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| The playwright at rest, 1965. (Heilpern) |
By 1959, John Osborne occupied an exalted cultural position. Having demolished notions of respectable theater, he inspired a new generation of writers from Alan Sillitoe to Edward Albee. "Come and help us make history," said Kenneth Tynan, inviting him to the National Theatre. "I've already made history," came Osborne's retort. His notorious "Damn You England" letter and arrest at CND's 9/17/61 demonstration established Osborne as a political pugilist. Then he moved into films, writing Tom Jones (1963) for Tony Richardson. Matched against his professional successes, however, were several failed marriages: Pamela Lane, Mary Ure and Penelope Gilliatt.
This post dissects 1960s Osborne, a playwright experimenting with diffuse dramatic forms. Now comfortable in his talent, Osborne tries several genres: musicals, historical pieces, a surreal character study. Yet the same anguish, penetrating insight and lacerating introspective remains - if anything, it's enhanced within new contexts. Despite a few missteps, it's Osborne's most interesting period as a writer.
The World of Paul Slickey (1959)
"One must be careful at all times not to hurt other people's feelings... Only an extremely vulgar mind pokes fun at such things."
Nothing's so perversely fascinating as an overachieving flop. Sometimes an artist at the height of their power crafts an ambitious, inexplicable failure, so grandiose in conception that it can't possibly work. The World of Paul Slickey has this in spades: a musical satire of the public's appetite for scandal, it's so top heavy with ideas that it bombs spectacularly.
Journalist Jack Oakham moonlights as Paul Slickey, a feared gossip columnist targeting the rich and powerful. His latest assignments include Lesley and Michael, two rich, pea-brained youths; out-of-touch aristocratic families the Mortlakes and Giltedge-Whytes; and pop singer Terry Maroon. But Jack comes to question the value of his work, even as his marriage falls apart.
Slickey was a notorious flop; opening night reportedly climaxed with actress Adrienne Corri flipping off the audience. The show hasn't improved with age. If its attack on media sensationalism remains evergreen, other aspects feel grounded in their time. The title character evokes '50s society writer William Hickey, while the story and music draw laboriously on contemporary events like German rearmament and Timothy Evans. One song even incorporates Anthony Eden's proclamation that Suez was not a war but an "armed conflict" as a lyric!
That contrived awkwardness characterizes Osborne's songs. The inspired ditties from The Entertainer give way to indigestible, inscrutable nonsense. This tortured song from a tour guide discussing an aristocratic family should suffice:
"If you don't want to be an unidentified mess
You must make yourself someone and be a success
You've got to understand the mechanics of success
If you've meaning to express you must spell it like success
If you're going to impress you must pander to the press
They'll want you to asses how much money you possess."
Just scan that verse and wonder what Osborne was thinking. Sour rhymes, indiscernible meter, painfully forced "wit." Not to mention Paul/Jack proclaiming himself "newspaper cold" and rhyming phlegm with apothegm, or Lesley singing about raping the tax man. (Glenn Beck, is that you?) Sure, it's words on a page - but what musical accompaniment could possibly sell it? Given the universal opprobrium leveled against Slickey (even John Heilpern calls it "wincingly off the mark"), I feel safe dismissing it at face value.
As for story... what story? Osborne conceives Slickey as a shotgun blast against modern England: the media, the aristocracy and political establishment, the facile public. He aims for so many targets that he scarcely nicks any. The characters are ludicrous cartoons: Lesley and Michael debate solving bad marriages with sex change operations, a joke that sounds funnier than it plays. More and more characters complicate the narrative, until Slickey collapses in a pointless non-climax.
Osborne's ambitions evaporate long before then, leaving only venom. George Wellwrath calls Slickey "pure spit and vomit thrown directly into the teeth of the audience." He fancies that a complement; I don't. Without focus, Slickey becomes meaningless spew rather than scathing satire.
