Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger - Articles about rare books, antiquarian books, manuscripts,... - ILAB-LILA Association: Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America - Bookseller: Lighthouse Books, ABAA Share with : Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger By Michael Slicker John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956) is credited with transforming British theater from escapist fantasies to stark realism. The play came to represent a generation of disaffected Brits after World War II and was hailed as a significant theatrical breakthrough. Osborne was described as the first of the "angry young men," working class British playwrights and novelists who came to prominence in the 1950s. The play was adapted for a 1959 film starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure (whom Osborne married). It was directed by Tony Richardson. The play had an inauspicious beginning. Osborne was working in a tiny theater company in a resort town in northern England.

He wrote the play in 17 days while sitting a deck chair on a pier recalling earlier acrimonious days with his actress wife in their cramped living quarters in a small town in central England. They fought and argued, and all the while she was having an affair with a local dentist. The play was full of vitriol and pessimism, and included tirades on the mediocrity of middle-class British life. When he returned to London, Osborne submitted the play to numerous agents but it was returned, (remarkably quickly, Osborne thought, though he wasn't surprised at the rejections.) Finally, he sent it to a new theater group, English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. The company had had three flops in a row and desperately needed a hit. Osborne was pretty desperate himself. At the time he was living in a leaky houseboat on the Thames River with an actor friend. They had little money. They gathered plants from the river bank and cooked them to eat. At first, the play received negative reviews, with critics calling it a failure and "a self-pitying snivel." But then the most influential critic of the time, Kenneth Tynan, called it the best young play of the decade.

Audiences took notice, and the play became a commercial success. It eventually played in London's prestigious West End and Broadway. During the original production, Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, who was in the cast, and divorced his wife, actress Pamela Lane. Osborne followed the success of Look Back in Anger with The Entertainer (1957), which used the transition from vaudeville to rock 'n roll as a metaphor for the British Empire's decline in world stature. It starred Laurence Olivier, who also did a movie version two years later. Osborne also wrote Luther (1961), a study of the life of Martin Luther, and the screenplay for Tom Jones (1963), the film adaptation of Henry Fielding's 1749 novel. *** Posted on the Lighthouse Books Blog , presented here by permission of the author. Picture: Between the Covers Rare Books. Look Back in Anger by John Osborne Author John Osborne John Osborne John James Osborne (12 December 1929 - 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment.

The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak (1956 - 1966), he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit. JOHN OSBORNE'S BRUSH WITH HAVANT On 12 December 1950, John Osborne spent his 21st birthday in Havant Magistrate's Court.

Long before Jimmy Porter was conceived, and at a time when the huge success of his birth was still unimaginable, Osborne was a struggling actor with an eye to running his own theatre company. The dream had been realised earlier that year when he and some chums rented the Victoria Hall, a 300-seater auditorium attached to a hotel in Beach Road, Hayling Island - since demolished. With a programme of potboilers and classics out of copyright the company had quite a good summer but with the end of the holiday season, the bank account soon emptied. A local grocer, one Mr. Cherry, took Osborne to court over an unpaid bill of 14 pounds. The actors lost the case and did a runner. Vengeance on Mr. Cherry took the form of characterising him as the mean-minded killjoy, Percy Elliot in Osborne's early play, 'Epitaph for George Dillon'. But final retribution did not stop there. In 1950, Havant Magistrate's Court was a tiny structure behind Havant Police Station in West Street. Twenty years later both of these buildings stood empty when the borough built their current replacements.

They mouldered away for a bit until the council took note of a new amateur theatre group in town called Theatre Union. This nomadic group needed a home and the old Magistrate's Court, at a peppercorn rent, was the answer. In 1970, Theatre Union moved in. With a canny sense of history, they called their new base the Bench Theatre. In time, the company gave way to the inevitable and dropped the Theatre Union moniker in favour of the name of the building. For the young company, John Osborne and his generation of playwrights stood for everything they aspired to, so it was not long before they turned to his plays for a production. In December 1972, as Osborne celebrated his 42nd birthday, the Bench staged his 1957 play, 'The Entertainer'. Archie Rice was played by Ray Osborne, a founder member. He was not related to the playwright, but that was not going to stop him writing to his famous namesake. Knowing the story of Mr. Cherry and the unpaid bill, Ray thought Osborne would like to know that the whirly-gig of time had brought in its revenges. The result was two happy Osborne.

The famous one wrote back to our Osborne with a letter full of charm, only slightly tinged with malice. As the playwright's usual mix in writing letters was the other way we can only count this as a rare event. The Bench moved out of the old building in 1977 when the Old Town Hall was developed as the arts centre it is today. The magistrate's court and the police station have since been demolished. Sadly, Ray Osborne died in 1985, leaving an enormous bundle of Bench stuff to me. Over the following months I converted 'stuff' into 'archive' and have been cataloguing the Bench's fortunes ever since. But though Ray had told me the story - okay, more than once - I never found Osborne's letter. I imagine that it was so precious to him that he put it in a special place - where perhaps it still is. David Penrose PlayLook Back in Anger In a one room flat in the Midlands, this is a slice of life drama set in the 1950's representing post-war youth with the lead character, protagonist Jimmy Porter, an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working class origin living with his upper middle class wife, Alison.

Cliff shares their lodging house and attempts to keep the peace during Jimmy's constant vitriolic verbal attacks on his wife, her family and their social standing. Their marriage is further threatened by the arrival of Alison's friend and aspiring actress Helena...... This play is considered to be autobiographical relating to John Osborne's relationship with the actress Pamela Lane, the adoration of his father and the vehement hatred of his mother. The Merits of Look Back in Anger When written, in the 1950's, this was the most original piece ever written which ultimately changed the face of British Theatre. As the first 'kitchen sink drama' featuring the foremost 'angry young man' in Jimmy Porter, it inspired a new wave of writers, directors and film makers who, as a direct result, produced classics such as 'Room at the Top', 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' and 'Love on the Dole'.

