The Social Theme in Osborne's Plays

THE SOCIAL THEME IN OSBORNE'S PLAYS JOHN OSBORNE'S VIEW OF MAN is primarily social. The condition of failure and despair in which modern man finds himself is not necessarily man's final state for John Osborne, and the world in which modern man exists does not have to remain an absurd world. In Luther, Osborne has Martin say: "Seems to me there are three ways out of despair. One is faith in Christ, the second is to become enraged by the world and make its nose bleed for it, and the third is the love of a woman." This states a basic theme that Osborne plays variations upon through all of his plays. For those who are not only intelligent enough but also sensitive enough to know the despair, the job of living becomes the problem of how to cope with this despair. The most common way to cope with the despair turns out to be anger. Being enraged or angered by the world is not necessarily a reaction that one chooses; it is almost inevitable, given an individual with sufficient capacity for feeling and sufficient experience of life's futility and failure. If anything at all is felt, the feeling will be anger. In its most exaggerated form, this anger becomes that of Leonido, in A Bond Honoured, who insists that his anger is his reaction to knowing that he was conceived when his father raped his mother. The prototype of this reaction of anger is found in Jimmy Porter's experiencelooking back to the "feverish failure" of his father's life, which ended in despair and bitterness. If failure is characteristic of life itself, how is it possible not to feel despair and bitterness? This is the question that most of Osborne's heroes ask. In Luther, where the failure appears in its theological form as sin, Brother Weinand says to Martin: "God isn't angry with you. It's you who are angry with him." It is precisely because those around Osborne and those around his heroes seem not to feel anything when, or if, they recognize the various failures in life that the reaction of those who do feel is a reaction of anger. The experience of despair thus has already inherent in it a way out of despair-that is, a way out through anger. An essential characteristic of the hero's experience in each of Osborne's plays is that he is alone, isolated, cut off from things. And the condition in which it is possible for him to be conscious of this isolation has always existedthat is, the condition in which he feels what no one else feels, in which no one but he seems aware of failure. "Am I the only one to see all this, and suffer?" Martin asks in the play Luther. To an unbearably painful degree, it is true for each of Osborne's heroesas it is true for Martin-that he is the only one. Thus Archie Rice, in 78 1970 SOCIAL THEME IN OSBORNE'S PLAYS 79 The Entertainer, can sing with bitter irony, "Number one's the only one for mel" and "Why should I care? ... What's the use of despair?" Archie Rice pleads with his audience for some response of feeling, but his audience not only fails to respond to the despair that he himself feels, it does not even respond to the capitalist middle-class sentiment : "We're all out for good old number one." Archie Rice's audience simply feels nothing-just as Alison, Helena, and Cliff feel nothing in Look Back in Anger after Jimmy finishes his tirade about having watched his father dying: They all sit silently. Presently, Helena rises. "Time we went." Alison nods. Then Alison quietly goes about getting ready to go to church with Helena, and, with no more than the slightest hesitation at learning from Jimmy that Hugh's mum is dying, does go, leaving Jimmy alone, looking about unbelievingly. That is about as much feeling as Alison at that point is capable of. A prominent group of images in Look Back in Anger is what might be called types of the historical hero...