the theatre a talent to abusE Looking back at John Osborne. by jOHN lAHR ohn Osborne’s rowdy, shocking anger— erary yearnings, died, of tuberculosis, first broadcast in his play “Look Back in when Osborne was ten, the boy was Anger,”J which is now in revival at the forced to live alone with Nellie, “the grab- Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura bing, uncaring crone of my childhood,” in Pels—was his trademark, his gift, and his what he called “her loveless embrace.” epitaph. “When the bell rings, I not only “When I was with her I was never whole,” come out. I’m the first out. Fighting,” Os- Osborne wrote in a notebook entry, re- borne taunted wife No. 4, the actress Jill produced in John Heilpern’s splendid Bennett, the “pretty scalpel,” whom he 2006 biography. Oppressed by Nellie as a was divorcing in the late seventies. Os- child, he was humiliated by her as an borne’s hate knew no bounds: it combined adult. “It’s such an honor for us to meet contempt with a desire to punish. Of you,” she said to Paul Robeson, when Os- Bennett, who committed suicide, he borne took her to see his “Othello” at wrote, “I have only one regret now in this Stratford. “Especially my son. You see, matter of Adolf ”—his nickname for her. he’s always been very sorry for you dark- “It is simply that I was unable to look ies.” “She was a disease from which I was down upon her open coffin, and, like the suffering, and would go on suffering until bird in the Book of Tobit, drop a good, one of us died,” Osborne said. (At the large mess in her eye.” Osborne’s cannon- time of her death, in 1983, Osborne ade was aimed at the body politic as well hadn’t spoken to her for seven years; he as at the people around him. “Damn you, didn’t attend the funeral.) “I’ve never England. You’re rotting now, and quite known anybody in my life who was so soon you’ll disappear,” he wrote in 1961, easily wounded,” Doris Lessing, one of in his infamous “Letter to My Fellow Osborne’s long string of lovers, said. If Countrymen,” which appeared in the his thin skin had its origin in his moth- left-wing paper Tribune. Onstage, the er’s abuse, so did his compulsive, cauter- blast of his full-throated abrasive music izing, reckless voice. Part protest and part was a kind of blues, in which the singing projection, his characters’ hectoring was itself was a deliverance from sorrow. It a sort of wrecking ball that allowed Os- was also a kind of psychological evacua- borne to put outside himself the destruc- tion. “The problem is, John doesn’t write tion that Nellie had put into him. a play, he shits it out—and it just lies When the English Stage Company there in a great steaming heap,” George mounted “Look Back in Anger,” at the Devine, the first artistic director of the Royal Court, on May 8, 1956, the play’s English Stage Company, said. mocking, even seditious, rage quickly The flame-throwing that made Os- made big news, and the twenty-six-year- borne a subject of national scandal and old Osborne became a poster boy for the concern was learned at his mother’s knee. notion of the Angry Young Man. (“AYM” “Throughout my childhood no adult ever was the license plate of his first sports car.) addressed a question to me,” Osborne The brazenness of “Look Back in Anger” wrote in “A Better Class of Person” pulled the porcelain plates off the well-set (1981), his best-selling first volume of table of British theatre and replaced them autobiography. Nellie Beatrice Osborne, with a whole new menu of people, man- an uneducated Cockney barmaid, rained ners, idioms, and concerns. The old play- withering contempt on her son through- writing establishment was swept away al- out their arid life together, attacking him most overnight, and its figureheads were for his timidity, his spindly looks, his bed- left stunned and sniffy. Noël Coward wetting, his aspiration to better himself. condescended to the play (“dreariness for After his loving father, an adman with lit- dreariness sake”); Terence Rattigan 118 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 13 & 20, 2012 TNY—2012_02_13&20—PAGE 118—133SC.