A short life of the author
John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English dramatist whose Look Back in Anger (1956) — first performed at the Royal Court Theatre — transformed British theatre overnight, launched the “Angry Young Men” movement, and introduced a new voice to the English stage: raw, furious, working-class, and contemptuous of the establishment. He was the most important English playwright between Shaw and Pinter, even if his later career never fully lived up to the revolution he began.
Life
Osborne was born in Fulham, London, the son of an advertising copywriter and a barmaid. His childhood was unhappy — his father died when he was eleven, and he had a fraught relationship with his mother (whom he excoriated in print and in person for the rest of his life). He was briefly educated at a minor public school, from which he was expelled for hitting the headmaster.
He drifted into the theatre as an actor in provincial repertory companies, where he learned his craft from the inside. He was married five times — to the actress Pamela Lane, the actress Mary Ure, the writer Penelope Gilliatt, the actress Jill Bennett (whose suicide he reportedly greeted with callousness), and the journalist Helen Dawson. His personal life was marked by rage, excess, and a capacity for cruelty that was inseparable from his talent.
Look Back in Anger (1956)
Osborne’s first major play — written in his mid-twenties, submitted to the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, and directed by Tony Richardson — premiered on 8 May 1956. Kenneth Tynan’s review in The Observer (“I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger”) made it an event.
Jimmy Porter — an educated working-class man running a sweet stall, raging against his upper-class wife Alison, her family, the Church, the government, the press, and the entire postwar settlement — was a new type of dramatic protagonist. He was not noble, not likeable, not redeemed. He was angry — specifically and articulately angry — at a society that had promised equality and delivered deference.
The play broke open the English stage. Before Look Back in Anger, serious English theatre meant Rattigan, Coward, and Fry — drawing-room plays about the upper middle class. After it, the stage was available to new voices: Wesker, Delaney, Arden, Bond.
The Entertainer (1957)
Osborne’s second major play — written for Laurence Olivier — uses the decline of a music-hall comedian, Archie Rice, as a metaphor for the decline of Britain itself, set against the background of the Suez Crisis. Olivier’s performance — embodying the forced gaiety and desperation of a dying art form — was one of the great theatrical events of the era.
Later Plays
Luther (1961) dramatises the life of Martin Luther, focusing on his psychological crises (constipation, terror, doubt) as much as his theology. Inadmissible Evidence (1964) follows a solicitor’s mental disintegration. A Patriot for Me (1965) — about the Austro-Hungarian officer Alfred Redl, blackmailed for his homosexuality — was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, cementing Osborne’s reputation as a theatrical provocateur.
Memoir
A Better Class of Person (1981) — the first volume of Osborne’s autobiography — is a brilliantly savage account of his childhood, his awful mother, and his early years in the theatre. It is one of the finest memoirs by a dramatist and is written with a verbal energy that matches the best of his plays.
Critical Standing
Osborne’s reputation has declined since his death. His anger, which seemed revolutionary in 1956, came to seem self-indulgent and misogynistic. His later plays were increasingly bitter and politically reactionary. But Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer remain essential works of postwar British theatre, and his influence on the generation of playwrights who followed him is beyond dispute.
Collecting Osborne
Look Back in Anger (1957, Faber & Faber) in first edition brings £100–£400. The Entertainer (1957, Faber) brings £50–£150. His later plays and memoirs bring £10–£40 in first edition.