New Plays in Manhattan

Look Back in Anger (by John Osborne) hit England with a bang last year and it is clear enough why. On the one hand, it jabbed some good spiny cactus into the aspidistra drama of the English stage; on the other hand, it clangingly echoed a new generation's call to disorder in English life. And it had something more than the Zeitgeist or England's general theatrical anemia to recommend it; it had a man who could really write.

Look Back in Anger has hardly raised the curtain on the frowsiest-looking attic in years than it catapults upon the audience the most blisteringly vituperative character. While his better-born young wife (Mary Ure) bends over an ironing board and his working-class friend (Alan Bates) sprawls over the Sunday papers, Jimmy Porter looses his bilious scorn, like a revolving gun turret, on everything within range: art, religion, radio, Sunday, England and, again and again, his wife and mother-in-law. As minutely venomous as a wasp, as sweepingly violent as a whirlwind, his mockery sauced with self-pity, his growl subsiding in a whine, he brings to a vast repository of grievances a commensurate repertory of abuse.

As the play proceeds, an actress friend of his wife's comes to stay in the house, lashes back at him, and rouses the put-upon pregnant wife to give him the gate. But after the wife leaves Jimmy's bed and ironing board, her friend suddenly takes over both. At the end, despite her being wild about the brute, the friend clears out from a sense of guilt, while the wife, who has had a miscarriage, pleads with him to take her back.

Postulating a grey-as-ashes England where upper-class loss has not meant lower-class gain, Playwright Osborne writes of a young intellectual who looks back because he has no incentive to look ahead, and looks back in anger because he has no brighter past than future. Exulting in his wrongs rather than crusading for his rights, living in "the American age" but without sharing its rewards, Jimmy--at least on the surface--is resolutely a full-fledged Disorganization Man. But gnawing at him worse than have-not economics is the endemic English intestinal bug of class resentment. Happily, none of this ever becomes a mere plight in man's clothing. Jimmy (extremely well played by Kenneth Haigh) is always real in himself, exasperatingly and vibrantly alive, and with a natural-sounding, real-life gift for witty and eloquent abuse.

Less happily, what is best in all this has been pretty fully conveyed by the end of a brilliant, dynamic first act. Indeed, the first act's very power of assault gives to what follows a diminished impact. But what follows has also too little organic development. The play never really advances from a kind of one-man show to any kind of social drama. To be sure, a negativist, no-exit attitude that shies away from moral crisis cannot develop very far; while at the same time so much overt anger must shut the door on irony. Having shown how angry Jimmy can be, the play chiefly thereafter shows how personally irresistible he is. Perhaps a little concentration on human plight would have helped: it cuts deeper than Bohemian mess.

Not for a good many years has anyone come out of England with Playwright Osborne's verbal talent for throwing stones. But playwrights need an architectural talent too, for placing one stone on top of another.

Playwright Osborne, 27, grows perceptibly peevish these days when he is called an "angry young man." Applied to him, the phrase is indeed growing threadbare and inaccurate. Perhaps in an effort to delimit his own brand of anger, Osborne states his aim in the current issue of Britain's longhaired Encounter: "I want to make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think afterwards." Whatever their deficiencies, Look Back in Anger and his The Entertainer (TIME, April 22) attest to Osborne's own tremendous capacity to feel. It is often hard to tell whether his sentiments are mere sediments of old thoughts or the seeds of new ones, but he easily qualifies as the foremost apostle of his personal gospel: Feel now; think later!

Osborne's feelings obviously come from his mother's side. She hails from a family of London pub keepers, now publess, and carries on the tradition as a practicing barmaid. His mother's mother is "a tough, sly old cockney"; his daydreaming maternal grandfather foresaw him as Britain's Prime Minister. Though Osborne's father's people were of the repressed middle class that Osborne deplores, he recalls his paternal grandparents as "kind, charming" folks. That grandfather informed Osborne that a socialist is "a man who doesn't believe in raising his hat." Today John Osborne is an amorphous sort of socialist, a literary leftist, distantly descended from the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw (who usually thought first, felt later). An elegant dresser, almost a dude, lanky Playwright Osborne likes to raise the roof, seldom raises his fancy hat to anything.

Uncontaminated by any university teachings, Osborne chucked school at 16, briefly languished as a copy-grinder for trade journals, drifted into the theater as a tutor to a band of kiddies playing the provinces in the hardy perennial No Room at the Inn. A year later he was an actor, and soon a repertory manager as well. He now boasts: "Any actor can usually flummox any writer, but they can't do that to me, thank God!"

As the closest thing to a British existentialist, Osborne, despite his meandering manner of expression, has used his actor's eye and ear well in imbuing his drama with a strong theatrical sense.

In a small mews cottage in London's arty Chelsea, Osborne lives with his wife, Actress Ure, and spews out his ferocities. He plans to bring out a new play next year, doubtless in the angry vein. The objects of his disfavor are legion. He regards Britain's explosion of an H-bomb as "the most debased criminal swindle in British history." He likes to refer to London journalists as "the cheap-jacks of Fleet Street," and to Britain's royalty as "the gold filling in a mouthful of decay." Socialist Osborne will not define his own socialism: Why should he "prop up any journalist who wants a bit of easy copy or give some reviewer another smart clue for his weekly written-up crossword game?" Why does John Osborne want his anger to spread to others? "To become angry is to care."

Miss Lonelyhearts (adapted from Nathanael West's novel by Howard Teichmann) was pretty plainly ill-fated for the stage from being so hopelessly ill-suited to it. Nathanael West's story of a young newspaperman (Fritz Weaver) jauntily taking over an agony column, only to grow more and more horrified and sickened by the suffering he meets with in every batch of mail, boasts an untouchably personal style, a scarcely transferrable personal vision. But more than that, it employs so packed, pointed, terse a method that in just 75 pages it creates the effect of a novel. Where most novels need to be cut down for the stage, Miss Lonelyhearts has had to be expanded, and the result is looseness, slackness and a substitute (and very weak synthetic) flavor.

Clearly, Adapter Teichmann intended no vandalism, but he was driven to it trying to make sense of Miss Lonelyhearts on the stage. And he has not made sense for all that. He has sadly simplified the story at the same time that he has complicated the storytelling. He has needed a mass of stage gimmicks, he has had to start farther back, he has made something too wooden of his hero and all but banal of his hero's going to pieces and his search for God; and instead of West's fever-confused, ironically violent ending, has wound up with straight bang-bang. He has softened some things, too. Obviously, a Miss Lonelyhearts can reach as lopsidedly morbid a view of life as an interviewer of nothing but sweepstakes winners might reach too cheerful a one. But Miss Lonelyheart's view fitted West's own savagely compassionate pessimism, and should remain inviolate.

Only with the gloatingly malevolent, Mephistophelean feature editor--well acted in a Front Page style by Pat O'Brien-does the play show any teeth. The editor makes a good stage villain; but the far greater villain of the book--life itself--never appears in the play.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.