The Bellicose Defeatism of John Osborne

"I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of the decade." With that declaration Kenneth Tynan ensured the astonishing success of John Osborne's play. It was soon transferred from London to New York. The Times announced, "An October bonfire opened last night, and lit a blaze on Broadway. Look Back in Anger by a 27-year old British playwright." It made Osborne rich and famous overnight. Later he claimed that royalties from the book, and from the regular performances of the play, guaranteed him a pension for life. This play, which turned out to be his lasting legacy, would define his future. He wrote a sequel to it as his last play, Dejavu (1992), bringing his dramatic career full circle.

Osborne went on to write such highly successful plays as The Entertainer, Inadmissible Evidence, Luther, and The Hotel in Amsterdam, in which such actors as Olivier, Gielgud, and Guinness took the leading roles. These plays changed the climate and landscape of British drama, and, in recognition of his contributions to it, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. At the start of his career, Osborne felt that the theater was in a dire state. He believed that the contemporary playwrights, Coward, Rattigan, et al., were passionless and reactionary, and that their style was outmoded. While acting in a Maugham play, Osborne began to feel that the playwright's "language was dead, elusively inert, wobbly like some synthetic rubber substance." Almost singlehandedly he pulled British drama out of the sophisticated drawing rooms, and pitched it at the center of contemporary life. He never wrote, as is commonly believed, about working-class life, but he did open the door for the later "kitchen sink" dramatists like Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe.

Osborne wrote about, and for, the newly emergent middle class—better-educated people who were more sensitive to the plight of postwar England. The country had shrunk both geographically and politically. Young people had grown up highly dissatisfied with what their lives had to offer. They were angry and rebellious, and they felt helpless and marginalized. Through the lives of his subsequent protagonists, Archie, Redl, Luther and Dillon, and Jimmy Porter, Osborne projected what David Hare would describe as "the comfortless tragedy of isolated hearts." These Englishmen speak the authentic speech of the common man; and Osborne wanted to introduce "vibrant language and patent honesty, which [he] always believed the theater, and now the abandoned liturgy of the Anglican church could accommodate." By achieving this idiom, he rescued the English stage from high-minded banality and rhetoric, and he remodeled the diction of dramatic literature for all time.

He was less successful in his marital life, partly owing to his own faults. He had five wives, but because of his infidelities, which he later regretfully called "criminal indiscretions," his marriages fell apart. After their divorces from Osborne, three of these women died of drug overdoses or alcoholism. This embittered him, and he was further exasperated by the tabloid columnists' exploitation of his personal life. He became angry and vituperative, and he started to inveigh, sometimes arbitrarily, against debased society in plays such as West of Suez and A Sense of Detachment. This subjectivity damaged his work, which began to be rejected. He turned to excessive drinking, which led to serious physical problems and finally to psychological breakdowns. The story of the latter half of his life is one of failure and disillusionment. John Heilpern has rendered it movingly by giving a graphic account of these years in his book. He has sympathetically completed the life story, which the playwright himself had covered only up to 1966 in the two volumes of his autobiography.

After a hiatus of sixteen years Osborne wrote what would be his last play, Dejavu. Jimmy Porter in this new play is now "a gray-haired man of indeterminate age." He is still very angry...