Of a 1989 revival of Look Back in Anger, Michael Billington, critic for the Guardian, asserted that "Good plays change their meaning with time; and it is a measure of the quality of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger that it now seems a very different work to the one staged at the Royal Court in 1956." Although to Billington the play "seemed less an incendiary social drama than an exploration of personal pain," he went on to note that "what is slightly chilling is to realise how topical many of Osborne's ideas remain." The plain, drab setting of the play illustrates the contrast between the idealistic Jimmy and the dull reality of the world surrounding him. Reviews The NewsJennie Rawling Jimmy Porter, the lead character in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, is a character most audiences find difficult to like. Showing this week at the Spring in Havant, Bench Theatre's production boasts a perfectly unlikeable Jimmy, played by Mark Woodhouse. His slightly hunched posture and threatening presence create an air of unease, with Jimmy's volatile nature played with gusto. In moments where he allows himself to really live in the character, the actor is capable of delivering a powerful performance.

Porter's long-suffering wife Alison is played with sensitivity and a very human subtleness by Robin Hall. Liz Donnelly as Alison's friend, Helena Charles, and Pete Woodward as Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, give distinct performances, with lovely work on the characters' physicality. Live music from trumpet player Jonathan Brocklehurst is a treat, with a well-deserved bow at the end. Sam Treharne as the Porters' neighbour, Cliff Lewis, gives a standout performance. The subtlest of facial expressions or body language tells the story of not only his character's feelings but the whole situation. His touching performance binds the show together. A thoughtful and emotive performance that doesn't always hit the mark but is powerful when it does. Until Saturday. The News, Jennie Rawling, 19th September 2013 Daily Echo, SouthamptonHam Quentin Look Back in Anger: A Play in Three Acts - John Osborne - Google Books Look Back in Anger: A Play in Three Acts 0 Reviews Jimmy Porter plays trumpet badly.

He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England. First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life." Book jacket. What people are saying - Write a review We haven't found any reviews in the usual places. Selected pages Copyright Common terms and phrases Limited preview - 2004 About the author (1959) John Osborne was born on December 12, 1929 in London, England. He was educated at Belmont College, Devon but was expelled after attacking the headmaster. He became involved in theatre, as a stage manager and then as an actor.

He started writing plays and two of them, The Devil Inside Her and Personal Enemy, were staged in regional theatres before he submitted Look Back in Anger to the newly formed English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. The company chose the play as the third production to enter repertory. The play became a commercial success, transferring to the West End and to Broadway, and was later filmed with Richard Burton in the leading role. His other plays included The Entertainer, Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, A Patriot for Me, A Hotel in Amsterdam, A Sense of Detachment, and Deja Vu. He also wrote a number of screenplays, mainly adaptations of his own works. He won an Oscar for his 1963 adaptation of Tom Jones. He acted in a few films including Get Carter, Tomorrow Never Comes, and Flash Gordon. He also wrote two autobiographies entitled A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman. He died from complications brought on from his diabetes on December 24, 1994 at the age of 65. Look Back in Anger - Roundabout Theatre Company Roundabout Theatre Company Alphabetical Listing Who's Who ADAM DRIVER (Cliff).

Broadway: Man and Boy, Mrs. Warren's Profession (Roundabout). Off-Broadway: Angels in America (Signature Theatre), The Retributionists (Playwrights Horizons), The Forest (CSC). Off-Off Broadway: Little Doc (Rattlestick), Slipping (Rattlestick), Cipher (SPF). Television: "Law & Order: Brilliant Disguise", "The Unusuals: The E.I.D.", "You Don't Know Jack" (HBO), "The Wonderful Maladays" (HBO) Film: I'm Coming Over, Goldstar Ohio, Not Waving But Drowning, Archangel. Upcoming: J. Edgar, Lincoln, Untitled Noah Baumbach Project. SARAH GOLDBERG (Alison). Theatre: Apologia (Bush Theatre), Clybourne Park (Royal Court, West End/Olivier nomination, Best Supporting Actress), Miss Lilly Gets Boned, Six Degrees of Separation (Old Vic), Ice-Cream (Royal Court), The Member of the Wedding (Young Vic). TV: "Any Human Heart".

Film: The Dark Knight Rises, Gambit, Rob and Valentina in Scotland, A Bunch of Amateurs, Refraction. CHARLOTTE PARRY (Helena). Roundabout: The Importance of Being Earnest, Howard Katz. Broadway: Coram Boy, The Real Thing. Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project (The Cherry Orchard/ The Winters Tale at BAM/West End/international tour). Peter Hall Company: As You Like It, The Importance of Being Earnest (BAM/London/US tour). Off-Broadway: Equivocation (MTC), Rainbow Kiss (Play Co.), Master Builder (Irish Rep). Regional: premiere of Pirate (NYSAF, dir./written by John Patrick Shanley), premiere of Albee’s Me, Myself and I, The Birthday Party (McCarter), The Turn of the Screw (Westport), Cymbeline and Private Lives (NJ Shakes.). UK London/regional: Amadeus, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Three Sisters, The Seagull, Titus Andronicus, Dream, The Blue Room, Follies, Whistle Down the Wind, Charley’s Aunt, Northanger Abbey.

