John Osborne: a natural dissenter who changed the face of British theatre
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Version 0 of 1. One of the most famous stories about John Osborne concerns a meeting with Kenneth Tynan, who had just been appointed literary manager of the National Theatre. “Come and join us at the National and make history,” said Tynan. “I’ve already made it,” snapped Osborne, turning on his heel. It is perfectly true that if Osborne, who has died aged 65, had written only Look Back in Anger his place in the history books would be secure: its premiere at the Royal Court in May 1956 not only put the English Stage Company on the map, but proved to a generation of writers that it was possible to put contemporary Britain on stage. But there was more – much more – to Osborne than that single resonant play. He was, in my view, a much misunderstood writer. Because of Look Back in Anger, he was instantly dubbed an Angry Young Man – a phrase coined by the Royal Court’s press officer – and seen as a flame-throwing socialist who eventually turned Right. The truth is that Osborne was a congenital outsider: a truculent individualist with a gift for lacerating invective and with little time for political parties or handed-down truths. I always saw him as a somewhat Byronic figure, viewing the passing world with satirical disdain. He once recorded how one of his wives described him – probably more accurately – as a Welsh Fulham upstart. Either way, he was a compulsive non-joiner whose gift for rhetoric re-charged British drama in the 1950s and 1960s and who ultimately produced two outstanding, self-punishing volumes of autobiography. As with all writers, his upbringing explains his later attitudes. He was born in Fulham in 1929, the son of an advertising agency copywriter and a barmaid. Describing Christmas get-togethers in A Better Class of Person, he writes that, “What the two families shared was the heart pumped from birth by misgiving. Not a proud misgiving of the spirit but a timid melancholy or dislike of joy, effort or courage.” It was a world of lower middle-class bitterness which Osborne sought to escape, but by which he was always partially claimed. From the start, he was always a rebel. When a master struck the 16-year-old Osborne at school, he responded by striking back – a gesture for which he was expelled and which suggested his permanent symbol was the untugged forelock. A desultory period as a journalist working for trade papers – Gas World, Nursery World and the Miller – was followed in 1948 by entry into the theatre as assistant stage manager on a 48-week tour of No Room at the Inn, and by a long, productive period as a rep actor. He may not have been a brilliant actor – he once described his Hayling Island Hamlet as “a passable impersonation of Claudius after a night’s carousing” – but he learned his craft, co-wrote a couple of plays, and married his first wife, Pamela Lane. In a revealing letter about that period, he once wrote to me that he joined his wife in Derby, where she was playing Hester Collyer – a woman almost destroyed by her inability to find an answering passion in her lovers – in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. “My notional role in life,” said Osborne, “was that of Freddie Page (the object of the heroine’s love). In fact, I was Hester.” It is a revealing remark because it shows Osborne’s affection for the older generation of writers – Rattigan especially – whom he was to displace. But it also explains a lot about Osborne’s most famous hero: Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, which George Devine bravely put on at the Royal Court in 1956. Jimmy is, in some ways, a male Hester: his tragic flaw is that he seeks in others a passionate enthusiasm to match his own. Of course, as memorably incarnated by Kenneth Haigh in Tony Richardson’s production, he also became a symbol of angry, alienated modern youth railing at the English class system and the whole gummed-up Establishment. But Jimmy’s rage and rhetoric is also part of a quest for what he himself calls “a burning virility of mind and spirit that looks for something as powerful as itself”. However you look at it – as social document or Strindbergian study in self-torment – it remains a great play. It also turned Osborne into an overnight celebrity. The 26-year-old playwright was endlessly interviewed, courted and nibbled at by gossip columnists – one of whom described him, libellously, as “the original teddy-boy”. Amidst all this, he found time to write a second play for the Court, The Entertainer, which elicited from Olivier one of his greatest performances as the seedy, third-rate music-hall comic, Archie Rice. Those of us lucky enough to have seen it will never forget Olivier’s leering, painted public mask or his private howls of self-loathing. What subsequent revivals have shown is that it is also a brutally bitter play about family life: the Rices’ endless recriminatory rows must have owed a lot to Osborne’s own Fulham origins. Osborne’s life was changed by fame and success. He married Mary Ure. He bought houses in Chelsea and the Kent countryside. He earned a bob or two. But, at heart, he remained a natural dissenter and he soon learned that he had not won the