Luther (1961)
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| Albert Finney as Luther, 1961 production. (source) |
Having failed at contemporary satire, Osborne retreated to historical drama. Luther proved a popular success on both the West End and Broadway, featuring Albert Finney in the title role. Superficially the play resembles familiar dramas of conscience like A Man for All Seasons. Yet Luther's no saturnine period piece, casting the founder of Protestantism as a tormented rebel against Catholic dogma - and his personal demons.
The play depicts Martin Luther's emergence as leader of the Protestant Reformation. He defies his father to become a priest, but quickly proves unsuited for monastic life. After a violent, unexplained outburst ("I am not!") Martin grows increasingly skeptical towards Catholic teaching. He attacks the system of indulgences, earning him Rome's ire. Soon Luther's the head of a religious and cultural upheaval, staring down the Diet of Worms and inspiring a peasant uprising against the Holy Roman Empire.
Luther draws on Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958), a psycho-biography framing Luther's theological struggle as an identity crisis writ large. Hence Luther's obsessive fretting over his bowels - he complains of being constipated, flatulent and uses scatological language to describe the Pope. "If I break wind in Wittenberg," he muses, "they might smell it in Rome." His mind's too inquisitive to fit into Church structures; taught to revere scripture, he cannot reconcile God's teachings with Rome's temporal corruption.
Osborne tries to frame the context in which Luther operated. Act II features John Tetzel, a priest happily hawking indulgences and holy relics to gullible believers. Here Osborne most strongly resembles Brecht, stopping the action cold for a digressive vignette. This imaginative sequence says more about Catholic corruption that any of Luther's eloquent disquisitions:
"My friend, the Pope himself has sent me with indulgences for you! Fine, you say, but what are indulgences? They're only the most precious and noble of God's gifts to men, that's all they are! Before God, I tell you I wouldn't swap my privilege at this moment with that of St. Peter... because I've already saved more souls with my indulgences than he ever could have done."
Unfortunately, he's less successful showing Luther's impact. Luther's confrontation with the Diet rings with stark clarity, but the resulting chaos remains ephemeral. His dealings with assorted German princes go unmentioned. Act III features a rushed scene with The Knight, a blood-soaked nobleman describing the Peasant's Revolt within Germany. These scenes are dramatically forced and historically inadequate, providing audiences a patchy understanding of the Reformation.
Osborne being Osborne, however, the personal portrait dominates. The play's most palpable scenes feature Luther butting heads with his father Hans. Hans expected Luther to become a "great man" within the temporal system, a lawyer or politician perhaps. Given subsequent events, he may have been right. Luther assumes its most roundly autobiographical element when the protagonist unleashes a cri de coeur against his father's presumed neglect:
"I loved you the best. It was always you I wanted. I wanted your love more than anyone's, and if anyone was to hold me I wanted it to be you. Funnily enough, my mother disappointed me the most, and I loved her less, much less. She made a gap which no else could have filled, but all she could do was make it bigger, bigger and more unbearable."
This becomes especially pointed if one's read Osborne's A Better Class of Person, or Heilpern's biography. The death of Osborne's father cast a long shadow over his life, while he expressed a venomous contempt towards his low-born mother. Osborne boldly invests his personal demons in an historical figure, remaining deeply felt as anything in Look Back in Anger or Inadmissible Evidence.
And throughout, it's Luther's dilemma that drives the story. He becomes a rebel not of choice or even passivity - it's his nature that drives him to doubt Rome's strictures. Like Redl in A Patriot for Me, he does everything he can to suppress his nonconformist streak, whether cleaning monastery privies or protesting that "I want to be still, in peace, and alone." But the Church won't brook even token criticism, forcing Luther into open defiance. Unlike Redl, Luther's dilemma has a happier personal outcome, but with more far-reaching (and destructive) consequences.