TV/film: “The Park Bench,” “The Safe House,” “Extreme Ghost Stories” (all for ITV). More than 40 audiobooks narrated. MATTHEW RHYS (Jimmy). Matthew Rhys' passion, creativity and attitude have helped him solidify his place in the industry as a reputable and versatile actor. He is best known for his role on ABC's hit drama "Brothers & Sisters," where he played Kevin Walker. He has recently produced a documentary for UK television, charting the volatile life of Griffith Jenkins Griffith - one of the founding fathers of Los Angeles. Rhys continued his work on the other side of the camera earlier this season when he made his directorial debut directing an episode of "Brothers & Sisters." Matthew recently wrapped production Marc Evan's independent film Patagonia depicting two parallel groups who travel to Argentina and the Welsh settlements of Patagonia. He was recently seen in the BBC Film, The Edge of Love, opposite Kiera Knightly and Sienna Miller where he received rave reviews. The film, about the legendary poet, Dylan Thomas (Rhys) and his love of two women, premiered at the Edinborough Film Festival and was released in the U.S. last year.

Leslie Felperin from Variety says "Rhys' work is sturdy, getting Thomas' delivery down pat without decending into mere impersonation." In 2006, Matthew starred opposite Brittany Murphy in the independent feature Love and Other Disasters. Matthew's other film credits include, Virgin Territory, The Testimony of Taliesin Jones, Very Annie Mary, Peaches, Tabloid and Deathwatch. Rhys's television credits include the lead role in "Metropolis," a drama series following the lives of six twenty-somethings living in London. He was also seen in BBC's the "Lost World," which recreating Conan Doyle's tale of British explorers searching for an undiscovered plateau inhabited by prehistoric beasts. In 2000, Rhys opened to huge critical acclaim when he starred as 'Benjamin' in the world premiere of the stage adaptation of The Graduate alongside Kathleen Turner at the Gielgud Theatre in London's West End. Matthew attended the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Shortly after, in 1993, Matthew was awarded the 'Patricia Rothermere Scholarship'.

During his time at RADA, Matthew appeared in "House of America" and "Back-Up", the BBC police series about the operational support units Hooli Vans. Matthew then returned to Cardiff to act in his own language in the Welsh film Bydd yn Wrol (Be Brave) for which he won 'Best Actor' at the Welsh BAFTAs. Matthew was born and raised in the historic city of Cardiff, South Wales. He currently resides in Los Angeles. JOHN OSBORNE (Playwright). John James Osborne was born in London on 12 December 1929 and died in Shropshire in December 1994. He was married five times. His first wife was actress Pamela Lane. Pamela was the basis for the character of Alison in Look Back in Anger, outlived John and all his subsequent wives and died in October 2010. Pamela kept all John's letters to her and they have recently been acquired by the British Library. John and Pamela maintained a friendship throughout John's life interrupted only during his marriage to Jill Bennett a friend of hers whom she advised John against marrying.

John's second wife was actress Mary Ure who created the role of Alison in Look Back in Anger. His third wife was novelist and critic Penelope Gilliat with whom he had a daughter, Nolan. His fourth wife was actress Jill Bennett for whom he wrote several plays. His fifth wife was journalist Helen Dawson. This was his happiest and longest marriage. Helen outlived him by ten years. In later life John observed that no man should be encouraged to marry an actress and playwrights should be actively prevented from such self slaughter. Osborne started writing plays whilst working as an actor in repertory in the 1950s.

He first gained international fame in 1956 when Look Back in Anger was presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where many of his plays were produced, including The Entertainer (1957); Epitaph For George Dillon (1958); Luther (1961); Plays For England : The Blood of the Bamburgs and Under Plain Cover (1962); Inadmissible Evidence (1964); A Patriot for Me (1965); Time Present (1968); The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968); West of Suez (1971) and A Sense of Detachment (1972).

His other plays include The Devil Inside Him/Cry For Love (Huddersfield 1950 & Cardiff 2010); Personal Enemy (Harrogate 1955 & London & New York 2010); the musical The World of Paul Slickey (Palace Theatre, 1959); The End of Me Old Cigar (Greenwich, 1975); Watch it Come Down (National, 1975) and Deja Vu (Comedy Theatre, 1992) and he adapted Lope de Vega's A Bond Honoured (National, 1966); Hedda Gabler (Royal Court, 1972); A Place Calling Itself Rome (a reworking of CORIOLANUS); Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray (Greenwich, 1975) and Strindberg's The Father (National, 1988).

His work for television includes "A Subject of Scandal and Concern"; "The Right Prospectus"; "Jack and Jill"; "The Gift of Friendship"; "Almost a Vision"; "Try a Little Tenderness"; "You're Not Watching Me Mummy"; "Very Like a Whale"; "God Rot Tunbridge Wells" and his autobiographical play "A Better Class of Person". He won an Oscar for his screenplay for Tom Jones and collaborated on the screenplays for Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Inadmissible Evidence and The Charge of The Light Brigade. His film and television performances included The Parachute, First Love, Get Carter, Tomorrow Never Comes and Flash Gordon. He wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman which were subsequently published together as Looking Back, Never Explain, Never Apologies and published a volume of essays, Damn You England. John Osborne received the Evening Standard Drama Award for Most Promising Playwright of the Year for Look Back in Anger and Best Play of the Year Award for A Patriot for Me and The Hotel in Amsterdam. He also received the "Tony" Award in New York for Best Play for Luther.

The Writer's Guild of Great Britain presented him with a Life Time Achievement Award in 1992. SAM GOLD (Director). Recent credits: A Doll's House (Williamstown Theatre Festival), August: Osage County (The Old Globe), Kin (Playwrights Horizons); The Coward (Lincoln Center's LCT3); Tigers be Still (Roundabout); Dusk Rings a Bell (Atlantic); The Aliens (Rattlestick); Circle Mirror Transformation (Playwrights Horizons, Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination); Jollyship the Whiz-Bang (Ars Nova- 2008, The Public's Under the Radar Festival- 2010); Rag and Bone (Rattlestick); The Joke (Studio Dante); The Black Eyed (NYTW); The Secret Agenda of Trees (Cherry Lane); The Threepenny Opera, Edward II (Juilliard); Electra (Williams College). Dramaturg at The Wooster Group (2003-2006). Roundabout Associate Artist, NYTW Usual Suspect, Drama League Directing Fellow, recipient of the Princess Grace Award, graduate of Juilliard Directing Program.

