Replacing Knitting Needles with Scalpels

...Why don’t we have a little game...

...His play was built around the fortunes of Archie Rice, an aging emcee on his way down...

...It began: “This is a letter of hate...

...He wasn’t Left-wing, he wasn’t Rightwing...

...He went on to excoriate Prime Minister Harold MacMillan and his Conservative government, and ended, “If you were offered the heart of Jesus Christ, your Lord and your Savior—though not mine, alas—you’d sniff it like sour offal...

...Wisely, the Guild went ahead anyway, praising him at a dinner for being “the first dramatist in our time to reclaim the English theater for passion and creative dissent...

...His scenario for The Charge of the Light Brigadewas a mordant satire, and the uproarious one he did for Tom Joneswon an Academy Award...

...Archie’s final lines to the audience became a shibboleth for performers everywhere: “Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night— and I’ll come and see YOU...

...But he saw in their shabby dignity a metaphor for the crumbling British Empire...

...Heilpern gives us a chance to look at one of the most significant lives in the British theater during the past 50 years...

...They never spoke again...

...Whatever the faults of this ranting, “kitchen sink” drama, its personae proceeded to speak with the fervent authority of real people...

...Following the breakthrough in 1956, he created a series of dramas that, ironically enough, would one day secure his membership in the new Old Guard...

...He treated Nolan Osborne with cold indifference and in her adolescence broke off all relations...

...On Stage Replacing Knitting Needles with Scalpels By Stefan Kanfer “Overnight, almost,” recalled Terence Rattigan, “we were told we were old-fashioned and effete and corrupt and finished...

...After a false start in journalism (working for a magazine called Gas World), Osborne talked his way into a rep company, performing in regional productions...

...The remaining parent, Dolly Osborne, he despised...

...The article was primly rejected...

...He was just a natural rebel...

...Sloane, and working-class protest films from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner to The Full Monty...

...Just for a while...

...Fortunately, he was an absolute theater man as well...

...She thinks I’m in jail...

...Other significant works ensued...

...A Patriot for Me, a sharply drawn tale of homosexuality, anti-Semitism and blackmail in fin-de-si?cle Austria, outraged the British censor but intrigued ticket holders and effectively ended the tradition of expurgated theater in England...

...Two years later, on Christmas Eve, the 65-yearold John Osborne died in Helen’s arms...

...Yet he never sought to alleviate his sufferings with pharmacological or psychiatric aids...

...Osborne’s ventures in film were also largely successful...

...It quickly became the voice for Britain’s postwar generation, weary of the bloodless prattle then being produced on the West End...

...A 1953 entry in his notebooks reads, “The English Theater isn’t merely dying, it’s being buried alive to the sound of Aunt Edna’s knitting needles...

...John was 10 when his father, an advertising copywriter, died of tuberculosis...

...Osborne’s private writings, on the other hand, reveal a chap who is consistent in his betrayals...

...When Dolly passed away in 1983, at age 87, John began an obit for the London Sunday Times with the words, “A year in which my mother died can’t be all bad...

...He loved the English music halls, with their rundown comedians and timeworn jokes (“If my mother knew I was doing this she’d be ashamed...

...His first wife was an actress who deceived him...

...In his new biography, John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man (Knopf, 544 pp., $35.00), John Heilpern notes that his subject was a paradox, “a Cavalier and a Roundhead, a traditionalist in revolt, a radical who hated change, a protector of certain musty old English values...

...Oh, Mr...

...Nonetheless, as the writer began to fail from the complications of diabetes he felt increasingly depressed and irrelevant—much as Rattigan had felt a generation before...

...He didn’t understand politics at all...

...Nonetheless, the high regard for Osborne’s oeuvre is lucid and argued with precept and example...

...This misogynistic attitude extended to his own daughter by wife number three, author Penelope Gilliatt...

...That was a shrewd summary of an autodidact who never did settle on a single persona...

...Leading that “thing” was a school dropout turned failed actor turned coruscating playwright, John Osborne...

...When he first saw the play, Sir John Gielgud said, “I thought my number was up...

...A former barmaid, she was, in her son’s words, “a caricature, an embarrassment...

...He did have a future, and there it is...

...With good reason...

...But who would have been interested in their sedated stories...

...Even at the height of global recognition the writer remained youthfully furious...

...Depression was the writer’s constant companion—an easily traced pathology, given Osborne’s burdened childhood...

...The public figure, Heilpern points out, was constantly changing, as if he were a Zelig “forever morphing into new images and new roles to play...

...He then proceeded to deceive a series of women...

