John Osborne

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This article is about the playwright. For other people by the name John Osborne, please see John Osborne (disambiguation).

John James Osborne (December 12, 1929 – December 24, 1994) was an English playwright. The first of the Angry Young Men, it could arguably be said that Osborne dragged theatre single-handedly out of the middlebrow Terrence Rattigan comfort into which it had settled by the mid 1950s.

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Early Life

He was born in London, the son of Thomas, a copywriter and Nellie Beatrice, a Cockney barmaid. Thomas died in 1941, leaving the devastated young boy an insurance settlement which he used to finance a private education at Belmont College, Devon. Heartbroken over his father's death and unable to focus on his studies, Osborne came to hate public school and was expelled after striking the headmaster. Such outbursts of anger were to occur throughout Osborne's life.

After school, Osborne went home to his mother in London and briefly tried trade journalism. A job tutoring a touring company of junior actors introduced him to the theatre. He soon became involved as a stage manager and acting, joining Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company. Osborne tried his hand at writing plays, his first The Devil Inside Him was co-written with his mentor, Stella Linden, who then directed it at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield in 1950. Around this time he also married Pamela Lane. His second play Personal Enemy was written with Anthony Creighton (with whom he also wrote Epitaph for George Dillon) and staged in regional theatres before he submitted Look Back in Anger.

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Look Back in Anger

Written in seventeen days in a deckchair on Morecambe pier where he was performing in a creaky rep show called Seagulls over Sorrento, Look Back in Anger was largely autobiograpical, based on his time living, and rowing, with Pamela Lane in cramped accommodation in Derby while she cuckolded him with a local dentist. It was submitted to agents all over London and returned with cruel rapidity. In his autobiography, Osborne writes: 'The speed with which it had been returned was not surprising, but its aggressive dispatch did give me a kind of relief. It was like being grasped at the upper arm by a testy policeman and told to move on." Finally it was sent to the newly-formed English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. Formed by actor-manager and artistic director George Devine, the company's first two productions had been flops and it urgently needed a success if it was to survive. Devine was prepared to gamble on this play because he saw in it a ferocious and scowling articulation of a new post-war spirit. Osborne was living on a leaky houseboat on the River Thames at the time with Creighton, stewing up nettles from the riverbank to eat. So keen was Devine to contact that that he rowed out to the boat to tell Osborne he would like to make the play the third production to enter repertory. It was a part-time press officer at the theatre who invented the phrase angry young man, which was to become a phenomenon with Osborne its epitome.

In 1993, a year before his death, Osborne wrote that the opening night was 'an occasion I only partly remember, but certainly with more accuracy than those who subsequently claimed to have been present and, if they are to be believed, would have filled the theatre several times over'. Reviews were mixed, most of the critics who attended the first night felt it was a failure and it looked as if the English Stage Company was going to go into liquidation. But the following Sunday, they were granted the miracle they had been praying for, Kenneth Tynan - the most influential critic of the age - praised it to the skies: 'I could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger,' he wrote, 'It is the best young play of its decade'. During production, the married Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, one of the stars of the play, and would divorce his wife, Pamela Lane, to marry her in 1957. The play went on to be an enormous commercial success, transferring to the West End and to Broadway, touring to Moscow and in 1958 it was filmed with Richard Burton and Mary Ure in the leading roles. The play turned Osborne from a struggling playwright into a wealthy and famous angry young man and won him the Evening Standard Drama Award as the most promising playwright of the year.

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The Entertainer and into the 1960s

Initially afraid of this new revolution in theatre and seeing himself, correctly, as a target, Laurence Olivier saw Look Back in Anger and was so impressed that he commissioned Osborne to write a play for him. The result was The Entertainer (1957). It was a Brecht-inspired (although he always denied this) piece that uses the metaphor of the dying music hall tradition to comment on the moribund state of the British Empire, something flagrantly revealed during the Suez Crisis of November 1956 which ellipitically forms the backdrop to the play. An experimental piece, The Entertainer was interspersed with Vaudeville performances. Most critics praised the development of an exciting writing talent.

'A real pro is a real man, all he needs is an old backcloth behind him and he can hold them on his own for half an hour. He's like the general run of people, only he's a lot more like them than they are themselves, if you understand me.'

The words are Billy Rice's though, as with much of Osborne's work they could be said to represent his own sentiments, as with this quote from Look Back in Anger:

'Oh, heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm — that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out 'Hallelujah! Hallelujah. I'm alive!

