse.
Epitaph for George Dillon (1955)
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| Joseph Fiennes as George Dillon in Comedy Theatre's 2005 revival. (source) |
Osborne and Creighton collaborated again on Epitaph for George Dillon. Though written in 1955, the play wasn't produced until 1958, after Anger and The Entertainer proved huge successes. Notices were enthusiastic, with Richard Watts Jr. calling it "Osborne's best play." It's certainly his first fully realized show, injecting personal elements into this tale of a frustrated artist.
36 year old George Dillon is an aspiring actor and playwright whose ambition outraces his talent. His wife Ruth grows tired of George's promises, while George begins an affair with family friend Josie. George tries to sell his latest play while auditioning for roles, but remains unsuccessful. The family falls into debt, driving Ruth further away from George.
Epitaph for George Dillon features the first of Osborne's lacerating self-portraits. Few playwrights are as self-critical as Osborne, his alter egos decidedly unflattering. Besides evincing Osborne's enthusiasm for vegetarianism and atheism, he's also obsessed with an image of success. He boasts of landing acting roles and that he's "polishing off" his seventh play - none of the previous six, of course, being published. Yet George hasn't deluded himself; he offsets boasting with moments of palpable self-doubt, as when he denounces acting as "hideously trivial and self-important."
By making George a writer, Epitaph allows Osborne to directly project his anxieties on stage. Just by writing four plays at age 26 Osborne achieved a great deal, yet this play evinces a man still in a hurry, unsatisfied by his output. One scene features George pitching a manuscript to Barney, a gregarious impresario who prods George to make his work as commercial as possible:
"Dialogue's not bad, but these great long speeches - that's a mistake. People want action, excitement. I know - you think you're Bernard Shaw. But where's he today? Eh? People won't listen to him."
Here we get a humorous look at not only the verities of the entertainment market, but the letdowns faced by budding "geniuses." One of adulthood's cruel lessons: some dreams aren't attainable, no matter how talented you are or how hard you try. Even then, success doesn't guarantee contentment. This motif recurs throughout Osborne's work: Anger, Inadmissible Evidence, Hotel in Amsterdam, Watch It Come Down.
This much Epitaph achieves; its weaknesses lie elsewhere. Like Anger, the play's so dominated by its protagonist that other characters scarcely have room to breathe. Percy and Mrs. E and Josie are so superficial they make no impression. Ruth gets wonderfully barbed dialogue, but even she functions mainly as a sounding board for George's anxieties. Again, the plotting feels awkward: there's an overlong opening and a limp finale, with Act II providing the meatiest drama.
It's true, as Ronald Hayman notes, that Osborne's preoccupations and awkward style "quite literally pull the play apart." But Epitaph's also a skillful character study presaging better work to come.
Look Back in Anger (1956)
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| Anger's original cast: Kenneth Haigh, Alan Bates and Mary Ure. (source) |
When Tony Richardson staged Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre, reviews were mixed. Some saw a masterpiece: Kenneth Tyann thought Anger "the best young play of its decade." It also engendered fierce critics like Philip Hope-Wallace, who called it "frenzied preaching in an empty conventicle." Terence Rattigan remarked that if Anger was successful, it meant "I know nothing about plays"; producer George Devine retorted "you know everything about plays, but you don't know a fucking thing about Look Back in Anger." Posterity proved Devine right.
57 years removed, one handles Anger with kid gloves. It's claustrophobic, nasty and cluttered, and not always to its benefit. Its sloppiness keeps it far removed from Osborne's best work. But, influence aside, Anger gained its reputation for a reason. Unpolished and unpleasant though it may be, it is John Osborne.
Jimmy Porter is a frustrated 20-something, living in a cramped flat with wife Alison and friend Cliff. Jimmy and Alison constantly fight, sometimes playfully, sometimes more serious. Alison's friend Helena doesn't understand why Alison's such a doormat for her abusive husband. Nonetheless, Helena grows attracted to Jimmy, just as Alison discovers she's pregnant. Tragedy results and the distance between them grows insurmountable.
As Osborne's first solo work, Anger lacks the refinement expected from a fifth play. Its plot development seems forced, when it happens at all: after Epitaph mocking plays that get women "in a family way," what should we make of Alison's plight? Mainly the play's so suffocating in its one-room nastiness that watching or reading it feels like an exercise in self-flagellation. Again we're left with Osborne's pointed verbiage and characterization to salvage the drama.
Anger succeeds through Jimmy Porter, one of British theater's definitive characters. Jimmy functions as another author avatar, this time more personal than professional. Jimmy losing his father at an early age is one obvious echo: at age 10, Osborne lost his father to tuberculosis. In A Better Class of Person, Osborne juxtaposes dialogue from Anger with his first wife Pamela Lane, saying: "Perhaps I interpreted what might have been bland complacency for the complaisance of a generous and loving heart." Jimmy and Alison's affection manifests itself in silly pet names ("squirrel and bear"), and Jimmy usually recognizes when he goes too far. After burning Alison with an iron, Jimmy repents with this heartfelt speech:
"There's hardly a moment when I'm not watching and wanting you. I've got to hit out somehow. Nearly four years of being in the same room with you, night and day, and I still can't stop my sweat breaking out when I see you doing - something as ordinary as leaning over an ironing board... Trouble is you get used to people. Even their trivialities become indispensable to you. Indispensable and a little mysterious."
