Osborne John Osborne Plays 1

Look Back in Anger; Epitaph for George Dillon; The World of Paul Slickey; Dejavu
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30083-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

In 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger changed the course of English theatre. This volume includes some of the early plays which launched his career along its startling trajectory, as well as his much later play, Dejavu, which brings us Look Back in Anger's Jimmy Porter thirty-five years on, older and wiser, but no less indignantly eloquent.

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Osborne, John

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
May 8th, 1956, is one of the few dates usually quoted in accounts of modern theatrical history, and generally regarded as the commencement, for good or ill, of a tangible change in the climate and direction of the English theatre. It was the first performance of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre, an occasion I only partially remember, but certainly with more accuracy than those who subsequently claimed to have been present and, if they are to be believed, would have filled the theatre several times over. The compilers of these histories have deduced all sorts of theories about the consequences of that sparsely attended first night and its social, political and even revolutionary implications. Some of these fanciful inventions are fairly wild, based on speculative and disordered hindsight, but they refuse to be swatted or blown away. And all this has served to draw attention to the piece as an historical phenomenon, while the play itself is passed over under the weight of perpetuated misinterpretation. People cling stubbornly to their fallacies, particularly those who feel constrained to illuminate or ‘explain’ the intentions of others who are reckless enough to embark upon an act of original creation. The damage such commentators inflict is difficult to restore, even with the refutation of the most authoritative and authentic performance. I will try then, without much hope, to dispose of the most crass misconceptions about Look Back in Anger. First, I would ask anyone reading the play for the first time to disregard anything they may have heard about it. Reading the text of a play is not easy, especially for those who have little experience of playgoing and, most specially, those who have never worked in the theatre itself. It requires the rare gift of technical insight and, above all, imagination. In forty-five years, I have come across barely half a dozen people who could study a script with the instinct to interpret in their heads as a conductor or musician does when reading a score. I am often asked by students, expecting me to hand over the ‘input’ of my past to some examination chore, the impatient question: ‘Why did you write Look Back in Anger?’ Why does one wish to breathe, hope for laughter or fall in love? There seems to be an insistent demand for ‘motivation’ in such things, something concrete and explicable, like an Arts Council grant or the prospect of quick fame. The answer is fairly simple. I was a twenty-five-year-old actor, out of work and separated from my first wife. I had been thinking about the play for a year or more and wrote it over a period of six weeks. The actual writing, as always the most pleasurable and easy part, took a dozen or so days, interrupted half way through when I went up to Morecambe to play a small part in the local repertory company. Most of the second act was written in a deck-chair on the end of the pier, which inspired one speculator to advance the theory that the original title was On the Pier at Morecambe. Look Back was to insinuate itself into theatrical perceptions, poisonously some might say, but it has survived and no one has yet found an antidote to what may be its principal ingredient – vitality. The other claim I would make for it after all these years is honesty. I tried to write it in a language in which it was possible only to tell the truth. When I began to write plays, it seemed to me then (as it does now), that most writers dissemble. They are not to be trusted. They look for intellectual respect, approbation, they flatter, indulge and offer false and easy comfort. The pursuit of vibrant language and patent honesty, which I always believed the theatre and the now abandoned liturgy of the Anglican church could accommodate, was my intention from the outset, although I never articulated it to myself. The language which actors were called upon to speak when I first began to work was thin and inexpressive. There seemed to be an acceptance that dramatic language shouldn’t get above itself, that it was no more than a supernumerary branch of ‘Literature’. The placement of the most successful playwrights, Priestley, Coward or Rattigan, was well below the salt of the Novelist or Poet. The scholarly efforts of Eliot or the self-conscious high