Luther was next in 1961, it transferred to Broadway and won Osborne a Tony Award. Inadmissible Evidence followed in 1964. They were both powerful pieces, using Osborne's characteristically soaring rhetorical venom to powerful effect, but lacing their stories with complexity, ambiguity and richness. However some critics said they were lacking the immediacy of earlier pieces. Inbetween these plays, Osborne won an Oscar for his 1963 adaptation of Tom Jones. A Patriot for Me (1965) was a tale of turn-of-the-century homosexuality and was instrumental in putting the boot in to the eighteenth-century system of theatrical censorship under the Lord Chamberlain. It also gave rise to rumours, always denied by Osborne and his family, that Osborne was himself homosexual. A Hotel in Amsterdam saw Osborne back on more traditional territory but by now the big successes of earlier years were eluding him, though both A Patriot For Me and Hotel in Amsterdam won Evening Standard Best Play of the Year awards.

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1970s and Later Life

In 1971, Osborne turned in his most famous acting appearance, lending Cyril Kinnear a sense of civil menace in Get Carter. A Sense of Detachment, (1972) was very unconventional and pressed the new avant-garde's techniques into the service of Osborne's by now unfashionable social vision. It was derided and seemed symptomatic of a writer who had lost his way, and his audience. As the work of Joe Orton, a playwright who had been influenced by Osborne, enjoyed a posthumous revival in the 1970s, Osborne's wasn't produced as it declined in quality. In 1978 he appeared in Tomorrow Never Comes and in 1980 Flash Gordon.

In the last decade of his life, Osborne received most praise (and vilification) for the two volumes of autobiography he produced, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991), which used that familiar acidity of language to lay low all his enemies, whether in the theatre, his family, or society at large. These included his ex-wife, actress Jill Bennett. All but the last of Osborne's marriages (to journalist Helen Dawson) were the stuff of sour melodrama. He gave Jill Bennett the nickname Adolf for her "common and strident" ways, wrote that onstage she sounded "like a puppy with a mouthful of lavatory paper," and openly rejoiced at her suicide.

He also collected various newspaper and magazine writings together in 1994 under the title Damn You, England. At his memorial service in 1995, playwright David Hare said:

'It is, if you like, the final irony that John's governing love was for a country which is, to say the least, distrustful of those who seem to be both clever and passionate. There is in English public life an implicit assumption that the head and the heart are in some sort of opposition. If someone is clever, they get labelled cold. If they are emotional, they get labelled stupid. Nothing bewilders the English more than someone who exhibits great feeling and great intelligence. When, as in John's case, a person is abundant in both, the English response is to take in the washing and bolt the back door'.

His last play was Déjà Vu (1991) a sequel to Look Back in Anger and has some force, but seems self-absorbed and grouchy, lacking the fire of the first play.

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Critical Responses, Idols and Effect

Notable among commentaries on John Osborne is Nancy Huntting's discussion of the relation of Jimmy and Alison in Look Back in Anger. She points to a deep feeling in Osborne that criticizing a person's contemptuous disdain for the world is the same as loving that person. Her paper, relating this play to women's lives today, was presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City with the title "Love and Criticism: Is There Any Relation?".

Osborne was a great fan of Max Miller and saw parallels between them. 'I love him, (Max Miller) because he embodied a kind of theatre I admire most. 'Mary from the Dairy' was an overture to the danger that (Max) might go too far. Whenever anyone tells me that a scene or a line in a play of mine goes too far in some way then I know my instinct has been functioning as it should. When such people tell you that a particular passage makes the audience uneasy or restless, then they seem (to me) as cautious and absurd as landladies and girls-who-won't.'

Osborne's work transformed British theatre. He helped to make it artistically respected again, throwing off the formal constraints of the former generation, and turning our attention once more to language, theatrical rhetoric, and emotional intensity. He saw theatre as a weapon with which ordinary people could break down the class barriers and that he had a 'beholden duty to kick against the pricks'. He wanted his plays to be a reminder of real pleasures and real pains. David Hare said in his memorial address:

'John Osborne devoted his life to trying to forge some sort of connection between the acuteness of his mind and the extraordinary power of his heart'.

Osborne did change the world of theatre, influencing playwrights such as Edward Albee and Mike Leigh, however work of his authenticity and originality would remain the exception rather than the rule. However this did not surprise Osborne, nobody understood the tackiness of the theatre better than the man who had played Hamlet on Hayling Island. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writer's Guild of Great Britain.

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Women

Osborne remained angry until the end of his life. Women evidently found his anger attractive - he had more than his fair share of lovers in addition to wives, and he was not kind to them. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that in relationships he was an out-and-out cad. In his own autobiography he details some of the brazen subterfuges he created in order to commit adultery with Penelope Gilliatt before they were married. Jill Bennett's suicide is generally believed to have been a result of Osborne's rejection of her.

He was married five times:

He died from complications from his diabetes at the age of 65 in the UK. He is buried at Clun in Shropshire alongside his last wife, Helen, who died in 2004.cs:John James Osborne de:John James Osborne pl:John Osborne sv:John Osborne

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