Upcoming: Seminar (Broadway); Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Big Meal (Playwrights Horizons); The Realistic Joneses (Yale Rep). The LOOK BACK IN ANGER creative team also includes Andrew Lieberman (Sets), David Zinn (Costumes), Mark Barton (Lights), Bray Poor (Sound). BBC - Shropshire - History - John Osborne - The man who turned anger into art You are in: Shropshire > History > Great Salopians > John Osborne - The man who turned anger into art John Osborne John Osborne - The man who turned anger into art John Osborne changed the face of British Theatre. His play "Look Back in Anger" was the turning point in postwar British theatre. He was an 'angry young man' who spent his happiest years in Shropshire. Born on 12 December 1929, in London, John Osborne changed the face of British theatre. His father, an advertising copywriter, died in 1941, leaving Osborne an insurance settlement which he used to finance a boarding school education at Belmont College in Devon.

Still heartbroken, however, over his father's death, Osborne could not focus on his studies and left after striking the headmaster. He returned to London and became involved in the theatre when he took a job tutoring a touring company of young actors. He went on to serve as actor-manager for a string of repertory companies and soon decided to try his hand at writing plays. Before Osborne arrived on the theatrical scene, the British theatre consisted mainly of melodramas and safe, middle class drawing-room comedies. But in 1956, Osborne's third play and first London-produced drama, Look Back in Anger, shocked audiences and "wiped the smugness off the frivolous face of English theatre," as John Lahr put it in a New York Times Book Review article. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the angry and rebellious nature of the postwar generation, a dispossessed lot who were clearly unhappy with things as they were in the decades following World War II. Jimmy Porter came to represent an entire generation of "angry young men." John and Helen Osbourne are buried in Clun Look Back in Anger established Osborne, the struggling actor and playwright, as a leading writer for theatre, television and film.

It also had a profound effect on British culture. The play not only influenced playwrights such as Joe Orton and Edward Albee, but it also threw cold water in the face of a sleepy popular culture. All manner of writers, actors, artists, and musicians (including the Beatles) soon reflected the influence of Osborne's "angry young man." So impressed was Laurence Olivier with Look Back in Anger that he commissioned Osborne to write a play for him. The result was was The Entertainer, which featured a leading role that is considered one of the greatest and most challenging parts in late twentieth-century drama. In The Entertainer, (1957), Osborne continued to examine the state of the country, this time using three generations of a family of entertainers to symbolize the decline of England after the war. Laurence Olivier played Archie Rice, a struggling comedian, and the role resulted in one of his most famous performances. An experimental piece, The Entertainer alternated realistic scenes with Vaudeville performances, and most critics agreed that it was an appropriate follow-up to the wild success of Look Back in Anger. After this, the quality of Osborne's output became erratic.

Although he produced a number of hits, he also produced a string of unimportant works. Critics began to accuse him of not fulfilling his early potential and audiences no longer seemed effected by his rage. Osborne died as a result of complications from Diabetes on December 24th 1994 and is buried in the churchyard at Clun. He left behind a large body of work for the stage as well as as several autobiographical works. Several of his plays were also adapted for film including Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. In 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. After his death, playwright David Hare made a moving tribute to John Osborne saying, "It took the author's sudden death last Christmas and his burial in a Shropshire churchyard, just a few miles from the blissful house he shared with his beloved Helen, to wake his own country into some kind of appreciation of what they had lost". Helen died in January 2004 and is buried alongside her husband in Clun.

last updated: 15/05/2008 at 11:24 created: 07/04/2005 John Osborne; Playwright Wrote 'Look Back in Anger' - latimes YOU ARE HERE: LAT Home → Collections John Osborne; Playwright Wrote 'Look Back in Anger' December 27, 1994 |WILLIAM TUOHY | TIMES STAFF WRITER LONDON — John Osborne, the Oscar-winning playwright who made his mark as one of the "angry young men" of British theater and who kept up his iconoclastic conduct long after, has died of heart failure in a hospital near his home in Shropshire, a spokesman said Monday. He was 65. Osborne's seminal play, "Look Back in Anger," transformed British theater in 1956, opening the way for what would be described as "kitchen sink" drama--the portrayal of the gritty realism of working-class life that also reflected the playwright's own background.

Jimmy Porter, the antihero of "Look Back," railed against the Establishment and its values, as did the author, who became a voice for the disgruntled of Britain's post-war generation. Richard Burton starred in a 1958 film version of the work. Osborne won his Oscar for his screenplay of the 1964 film "Tom Jones." Among his other notable works are "The Entertainer," which many critics saw as a metaphor for a declining Britain and which starred Sir Laurence Olivier, "Luther" and "Inadmissible Evidence." In 1992, Osborne updated the Jimmy Porter story with a new play, "Deja Vu," in which his old hero now lives comfortably but rages against homosexuals and "luvvies," theatrical and literary folk. The work was a critical and box-office failure. Osborne in his private life adopted the angry man persona. He was notorious for his hard drinking and irascibility.

In a recent interview, he asked: "Who wants to live to 110 anyway if it means not smoking and not drinking?" Married five times, he savaged some of his wives in his autobiography and called his mother "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent." Helen Dawson, his fifth wife, was at his hospital bedside when he died Saturday. His other wives were Pamela Lane, actress Mary Ure, writer Penelope Gilliatt and actress Jill Bennett. Osborne described Bennett in his memoirs, "Almost a Gentleman," as "the most evil woman I've ever come across" and called her suicide the "coarse posturing of an overheated housemaid." Osborne was a fixture on the London theatrical scene and became notorious for firing off letters to newspapers and speaking out on a range of topics that piqued him. He once said critics were "nearly all cripples suffering from some terrible disease." At the Writers' Guild Awards in London two years ago, he denounced British theater as "this horrible profession which has never been held in more contempt." In his polemic "Damn You, England," he ripped his country, saying of it: "You're rotting now, and quite soon you'll disappear .