spirits of Fry added to the confusion, while the purple blarney of poesies by O’Casey and, inexplicably, O’Neill, were admired as attempts to elevate English, the world’s most defiant and irrepressible language, into a command it had given up with faint heart under the towering shadow of Shakespeare. Some had tried and acquitted themselves honourably, Congreve for one, but most – Farquhar, Sheridan, Wilde or Shaw – were Irishmen, a race literally allowed to get away with murder. For a long time there was a prevalent feeling that distinguished men of letters who entered the theatre were slumming. Henry James, who tried persistently to invade this lowly brothel, was spectacularly unsuccessful. Somerset Maugham, on the other hand, appeared to have the trick of it and entertained middle-class audiences for a quarter of a century. As a young actor I did a lot of Maugham – Lady Frederick, The Breadwinner, The Circle, The Sacred Flame – and one of the things I discovered was that they were extremely difficult to learn. It is one thing to read a play for pleasure, but quite another to study it for commitment to memory. Maugham’s language was dead, elusively inert, wobbly like some synthetic rubber substance. The actor’s expression ‘D.L.P.’ (‘dead letter perfect’) had an impossible application to Maugham because it didn’t really matter about the precedence of words or punctuation. You could approximate with little difference in meaning or nuance. Slovenly writing invites slovenly performance. Later, more skilful dramatists cannot be presented so wilfully, though actors and directors, God rot them, often do their best, protesting that they don’t ‘feel’ a line. And there still prevails a common assumption that a B Flat or C Minor here or there is no matter except to be left to the improvised hindsight of the interpreter. You can’t or shouldn’t do it to Pinter, Beckett or, I hope, myself. The notations are indicated for meticulously constructed reasons. The ‘ands’ and the ‘buts’ are the map-markings of syntax and truth, not the stammering infelicities of another’s haphazard personal selection. A play is an intricate mechanism, and the whole mesh of its engineering logic can be shattered by a misplaced word or emphasis. The most famous example of a playwright preventing an actor from crashing the gears of his fine-tuned machinery is Noël Coward’s reproof of Edith Evans when she insisted on inserting the word ‘very’ into the line: ‘On a [very] clear day you can see Marlow.’ Having repeatedly corrected her, he exploded: ‘No, Edith. On a clear day you can see Marlow. On a very clear day you can see Marlow, and Beaumont, and Fletcher.’ Many people made the mistake of claiming that the language of Look Back in Anger was naturalistic, whatever that means. The language of ‘everyday life’ is almost incommunicable for the very good reason that it is restricted, inarticulate, dull and boring, and never more so than today when verbal fluency is regarded as suspect if not downright ‘elitist’. They also missed the point, which may not be obvious on the printed page to the uninitiated reader, that it is a comedy. At the Public Dress Rehearsal on May 7th, the mostly young audience had laughed where I hoped they would, to the dismay of George Devine and Tony Richardson, the directors of the theatre and the play. ‘But why are they laughing?’ Because it’s funny, I replied. They were not reassured. I remembered that Chekhov had the same trouble. True, the following evening, there were very few laughs indeed. The First Night audience, if they were conscious, seemed transfixed by a tone of voice that was quite alien to them. They were ill at ease; they had no rules of conduct as to how to respond. The obvious one was to walk out, which some did, but with only a vague idea of why. Boredom and anger may have contributed, but mostly they were adrift, like Eskimos watching a Restoration comedy. A performance of Look Back without persistent laughter is like an opera without arias. Indeed, Jimmy Porter’s inaccurately named ‘tirades’ should be approached as arias, and require the most adroit handling, delicacy of delivery, invention and timing. This is no play for amateurs, although they frequently attempt it. In spite of the attention to the play at the time, amounting to something like crazed tumult, it did not transfer to the West End. The misgivings and private distaste of the presiding managements were unpersuaded. Timidity prevailed over agonized avarice. The one producer prepared to compromise his reputation insisted that all references to bears and squirrels be excised. This, I was told, embarrassed the customers; it made them squirm. Even the play’s most quoted supporter, Kenneth Tynan, had described them as ‘painful whimsy’. A few years on, whole pages of respectable national newspapers would be devoted to Valentine’s Day messages from ‘Snuggly Bouffel Bears’ to ‘Squiggly Whiffly Squirrels’, far more nauseous than my own prescient invention. In my...