John Osborne

1929-1994. British playwright. He started as actor and founded his reputation as one of the innovators of British theatre and drama with Look Back in Anger (1956). His plays typically feature strong, idiosyncratic and nonconformist protagonists, who struggle against a repressive social system and conventions.

Osborne was born in the London suburb of Fulham into a lower working-class family. Until he was expelled at the age of 16 he attended a minor public school in Barnstaple, Devon. For several months Osborne worked as a journalist before joining a local theatre as an amateur actor. He started to take lessons at a London drama school and was recommended by its director to a minor theater company in 1947. He stayed with the company until 1955, when his first play Look Back in Anger was accepted by the newly established English Stage Company.

The play premiered on 8 May 1956 at the Royal Court Theater and was praised by The Obsever as “the best young play of its decade” (cited in Molino). It transformed British theatre and its protagonist Jimmy Porter become the very symbol of the dissatisfied generation of young authors and playwrights, termed the Angry Young Men. Like many others counting themselves to this movement, Osborne was influenced by socialist ideas and an anti-Establishment spirit. His plays betray the deep dissatisfaction with the status quo and his disillusion with the post-war welfare state.

Osborne's following plays written in the late 1950s and 1960s, The Entertainer (1957), starring Laurence Olivier in the title role, Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1965), and A Patriot for Me (1965) were also largely successful and controversial. Set against the backdrop of the Suez-crisis, The Entertainer, was the first play to question the monarchy on one of England's major stages. A Patriot for Me, a play about the Austro-Hungarian officer Redl openly addresses male homosexuality and sparked off a debate on theatre censorship leading to its eventual abolition in 1968.

In the decades following Osborne authored several more plays the more prominent being A Sense of Detachment (1972), The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) and West of Suez (1971), Watch it Come Down (1975) and Déjàvu (1992), as well as the screen plays for Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. He also tried himself as screen writer, although many of his scripts, apart from Tom Jones (1962), for which he won the Oscar, could not live up to earlier successes.

Until his death in 1994, Osborne had written 25 full-length plays, two autobiographies and countless essays and screenplays.

Works Cited

Molino, Michael R. "Osborne, John". The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David Scott Kastan. 2005. Oxford University Press. 12 June 2012 <http://www.oxford-britishliterature.com/entry?entry=t198.e0357>

Klotz, Günther. Britische Dramatiker der Gegenwart. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1982.

Ratcliffe, Michael. “Osborne, John James (1929–1994)”.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004. Oxford University Press. 12 June 2012 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55236>