. . untouchable, unteachable, impregnable." Osborne began his career as an actor but started writing plays at age 19. He moved from London to Clunton, Shropshire, in a deliberate attempt to flee the literary Establishment. Upon his death, which occurred after he was hospitalized for a diabetic condition, his friends took note of his abundant bile but also praised his talents. "He was a revolutionary writer," playwright Arthur Miller said. "He opened up British theater . . . and I suppose everybody is indebted to him for that." Osborne "was wonderfully vindictive," Sheridan Morley, an author, playwright and critic, said. "He took no prisoners, gave no hostages. He was full of loathing . . . and yet there was a richness of language in John. He wrote wonderful roles, wonderful speeches. . . . What is important is the energy of the man. He had this tremendous raging against the light.

Whatever it was, John was there to hate it." MORE: Look Back in Anger by John Osborne - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Look Back in Anger by John Osborne Playing at the Royal National Theatre, London through September 18 By Paul Bond 14 September 1999 The first production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 provoked a major controversy. There were those, like the Observer newspaper's influential critic Kenneth Tynan, who saw it as the first totally original play of a new generation. There were others who hated both it and the world that Osborne was showing them. But even these critics acknowledged that the play, written in just one month, marked a new voice on the British stage. Howard Brenton, writing in the Independent newspaper at the time of Osborne's death in 1994, said, “When somebody breaks the mould so comprehensively it's difficult to describe what it feels like”. In the same paper, Arnold Wesker described Osborne as having “opened the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers”.

Look Back in Anger came to exemplify a reaction to the affected drawing-room comedies of Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan and others, which dominated the West End stage in the early 1950s. Coward et al wrote about an affluent bourgeoisie at play in the drawing rooms of their country homes, or sections of the upper middle class comfortable in suburbia. Osborne and the writers who followed him were looking at the working class or the lower middle class, struggling with their existence in bedsits or terraces. The "kitchen sink" dramatists—as their style of domestic realism became to be known—sought to convey the language of everyday speech, and to shock with its bluntness. Eric Keown, reviewing Look Back in Anger in Punch magazine at the time, wrote that Osborne “draws liberally on the vocabulary of the intestines and laces his tirades with the steamier epithets of the tripe butcher”. The play The three-act play takes place in a one-bedroom flat in the Midlands. Jimmy Porter, lower middle-class, university-educated, lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in the British Army in India.

His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them. Jimmy, intellectually restless and thwarted, reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his bile for Alison's friends and family. The situation is exacerbated by the arrival of Helena, an actress friend of Alison's from school. Appalled at what she finds, Helena calls Alison's father to take her away from the flat. He arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes Alison away. As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy's baby. Helena can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves. Finally Alison returns to Jimmy and his angry life. The problem, which even a fine revival like this production has, is with the melodramatic qualities of the narrative. Osborne's script became almost a template for the new school of writers, and it is difficult to present his work without being aware that there is a faint whiff of formula about it.

But despite the plot's shortcomings (which were recognised even by such a fierce admirer as Tynan), it still has the power to startle. There was an audible intake of breath from the audience when Jimmy fell into Helena's arms. Thanks to a fine performance from William Gaunt the sympathy felt by Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, for Jimmy came as a revelation, but still totally understandable within the framework of the play. The language, too, still has the power to shock, such as when Jimmy, unaware of Alison's pregnancy, says to her: “If only something—something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles. Please—if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it.” It is a tribute to Gregory Hersov's direction and Michael Sheen's performance as Jimmy that this does not seem overblown or ridiculous. Some of the imagery and language doesn't travel too well historically and reflects only the preoccupations of the era.

It is difficult, for example, to imagine jazz being quite as exotic as it is for Jimmy. Or to understand the intellectual courage of saying about a gay man, “He's like a man with a strawberry mark—he keeps thrusting it in your face because he can't believe it doesn't interest or horrify you particularly. As if I give a damn which way he likes his meat served up”. At the time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. The production stays close to Osborne's original stage-image. This enables it to show the play as standing at a crossroads both of the British stage and also of political and historical epochs. Before the show, the title is projected onto the curtains like a jazz album cover. Between scenes, wreaths of cigarette smoke rise up the curtains. An era is evoked. Matilda Ziegler's Helena also captures a lost period of weekly repertory theatre, of companies travelling the country with precisely the sort of play that Look Back in Anger was attacking; a world evoked with such nostalgia in The Dresser. It was a time when actors auditioned in suits or the sort of starched twin-pieces that Helena wears before she moves in with Jimmy.

The admiration of William Gaunt's Colonel Redfern for Jimmy's principles and his amusement at Jimmy's description of Mrs Redfern as “an overfed, overprivileged old bitch”, are set against his total lack of comprehension of what Jimmy's life actually means. Alison says to him “You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?” Or as it was put in a Daily Express article from December 1959 which is quoted in the programme: “Out of this decade has come the Illusion of Comfort, and we have lost the sense of life's difficulty”. It is clear from Osborne's script that there was no lack of a sense of life's difficulties around at the time. But the emphasis had shifted from the martyred expressions of the British ruling class and their “white man's burden”, as represented in Colonel Redfern, to a more serious appraisal of life for those outside that ruling class. Emma Fielding does a good job playing Alison, who has grown up with the one attitude but has been forced by her situation into the other.