Though soon after, Jimmy crosses the line with this prophetic peroration:
"Oh my dear wife, you've got so much to learn. I only hope you learn it one day. If only something - something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep. If you could have a child, and it would die.... I wonder if you might even become a recognizable human being yourself. But I doubt it."
More often, Jimmy's simply an articulate hooligan - the archetypical "angry young man," standing in for a generation of disaffected young Britons. He works as a candy grocer, taking out frustrations on friends and family. Unlike similar heroes in Kingsley Amis and Harold Pinter, he's not driven by class or ideological resentment; his anti-establishment pose is general, nihilistic bitterness. Jimmy's unfocused passion doesn't amount to anything constructive, letting him flounder in economic destitute and broken dreams. As Alison tells her father, a retired Army Colonel:
"You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it."
Hayman writes that Osborne's plays are one-man shows, contrasting a formidable protagonist with weak support. Anger epitomizes this, with Jimmy's nastiness smothering everyone else. Cliff's too anemic drawn to be a true foil, trading silly comedy routines but no substantive talk. I won't harp unnecessarily on the misogynist element in these reviews, but it's hard to avoid with Anger. Alison's a pathetic loser without motivation; Helena's pretensions as a strong woman melt when she encounters feral, sexy Jimmy. Even when Jimmy's not onstage, other characters discuss him exclusively.
One regards Look Back in Anger with wary respect. It's undeniably powerful, but too flawed to be a masterpiece.
The Entertainer (1957)
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| Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice. He'd reprise the role in a 1960 film adaptation. (source) |
Osborne rejoined Tony Richardson for The Entertainer (1957), whose success nearly eclipsed Anger. This thanks largely to Laurence Olivier; the Shakespearean idol sent up a career of patriotic roles playing Archie Rice, a seedy comedian embodying England's postwar decline. The best of Osborne's early plays, Entertainer recasts his preoccupations within a broader context.
Musical hall entertainer Archie Rice ekes out a living on a rather pathetic. He lives with father Billy, a much-beloved vaudevillian, his wife Phoebe and daughter Jean. Archie claims to carry on Billy's tradition, when he's really a seedy hack. Jean detests Archie; Phoebe seems ready to leave him. Further tension arises with the arrival of Frankie, an aspiring musician, and the death of Archie's son Mick, serving in the British Army during the Suez Crisis.
The Entertainer shows a more comfortable Osborne, eager to experiment with dramatic form. Jimmy and Cliff's silly routines morph into Archie's music hall act, seamlessly contrasted with the Rices' fraught home life. Archie mixes bawdy songs and hackneyed puns, juxtaposing sex and patriotism (a topless Britannia forms the backdrop to one scene). Later plays stretched form further: the musical World of Paul Slickey, the Brecht-inflected Luther and Inadmissible Evidence, the absurdist A Sense of Detachment.
The Entertainer uses this dissonance to brilliant effect. "Thank God I'm normal!" goes one of Archie's songs, as he inveighs against the welfare state and National Service. Off-stage he's a philandering busybody, who takes great pride in 20 years avoiding income tax. Archie represents England's complacent postwar ruling class, outward patriotism and normalcy obscuring cynical decadence. His self-satisfaction earns him the contempt of both his old-fashioned father and youthful characters. One imagines Archie seconding Harold Macmillan's oblivious comment that "most of our people never had it so good."
The inter-generational tension provides Entertainer's meat. Billy Rice, Archie's not-so-beloved father, boasts a formidable reputation his son exploits. Yet he's a doddering old man raging against Polish laborers and singing Christian hymns, embarrassing everyone. The young generation, related to rebellious daughter Jean and Frankie, an aspiring vaudevillian himself, see Archie as a sham, an example to be avoided - even when Archie tries to take Frankie under his wing. Even Archie sees the hollowness of being caught between them:
"You see this face... this face can split open with warmth and humanity. It can sing, and tell the worst stories in the world to a great mob of dead, drab erks and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because - look at my eyes. I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they. We're just as dead as each other."
Osborne's play also incorporates 1956's Suez Crisis to brilliant effect. Anthony Eden's standoff with Egypt's Abdel Nasser over the Suez Canal culminated in an Anglo-French-Israeli conspiracy to "knock Nasser of his perch." Its failure thanks to international opprobrium proved deeply traumatizing for a nation weakened by World War II, decolonization and austerity economics, yet still imagining itself a superpower. Osborne makes Mick a victim of the conflict. Like Don in Personal Enemies, he becomes more important as a symbol than a person.
Entertainer's greatest achievement, though, is its structuring. Osborne's interplay between plot and musical hall ditties works wonderfully, and the supporting cast finally makes a strong impression. If it lacks the cutting dialogue of earlier works, it's far more dramatically felicitous. I second Kenneth Tynan in applauding "the big and brilliant notion of putting the whole of contemporary England onto one... stage."
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Expect the next Osborne piece sometime this week. We'll move from The World of Paul Slickey through A Patriot for Me, covering the most experimental (and, in my view, successful) phase of Osborne's career. Movie reviews in the meantime!
A Note on Sources:
For background info on Osborne's life and plays, I draw primarily on John Heilpern's 2006 biography John Osborne: A Patriot for Us. For anyone seriously interested in Osborne, or modern theater generally, it's an essential work. I've also consulted Osborne's two autobiographical volumes, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1994); Tony Richardson's memoir The Long Distance Runner (1993); and Ronald Hayman's John Osborne (1972). Online sources will be linked where appropriate.
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