—#2 page—new text corrections huffed about its improbable success (“then his misogynistic triumphs and the mas- production, to my eye, is more of an ad- I know nothing about plays”); and J. B. ochistic Alison always has a shoulder to cry aptation than a rendition. Priestley blew his top in front a group of on. “All this time, I have been married to Since Osborne was strong on emotion young Royal Court playwrights (“Angry? this woman, this monument to non- but not on form—“I want to make people I’ll give you angry. I was angry before you attachment, and suddenly I discover that feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They buggers were born!”). Kenneth Tynan, there is actually a word that sums her up,” can think afterward,” he said in 1957—his though, labelled Osborne’s hero “the Jimmy brays to Cliff, in front of Alison: plays hardly feature in the cultural discus- completest young pup in our literature Not just an adjective in the English lan­ sion these days. But what he wanted, as since Hamlet”—in one of only two good guage to describe her with—it’s her name! “Look Back in Anger” makes clear, wasn’t reviews of the play—and a whole genera- tion of disaffected English youths got high off the fumes of his rage-outs, which gave expression to their aimlessness, their anarchy, their post-imperial jitters. When Osborne co-founded Woodfall Films, with the director Tony Richardson, in 1958, in order to make a movie of “Look Back in Anger,” the shift in cultural para- digms extended from the stage to the cin- ema; among the films produced by his company were “The Entertainer,” “A Taste of Honey,” “The Knack,” and “Tom Jones,” for whose screenplay Os- borne won an Academy Award. In the current staging of “Look Back in Anger,” the director, Sam Gold, has tried to match Osborne’s verbal showboating with a cockiness of his own. It’s an egotis- tical production whose stylization com- petes with the play. Gold has denuded the Ménage à trois: Driver, Goldberg, and Rhys in “Look Back in Anger.” play of any semblance of Englishness and Pusillanimous! It sounds like some fleshy class, an issue that should be central to the Roman matron, doesn’t it? The Lady Pusil­ so much discussion as capitulation. At the argument between the bullying, blue-col- lanimous. But I haven’t told you what it play’s jerry-built finale, Alison, having lar Jimmy Porter (Matthew Rhys) and his means yet, have I? . Here it is. I quote: walked out on Jimmy and lost their child Pusillanimous. Adjective. Wanting of firm­ browbeaten middle-class wife, Alison ness of mind, of small courage, having a in the interim, walks back in and falls to (Sarah Goldberg), who are two emotion- little mind, mean­spirited, cowardly. her knees in front of him. “I’m in the mud ally stuck babes in the provincial woods. That’s my wife! . Hi, Pusey! What’s your at last! I’m grovelling! I’m crawling!” she The excellent ensemble performs “in one,” next picture? says. “Look Back in Anger,” which was at the lip of the stage, with a behemoth based on Osborne’s first marriage, engi- black wall looming behind them, thrusting In his cruel diatribes, Jimmy Porter neers a fragile harmony that was never them toward the audience as if they were throws off illuminating sparks. One actually sustained in his life. By the end of figures on a frieze. Amid the detritus of the terrific speech tells us a lot about Jimmy his turbulent existence—he died in 1994, long, cluttered proscenium, which—with and the world he has inherited; it also in- at the age of sixty-five—Osborne, whose a mattress propped against the wall, news- cludes the first shout of Osborne’s boiler- habit of high living had earned him the papers, cups, cans, and clothes littering the plate anti-Americanism: nickname Champagne Johnny, and who floor—looks more like a crack alley than The old Edwardian brigade do make signed himself “Ex-Playwright,” had be- like the Porters’ attic room, the characters their brief little world look pretty tempting. come the kind of High Tory, Anglican All home­made cakes and croquet. Always peck, cluck, and wander like pigeons on a the same picture: high summer, the long days country gent he’d once inveighed against. ledge. In both a literal and a metaphorical in the sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, From a dramatic point of view, however, sense, depth is lost. The startling staging the smell of starch. If you’ve no world of he remained “Johnny One-Note,” for your own, it’s rather pleasing to regret the abstracts the people from the period, from passing of someone else’s. But I must say it’s whom “holding one note was his ace,” as the place, from nostalgia, and, to some de- pretty dreary living in the American Age— the song says. The current revival skews gree, from credibility. unless you’re an American, of course. Per­ the play’s focus, but it does preserve the haps all our children will be American.