Fielding gives a good performance as the woman who tolerates Jimmy's invective, living constantly with the threat of something erupting in front of her. Helena on the other hand ultimately cannot stay with Jimmy precisely because of the destruction of all her old certainties. Perhaps the only truly sympathetic character in the play is Cliff, here excellently played by Jason Hughes. From his role as Jimmy's foil in the early exchanges, to appearing as Alison's real friend, to the point when he decides that he does not want to stay in the flat, Hughes gives a magnificent portrayal of solidness. Whilst Alison is forced to accept Jimmy's rages because her family background has robbed her of any other viable option, Hughes shows us Cliff as someone who is keeping the peace by hiding his real character—by playing along with all the games. In Jimmy Porter, Osborne created what came to be seen as a model of the “angry young man”—railing at the lack of passion of his age, entreating Alison and Cliff to show some enthusiasm. He is marvellously, unreasonably idealistic in a wildly unfocussed way.

Kenneth Tynan, who described Jimmy as “the completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet”, criticised those who attacked the recklessness of Jimmy's attacks. “Is Jimmy's anger justified? Why doesn't he do something? These questions might be relevant if the character had failed to come to life; in the presence of such evident and blazing vitality, I marvel at the pedantry that could ask them. Why don't Chekhov's people do something? Is the sun justified in scorching us?” It is just this “evident and blazing vitality” that Michael Sheen represents so well. Spluttering with indignation, retreating into his pseudo-literary takes on vaudeville, firing off his vindictive gags almost because he can do nothing else. Osborne, throughout his work, was fascinated by end-of-pier music hall and vaudeville. In The Entertainer, one year later, he used vaudeville and its washed-up performer Archie Rice in a brilliant take on the crisis in post-war British society.

Here he has Jimmy and Cliff perform a variety-style number, “Don't be afraid to sleep with your sweetheart just because she's better than you”, as well as trading cheap cracks in true hackneyed music hall style. More than any other writer of his generation, Osborne was fascinated by the tragedy lurking at the heart of the light entertainment performance. Michael Sheen adds another layer to this in his spluttering soliloquies, carrying with them an echo of Tony Hancock's ridiculous suburban pretensions. It is a fascinating comparison: Hancock, the parodist of lower-middle-class aspirations, and Jimmy Porter, the raging expression of the frustrations of the lower middle class. Sheen has a lightness of touch that suits Jimmy's failed jokes and misplaced comments, as well as his more furious denunciations of the absence of passion. The impact Osborne had on British theatre is incalculable. With Look Back in Anger he brought class as an issue before British audiences. Under Hersov's direction, Sheen articulates the realisation of a man who has reached the limits of the possibilities open to him but is struggling to retain his dignity. “Why don't we have a little game?” he asks.

“Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive”. Sheen gives a marvellous performance of a man running in circles trying to find a way out. Osborne has often been criticised for not seeing a way out, and not explaining more carefully the crisis in which Jimmy finds himself. Robert Wright, reviewing the first production in the Star, wrote “He obviously wants to shake us into thinking but we are never quite clear what it is he wants us to think about. Is it the Class Struggle or simply sex?” This incoherence in Jimmy's rage is both strength and a limitation to the play. It is apparent from the text that Osborne recognised this limitation, even tacitly. Helena criticises Jimmy, saying, “There's no place for people like that any longer—in sex, or politics, or anything. That's why he's so futile.... He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going. He'll never do anything, and he'll never amount to anything.” It seems almost a recognition that within his own work there are insufficient answers. This goes hand-in-hand with Jimmy's statement that “people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer....

There aren't any good, brave causes left.” Such a statement could be read as the voice of pessimistic nihilism. Writing about Celine's novel Journey to the End of Night, Trotsky described it as “a book dictated by terror in the face of life, and weariness of it, rather than by indignation. Active indignation is linked up with hope. In Celine's book there is no hope.” That is clearly not the case here. Jimmy yearns for passion, and clings to the idea of it. When Alison returns to him he tells her “I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter.” There is a vision, however confused, of the possibilities of human existence. What makes Jimmy's statement so interesting is precisely the historical context in which it occurs. Kenneth Tynan, who referred to the play's “instinctive leftishness” in his Observer review, wrote in a piece on “The Angry Young Movement” that Jimmy Porter “represented the dismay of many young Britons ...

who came of age under a Socialist government, yet found, when they went out into the world, that the class system was still mysteriously intact.” It is the mistaken association of the post-war Labour government with the failure of socialism per se that accounts for Porter's frustration. Osborne, active in various protests at the time, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, articulated his own sentiments through his lead character. In this respect, it is possible to see in the play expressions of the political impasse that had been reached in Britain during the 1950s, as a result of the domination of intellectual life by Stalinism and social democracy. Nonetheless, it is also possible to see a challenge, albeit confused and unclear, to that impasse. There remains somewhere at the play's core, even if it cannot be explained, hope. There remains a belief that somehow people can survive the worst and perhaps even overcome it; a belief in humanity, and the possibility of a way forward. (All quotations from Kenneth Tynan are from Tynan on Theatre, Penguin, 1964.) Look Back in Anger - John Osborne - Google Books Look Back in Anger 8 Reviews Jimmy Porter plays trumpet badly.

He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England. First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life." Book jacket. From inside the book What people are saying - Write a review User ratings Review: Look Back in Anger User Review - Chris Gager - Goodreads Tough to rate as I remember it so little. Another of my older sister's books. Forbidden fruit... Date read is a guess. Read full review Review: Look Back in Anger User Review - Lamia M. - Goodreads i liked it, and it was really easy-to-read. Anyone can finish reading it in one sitting.