affection either of Fleet Street or the theatre-going public. In 1959, he wrote a musical about gossip columnists, The World Of Paul Slickey, which earned vitriolic reviews and which led, on the first night, to Osborne being pursued up Charing Cross Road by parties of irate theatre-goers. Osborne’s vivid description of the scene in Almost A Gentleman suggests he got a high from being so hated. Through all the private traumas of the 1960s – in 1963 he married Penelope Gilliatt, and in 1968 Jill Bennett – he continued to write plays and one famously successful, money-spinning film script, Tom Jones. But his work was still characterised by unassuaged discontent. In 1961, he wrote a Brechtian chronicle play about the founder of Protestantism, Luther, but once again the hero seemed like a projection of Osborne himself. As Tynan shrewdly noted at the time, “Luther in Christendom, like Mr Osborne in the microcosm of the theatre, was a stubborn iconoclast of lowly birth, resentful of authority and blind to compromise.” It was followed in 1964 by an even more remarkable play, Inadmissible Evidence, in which Nicol Williamson gave an unforgettable performance as a middle-aged solicitor watching the total disintegration of his life – “a kind of Willy Loman in striped English serge”, as Ronald Bryden wrote. But in the hero’s blistering rhetoric and punitive self-laceration it was again not difficult to detect something of Osborne’s own private rage and sense of being permanently wounded. But Osborne’s biggest play of that period, A Patriot for Me, was also one that in 1965 fell foul of the Lord Chamberlain’s arbitrary power of censorship. Staged at the Royal Court as a club production for consenting theatre-goers, it was a turbulent epic about Alfred Redl, a homosexual spy in the Austro-Hungarian army. It allowed Osborne to write on a big canvas, to pursue the subject of sexual ambiguity – by which he had always been fascinated – and to create one brilliantly theatrical scene in which a group of exquisitely-gowned figures dancing to Mozart turned out, on close inspection, to be men. One of Osborne’s richest plays, it had to wait until Ronald Eyre’s 1983 Chichester production, with Alan Bates, to achieve the success it deserved. After the high peak of A Patriot for Me, Osborne enjoyed fluctuating fortunes. The Hotel in Amsterdam – written in 1968 and scarcely revived since – was an elegant tone-poem about a group of six friends, all fleeing from the influence of a tyrannical film producer. West of Suez, in 1971, was seen by many as the moment when Osborne turned Right. Set in a former British colony, it was widely viewed as a hymn to lost empires: one of the first plays I ever reviewed in these pages, I wrote at the time that it was actually about “the break-up of any civilisation that no longer puts its trust in reason, in respect for other people’s values and, above all, in language”. It was a view from which I gather Osborne himself did not entirely dissent. But where Osborne had once been claimed as the spokesman for a generation, he came in later years to be seen as a rancorous theatrical Thersites. A Sense of Detachment, in 1972, with its attack on the corruption of language and the prevalence of pornography, found few supporters. Watch It Come Down, staged at the Old Vic in 1976, was an intriguing but intellectually muddled attempt to do a latterday Heartbreak House. And Deja Vu, a 1992 update on the life and times of Jimmy Porter, while full of vintage Osborne bile, failed to take the West End by storm. So how important a writer was John Osborne? Without a shadow of doubt, he helped to change the face of postwar British theatre, and nothing can take that away from him. He also wrote at least half-a-dozen plays that will have a claim on posterity. But I suspect he will be remembered as well for his two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman, which reveal him as one of the most incandescent prose writers of his generation. And to those who object to the vicious assault on his former wife, Jill Bennett, I can only quote the remark of a friend who said to me that he must have once loved her a lot to have hated her so much. As for the man himself, he was a bundle of contradictions. From my slight acquaintanceship, I found he could be as charming and courteous in private as he could be blisteringly rude in print. And in later years, though he achieved domestic happiness with his fifth wife, Helen Dawson, there was something saddening about his alienation from the current theatrical scene. In the course of a very funny letter to me about Terence Rattigan, he reflected on the short period of popularity most dramatists enjoy, and remarked: “I seem to incite only dislike and indifference in whatever I attempt. I never did have much of a following. Now even that remnant is apparently gone. It’s a mistake to stick around too long.” But though Osborne fell out of theatrical fashion, the best of his work will survive. He once described his plays as “lessons in feeling”. And his unique gift was to create fiercely articulate dramatic heroes who embodied his own wounded and damaged spirit. He was, to the very last, a man with a talent for dissent. • John James Osborne, born 12 December 1929; died 24 December 1994 |