Luther's staging explicitly recalls Brecht's Galileo, the template for most similar dramas. Hence the episodic plot, the elaborate staging (Luther's appearance before the Diet backgrounded by a political cartoon!), characters breaking fourth wall and the emphasis on tableaux over narrative. But Osborne's no Marxist, downplaying Luther's individual achievements for their effect. Nor is he Robert Bolt, whose Sir Thomas More is deliberately established (via the fourth-wall breaking Common Man) as a Great Man above us mere mortals. Martin Luther remains the play's focus - a living, thinking, suffering human being, who shapes history yet remains identifiable.
Plays for England: The Blood of the Bambergs and Under Plain Cover (1963)
Osborne returned to the Slickey vein with two short plays attacking English society. With weightier works to consume, we'll dispense succinctly with these.
Anyone nauseated by 2011's Royal Wedding might appreciate The Blood of the Bambergs. A loose reworking of The Prisoner of Zenda, it details the marriage of Bamberg's Princess Melanie to Prince Willy, heir to a foreign throne. But Willy dies driving to the wedding, leaving officials in a bind. The solution: swap Willy with Russell, an uncouth Australian who bares a striking resemblance to Willy. Russell's reluctant at first, until exposed to the job's perks - especially the gorgeous Princess.
Bambergs provides rather sophomoric satire of the hysteria surrounding royal pageantry. It's central conceit isn't bad, with all corners of society (from the press to the Socialist Prime Minister) conniving in the coverup. And it must be said that Russell provides some laughs, especially when he admits changing mind due to "the long, thrusting, sexual stimulus of the Crown." But in short form, it's too superficial to make much impact. The play's nothing more than an amusing trifle.
But that makes it superior to Under Plain Cover, little more than a fleeting skirmish against good taste. Osborne shows a reporter investigating a seemingly normal couple, Tim and Jenny, who turn out to be brother and sister. There's nothing more to it, and this V.C. Andrews twist seems an improbable vehicle for social satire. Osborne probes again the press's intrusion into private lives and misguided public morality, but elicits few laughs or shock, only mild surprise. For Osborne completists only.
Inadmissible Evidence (1964)
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| Douglas Hodge as Bill Maitland in Donmar Warehouse's 2011 revival. (Source) |
Osborne returned to vitriolic introspection with Inadmissible Evidence. Heilpern calls it "a dreamplay of grubby futility and self-loathing in the losing battle against irredeemable mediocrity." Long, rambling and bursting with indigestible bile, it makes Look Back in Anger look like Coward's Private Lives. Yet for all its off-kilter structuring, it's more gut-wrenchingly effective than that earlier play.
Bill Maitland experiences a crippling midlife crisis. A mildly successful barrister, he's grown stale in cases of fraud and divorce, which considers a waste of talent. His flagrant womanizing jeopardizes his marriage, his domineering personality isolates friends and colleagues. Indeed, everyone seems eager to leave Maitland: favored secretary Shirley goes on maternity leave, his assistants entertain job offers, his wife Elizabeth finally prepares to leave him. Haunted by delusions and very real abandonment, Maintland's driven over the edge.
From page one, Evidence bleeds existential rot. Consider Maitland's monologue to the Judge in the opening dream sequence, admitting his sins:
"This can't hide the fact from me, and never has done, that I am by nature indecisive...I am almost 40 years old, and I know I have never made a decision which I didn't either regret, or suspect was just plain commonplace or shifty or scamped and indulgent or mildly stupid or undistinguished... I have depended almost entirely on other people's efforts. Anything else would have been impossible for me, and I always knew in my own heart that only that it was that kept me alive and functioning at all..."
This extends beyond self-deprecation to psychosis. It's a cry for a help from someone who's seen his ambition and dreams turn to ash, who's destroyed everything good in his life. He'd be a monster if he weren't so cripplingly self-aware. Even the few moments of hope - assistant Hudson, considering Bill's offer of a partnership; wife Liz trying, against all odds, to patch things up - drive Maitland further into despair. He makes George Dillon and Jimmy Porter look George Bailey.