...No matter...

...The boy never overcame a pervasive feeling of abandonment...

...It is likely, though, that Jimmy Porter, Archie Rice and other personae will be remembered as influences rather than subjects for revival...

...The works of Edward Albee—particularly Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?— have a distinctly Osbornean tone, as do Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr...

...Osborne’s greatest contribution is the liberation of high and popular culture...

...When he was famous he introduced Mum to Paul Robeson, then in Stratford to play Othello...

...Robinson,” she gushed, “It’s such an honor for us to meet you, especially my son...

...Said Helen Osborne, his fifth and final wife, “John felt that inspiration comes from God and don’t bugger about it...

...But he was wrongest about himself...

...Look Back went on to take London by storm, altering the intellectual and aesthetic climate of England...

...Heilpern obviously agrees: “I have read earnest articles arguing how the problems of anguished dramatic heroes like Jimmy Porter, Willy Loman and James Tyrone, wrecked by rage and failure and booze, would have been solved by Prozac and a prescription or two of Lithium...

...He resolved to replace those needles with scalpels...

...He was not a very able performer, but the stage work provided all the schooling he needed to get on as a playwright...

...The message was rebellious, the technique Brechtian...

...Heilpern’s thoroughgoing, full-length portrait never exculpates or excuses him...

...Doris Lessing, once a hard-line Communist, remembered a meeting they both attended...

...Rice was played by Sir Laurence Olivier, immediately giving Osborne the imprimatur of the Establishment...

...His first major work, Look Back in Anger, was presented at the experimental Royal Court Theater...

...Undoubtedly Osborne saw something of himself in the first Protestant...

...I’ve no audience, public or future...

...At present, it seems to add up to TOTAL FAILURE...

...The wiry New Left intellectual with pipe and cravat of the conformist Fifties becomes the faux Noel Coward sophisticate and surly teddy boy with drainpipe trousers of the Sixties, which begets the Beau Brummell with waxed mustache and Chekhovian artist with beard and halfglasses of the Seventies, followed by the late middleaged dropout of the Eighties and the unruly Falstaff and English squire of the Nineties...

...His last play, D?j?vu, a look at Jimmy Porter 35 years later, was greeted with indifference and made him more despondent than ever...

...Let’s pretend that we’re human beings and that we’re actually alive...

...Osborne’s ascent began with The Entertainer...

...The program described Osborne as an “angry young man,” and throughout his life, no matter what he wrote, he could never unpeel that label...

...I’ve an idea,” began Jimmy Porter, the play’s protagonist and Osborne’s alter ego...

...In 1992, when the Writers Guild of Great Britain made ready to present Osborne with its Lifetime Achievement Award, he wrote back: “I don’t mean to seem churlish, but my life work seems to represent absolutely noACHIEVEMENT at all, whatever...

...Writer John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey), who knew Osborne well, seems to have the playwright down cold: “He was an affable, lovely, champagne-drinking man— and an absolute shit, of course...

...You see, he’s always been very sorry for you darkies...

...During the height of the nuclear jitters in 1961 he wrote an essay entitled “Damn You, England...

...Some were explorations of character: The powerhouse Luther, for example, portrayed its title character as a complex, Godhaunted, ranting, constipated, distinctly unlikable, absolutely compelling figure...

...Looking back on a chaotic love life, he noted, “I often confronted problems like an improvising chimpanzee when faced with the dashboard of a jumbo jet...

...John Osborne was wrong about a great many things, including women and politics...

...For that is the kind of men you are...

...What do you say...

...If you would see his legacy, try Broadway or the West End...

...Heilpern describes one period with tongue-in-cheek bewilderment: “Let’s see: Osborne is on a besieged holiday with his aggrieved mistress while having a passionate affair with his third wife as the founding director of the Royal Court has a nervous breakdown and [Osborne’s] current wife gives birth to a son that isn’t his...

...There I was in 1956, a reasonably successful playwright with Separate Tables just opened, and suddenly the whole Royal Court Theater thing exploded, and Noel Coward and J. B. Priestly and I were all dismissed, sacked by the critics...

...For that matter, so do the forthright acting styles of Albert Finney, Richard Burton, Robert Shaw, and all who came after them...

...Inadmissible Evidence, the howl of a hallucinating, loveless middle-aged lawyer at the end of his grope, was both merciless and hilarious—a career-making role for its star, Nicol Williamson, and a boost for the playwright, who showed that he could play with words, as well as hurl them at an audience...

...With this missive he became the radicals’ hero, a role that discomfited him...