Read full review View all » Common terms and phrases All Book Search results &raquo; About the author (1957) John Osborne was born on December 12, 1929 in London, England. He was educated at Belmont College, Devon but was expelled after attacking the headmaster. He became involved in theatre, as a stage manager and then as an actor. He started writing plays and two of them, The Devil Inside Her and Personal Enemy, were staged in regional theatres before he submitted Look Back in Anger to the newly formed English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. The company chose the play as the third production to enter repertory. The play became a commercial success, transferring to the West End and to Broadway, and was later filmed with Richard Burton in the leading role. His other plays included The Entertainer, Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, A Patriot for Me, A Hotel in Amsterdam, A Sense of Detachment, and Deja Vu. He also wrote a number of screenplays, mainly adaptations of his own works. He won an Oscar for his 1963 adaptation of Tom Jones. He acted in a few films including Get Carter, Tomorrow Never Comes, and Flash Gordon.

He also wrote two autobiographies entitled A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman. He died from complications brought on from his diabetes on December 24, 1994 at the age of 65. 9780140481754: Look Back in Anger (Plays, Penguin) - AbeBooks - Osborne, John: 0140481753 About this title One of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. Osborne's play changed the course of British theatre in the 1950s, and features the prototype "angry young man", Jimmy Porter. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. About the Author: John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger.

Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994. About the Author: John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor.

Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence(1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

look back in anger New Search John Osborne wrote 25 stage plays and collaborations, five screenplays, 11 works for television, two volumes of autobiography and sundry short pieces of social comment and criticism. He established a critical reputation for having single-handedly changed the course of post-war British drama. This reputation rests almost entirely on the reception accorded to Look Back in Anger (1956). His other most significant plays are The Entertainer (1957), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot for Me (1965), with Luther (1961) and The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) also critically regarded as important works. The two published volumes of his autobiography – A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography 1929–1956 and Almost a Gentleman, which covers the years 1955–1966 – are the most interesting part of his later output. They provide a worthwhile picture of the environment which gave rise to Look Back in Anger, in particular, and more generally of Osborne the man. Osborne was born in 1929.

A low income conflicting unhappily with middle-class aspirations were dominant features of his childhood. His father's ill health exacerbated the family's financial problems, and Osborne records as a significant influence, both on his immediate circumstances and on his later life, his father's last illness and death when Osborne was 11 or 12 years old. Osborne's portrayal of the rest of his family suggests dysfunctionality almost to the pitch of group and individual psychosis. Anxieties about not belonging to a particular social class, about the disempowerment of men and about sexuality are evident in the depictions of the protagonists of all his major plays. Following an unhappy period at a boarding school which, from Osborne's description, was irredeemably fourth-rate, Osborne worked for a time in his late teens as a journalist, before embarking on a stage career, becoming an assistant stage manager in 1948 and subsequently actor, actor/manager and playwright. With his arrest in 1961 for participating in a CND demonstration, Osborne acquired a reputation for radicalism, which he was subsequently at pains to rebut.

Indeed, from the mid-1960s onwards, Osborne was often seen as a self-made reactionary figure, a view which the volumes of his autobiography do little to dispel and which is positively asserted by Déjàvu (1992), the last play he wrote before he died. Look Back in Anger is widely credited with being the play above all others in which Osborne succeeded in capturing the contemporary zeitgeist. In it he expressed a sense of anger and frustration at the stifling complacency of post-war Britain (or certainly England) which many others shared. For men of Osborne's age and class a unique cocktail of factors was coming together to fuel a sense of rage and frustration: while they had been too young to acquire cachet by fighting in World War Two, they were expected to participate in the new domestication which was perceived as constituting the just deserts of returning heroes.

At the same time a peculiarly masculinist culture was prevalent, a result of the combined effects of the extreme homosociality bred by National Service, a politically determined effort to devalue women in employment, and an hysterical national homophobia, fostered by the fall-out from the Burgess and MacLean affair and the adoption in Britain of many of the attitudes of American MacCarthyism. Meanwhile, Britain's international role was plainly in decline with the end of empire and the futile attempt to demonstrate national virility represented by the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. This can be seen as a symptom at national level of the same malaise that Jimmy Porter – the protagonist of Look Back in Anger – was suffering at the personal level. In theatrical terms, Osborne has become the standard-bearer of a largely impotent and reactionary movement which raged against the disappearance of pre-war masculine certainties. However, he was by no means alone in literature: a similar misogyny is detectable in a number of novels and plays by other English authors around this time.

More positively, the outspokenness of Look Back in Anger against surviving aspects of the British class system and against the Establishment, particularly the church, struck a chord with a new theatre-going public, especially after an extract from the play was broadcast on television in October 1956. This phenomenon not only generated a new awareness of the potential stimulus which theatre could provide, but also had a real impact on the political relevance of theatre, turning it into a focus for political thinking at a time when any spirit of radicalism or even inquiry had largely been lost from the conventional political system, smothered beneath the complacent government-sponsored mantra “You've never had it so good” and its analogues. The generation of authors and playwrights of which Osborne was so prominent and influential a member became known as the Angry Young Men, a term at various times applied to a discrete and shifting population of playwrights and novelists of the 1950s – not all of them men. The term came closest to a meaningful definition when applied to the contributors to Declaration (1957), a small collection of essays edited by Tom Maschler.

These were, in addition to Osborne himself, Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins and John Wain. The expression “kitchen-sink drama” was coined to describe those new plays which shared with Look Back in Anger qualities of vivid, raw authenticity and acuity, presented in a more or less working-class setting. In this theatrical milieu people lived lives on stage which were recognisably analogous to the way that many members of their audience lived their lives at home. There was a perception that, prior to the premiere of Look Back in Anger in May 1956, the stage had been dominated by escapist drama in which half-witted young men would bound through French windows in search of tennis partners. The 1990s saw the emergence of a revised critical opinion of Osborne, in which the overt misogyny and homophobia of his major plays were called to account.