"There were girls like Maureen, and even with you there were difficulties but not revolting or upsetting. At least, not much, I don't think so. You weren't reluctant, you should be happy, you didn't cling on to it like it was the crown jewels. You were generous, loving, bright, you should have been able to cope. I should have been able to cope."
Osborne vomits his neuroses upon the page. As in Epitaph of George Dillon, the middle-aged fear of accomplishing nothing dominates the story. How palpable are such feelings emanating from a successful writer! Maitland's neuroses about disappointing women drives him to despair - this from a man with five wives, whose prickly personality alienated even close friends. Osborne feared isolation most of all: two years after Evidence, triggered by the loss of loved ones, he experienced a comparable nervous breakdown (of which more later). It's ugly to watch or read, but darkly compelling.
Osborne borrows from Strindberg not only his vulgar nihilism but an air of despairing unreality. Highlighting his paranoid state, Maitland drifts between reality and fantasy. He starts the play asleep, dreaming of prosecution by a universal Judge who finds him lacking. In Act II carries on phone conversations, ostensibly with his various lovers - though Osborne's directions emphasize "a feeling of doubt as to whether there is anyone to speak to at all." This disconnect reaches its extreme form when Bill, meeting with his clients, talks past them, as if the divorcees describe his life. It's The Ghost Sonata reshaped into a character study
Inadmissible Evidence is stifling in a way that neither vulgar innuendo ("You could stick a bus ticket in there!") nor Maitland's ludicrous clientele (selfish hausfrau Mrs. A, shamed homosexual Marples) can alleviate. Few plays match it for depressive, soul-consuming nastiness. The converse of individualism is loneliness - uniqueness can be a blessing or a curse. For Bill Maitland, it's hell on Earth.
A Patriot for Me (1965)
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| Mark Crook plays Redl in The Actor's Company's 2008 production. (Source) |
Osborne finished destroying traditional theater with A Patriot for Me. This play about Alfred Redl, notorious Austrian traitor, so infuriated the Lord Chamberlain that he refused to license its performance. The Royal Court rebranded itself a private club, hence beyond the government's reach - an act of defiance which destroyed the Lord Chamberlain's censorship power. Critics were divided, while the show (starring Maximilian Schell and Jill Bennett) did lukewarm box office. A 1983 revival with Alan Bates proved more successful.
A Patriot for Me is Groggy's favorite Osborne play. Far more than Luther, it uses the trappings of the historical pageant (familiar names, faraway settings, fancy costumes) to tell a deeply personal story. It's explores the cost of conformity, mixing baroque satire with personal tragedy.
Alfred Redl is a promising officer in the Austrian Army circa 1900. By all outward appearances he's a model soldier: punctilious, disciplined, class conscious, loyal. But Redl hides damaging secrets: his Jewish ancestry, profligate spending - and homosexuality. While Colonel in charge of Austria's military intelligence, he moonlights in Vienna's gay society and gains the attention of Russian spies. Redl's blackmailed into sending Russia military secrets, disastrously confronting the contradictions between his public life and private desires.
A Patriot for Me came after plays like A Taste of Honey and films like Victim punctured holes in censorship. Gay rights became a public issue in England following Lord Montagu and John Gielgud's arrests for sodomy; 1967's Sexual Offences Act effectively demolished existing legal strictures. Yet homosexuality remained identified with crime and subversion, heightened by exposure of the Cambridge Five: queers selling out the Empire. Osborne's provocative Patriot provided the final nail in the Lord Chamberlain's coffin. Yet we must tread warily before proclaiming Osborne a cultural hero.
Like many of his generation, Osborne campaigned for nuclear disarmament, the issue which provoked his "Damn You England" letter. He was arrested during CND's 9/17/61 protest in Trafalgar Square, alongside Robert Bolt, Vanessa Redgrave and others. But Doris Lessing opined "he didn't understand politics at all... he was just a natural rebel." He gradually drifted from anti-establishment posturing to Little England conservatism. More relevant here: Osborne peppered friends Tony Richardson and George Devine with homophobic slurs, while denouncing sodomy laws as "pointless, stupid and vindictive." A cynic wonders whether Osborne held genuine convictions or merely enjoyed playing the contrarian.