A major reason for Osborne's success in capturing the imagination of a broad section of contemporary England, however, may lie in an ambivalence which neither the mainly adulatory critical response of the 1950s and 1960s nor the more hostile revisionism of the 1990s has succeeded in pinpointing. For example, an extraordinary degree of anxiety about homosexuality is evident in Osborne's autobiography, with relentless references, on page after page, to queers, queens and so on. On the other hand, it is in very relaxed tones that Osborne describes his relationship with Anthony Creighton, who, he said, had “declared his hopeless love for me”. Indeed, after Osborne's death, Creighton publicly asserted that there had been a sexual relationship between himself and Osborne. Thus Osborne's anxieties about homosexuality may very well have stemmed from doubts which he had about his own sexuality, especially since he describes himself variously as “about twenty per cent” and “about thirty per cent” homosexual. This putative insecurity about his own sexuality can be seen as a probable influence upon Osborne's output. In A Patriot for Me (1965), for example, the protagonist, Colonel Redl, is a marginalized Jewish homosexual.

Osborne's habit of providing sympathetic portrayals of partially autobiographical central figures in his plays resulted, in this case, in a distinctly positive image of a homosexual man. In this respect, Osborne was far ahead of the sensibilities of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, who refused to license the play unless substantial cuts were made, largely to scenes involving depictions of homosexuality. Osborne refused to make these cuts and the play could only be shown to “club” audiences, a situation which prevailed until the demise of the Lord Chamberlain's role as theatre censor. Notwithstanding the progressive radicalism of his stance in this matter, however, Osborne's ambivalence reasserted itself in the shape of the play's denouement, in which Redl's treachery and suicide are depicted. Similarly, evidence that Osborne's attitudes towards women were not straightforwardly misogynistic, but the product of an uneasy sense of hybridity within himself, can be gleaned from his autobiography and from the plays.

Osborne is ungenerous in his writings about his various wives – in remarkable contrast to his writings about George Devine and Tony Richardson, the presiding genii of the Royal Court from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s – but this is no more marked in Osborne's case than in that of other heterosexual male autobiographers with scores to settle. However, Osborne also goes out of his way to be extraordinarily and unnecessarily unpleasant about some women with whom he has no particularly close relationship, and hence, presumably, no score to settle, while appearing extremely generous towards others. By the time of writing his autobiography, of course, the gains made by the women's movement were undeniable: in 1956 his misogynistic rancour seems more to have been based on various failed emotional attachments than on any prophetic awareness of a feminist movement that was yet to sweep the British national consciousness. But what makes Osborne a more interesting and more dangerous figure than the mere misogynist blimp which he does his best to portray himself as, is the fact that he cannot wholly escape various underlying, more feminine aspects of his being.

He is capable of recognising what is fair and what is not, even when he is assessing his particular heroes: “I have never seen such a venomous, uncoordinated assault, such a crowing repudiation of the female species and distortion of its physicality” says Osborne of Tony Richardson's film version of Waugh's The Loved One . Coming from the author of Look Back in Anger this is an astonishing assertion. However, it demonstrates an ambivalence in Osborne's attitudes towards women, which is also occasionally discernible in some of the minor plays. The character of Regine in The End of Me Old Cigar (1975) is a case in point since Regine echoes the character of Osborne himself in a number of respects. Osborne's major plays all feature a dominant male character from whom all the other characters serve to strike sparks. The egoism and intimate depiction of all these protagonists suggest a measure of autobiographical portraiture.

While Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger rages uncomprehendingly against a world which fails to respond constructively to his febrile intelligence, Archie Rice in The Entertainer knows all too well that he is a man out of his time, whose failure to find any empathy with the spirit of his age has bred in him a corrosive cynicism. Each of these characters is conjured up by a series of clever, mordant, revelatory speeches, and the sympathetic portrayal of each is bolstered by Osborne by means of a series of impossibly detailed stage directions. Each is a wonderfully vivid portrait of some aspects of a man, presumably Osborne himself, but the selectivity of the facets portrayed cannot provide the depth that a third dimension might have contributed. Osborne's creative radicalism asserted itself once more in The Entertainer, this time in his use of Brechtian short scenes with which he brought the atmosphere of the music hall to the theatre stage. The symbolism of a seedy nude Britannia, too, was a startling evocation of Britain's post-imperial loss of identity.

In another of Osborne's great self-portraits – that of Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence – the whole play is suffused with the miasma of nightmare, a misty aura which stands between the audience and any overly revelatory account of the protagonist. Sadly, Osborne's creativity was to flourish only for a period of about ten years. After The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), his most notable writings were his volumes of autobiography, which provide a fascinating, if rancorous, account of Osborne's life in the theatre of the 1950s and 1960s. His last produced play, Déjàvu (1992), provided testimony to a Jimmy Porter whose life force and relevance had been sapped by too many years, too much alcohol, and too much misogynistic acrimony. To the extent that the play is autobiographical – albeit partially so – it is clear that Osborne himself had succumbed to these influences, along with the fatal impact of believing in his own fictionalized, reactionary and misogynistic persona.

In light of the nature of his later work, an effort of retrospection is needed in order to perceive how it came to be that so many commentators believed that Osborne was the principal agent of revitalizing the post-war theatre in Britain. The answer lies partly in the vigour, however unfairly deployed, of the characters in the earlier plays. However, it also seems to be the case that Osborne's strenuously denied ambivalence in matters of gender and sexuality filtered into his central characters. Paradoxically, this meant that aspects of these characters provided some facet with which diverse sections of his audiences were able to identify, reinforcing Osborne's ability to capture the spirit of his times.

Question: Who wrote the plays ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Look Back in Anger’?
Answer: JOHN OSBORNE