Today, Patriot's gay content seems rather tame. In its day however, the outre decadence and language led some crass critics to question if Osborne drew from personal experience. ("You just wonder... where he acquired all this information," James Fenton insinuated.) Consider Redl's sensual snarl to the Countess marrying his past lover, which surely raised the Lord Chamberlain's hackles as much as the infamous drag ball:
"I'll tell you this. You'll never know that body like I know it. The lines beneath his eyes... And the scar behind his ear, and the hairs in his nostrils, which has the most, what color are they in the light? The mole on where?.... You'll never know like I know, you can't... His thick waist, and how long are his thighs, compared to his calves, you've not looked at him, you never will."
Again, one shouldn't focus excessively on Redl's proclivities. Patriot's point isn't championing gay rights but lauding the individual against conformity, Osborne's hobby horse. The Austro-Hungarian Empire exemplifies this: in a polyglot state with dozens of nationalities, a lower peg like the Galician Redl is expected to not only display extraordinary merit, but act with appropriate deference to his Austrian betters. This drives the play less than Istvan Szabo's Colonel Redl, but Redl's ethnicity marks him as an outsider as surely as his sexuality.
Hence the second act drag ball, a mirror society embracing the misfits cast off by bourgeois society. Some characters even joke about forming a "queer empire" to oppose Austria's heterosexual conformity. As The Baron, the formidable transvestite nobleman, observes:
"This is the celebration of the individual against the rest, the uses and the thems, the free and the constricted, the gay and the dreary, the lonely and the mob."
Yet Redl's out of place even here. Tellingly, he arrives at the ball in full uniform, drawing disapproval from his cross-dressing compatriots: "I'm surprised they let you in," the Baron scolds. Unlike others, Redl's uncomfortable with his desires even when he gives in. He knows an improper word, indiscreet liaison or untoward glance could destroy his life's work.
Patriot teaches us the nonconformist never wins. Act I sees Redl seconding a young officer, Siczynski, in a duel where the latter's mortally wounded. The doomed man represents Redl's Id: unabashedly Jewish, openly gay and self-confident. His death imparts a cruel lesson to Redl: quoting biographer Robert Asprey, he learns to "[impart] humility, lofty ambition, duty, loyalty and honor" in everything. His utter obsequiousness marks him for advancement as a "a damned fine officer." No room for gratification or honesty. When confronted by superior officers at a society ball, Redl protests his adherence to class strictures:
"I am proud to be despised by some men, no perhaps most men. Others are to be tolerated and ignored. And if they do the same for me, I am gratified, or at least relieved."
And Osborne repeatedly shows honesty being punished. Act I ends with soldiers finding Redl in bed with another man, then savagely beating him. After giving into his desires, Redl's almost immediately blackmailed by Russian spymasters. (These scenes recall Terence Rattigan's Ross, where Turkish officials plot to expose T.E. Lawrence's latent tendencies.) Redl less resents being blackmailed into treachery than his inability to fit in anywhere. It's a palpable portrait of individualism crushed by social pressure.
Against such richly textured drama, Patriot's flaws are minor. One awkward thread has a Freudian psychologist lecturing on homosexuality, an aside which serves little purpose. The Countess, a foxy villainess working for the Russians, shows again that Osborne's women are either passive simps or malicious whores. And the build-up to Redl's suicide feels perfunctory and rushed. I happily acknowledge these flaws while proclaiming A Patriot for Me John Osborne's greatest achievement.
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For anyone who's read this far, I'm keen on hearing your opinion. Do you find these articles entertaining and informative? Or merely long-winded and boring? Let me know in comment or email!
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