A collection of some of Osborne's early plays, as well as his last, "Dejavu", which features Jimmy Porter of "Look Back in Anger", 35 years on, older and wiser, but no less indignantly eloquent.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Look Back at Look Back in Anger,
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This review is from: John Osborne Plays 1; Look Back in Anger, Epitaph for George Dillion, the World of Paul Slickey, Dejauv (Faber Contemporary Classics) (Paperback)
I bought this volume largely for "Look Back in Anger", the reason I have given the book five stars, but as I have reviewed that excellent play elsewhere I will concentrate on the other three works contained here.
"Dejavu" (the playwright preferred to spell this as a single word) was the last play which John Osborne wrote before his death in 1994. It could perhaps be called "Look Back at Look Back in Anger" because it features that play's hero, Jimmy Porter, now elderly and comparatively wealthy, living in a country house in Shropshire. Another character from "Look Back", Jimmy's close friend Cliff Lewis, also makes an appearance. We learn that Jimmy's marriage to Alison has ended in divorce and that he has made a second unsuccessful marriage. The other characters are Jimmy's daughter from that second marriage, also called Alison, and her friend, also called Helena. Jimmy is as shockingly outspoken as ever, but whereas in the earlier play the principal target of his anger was the British establishment, he now takes on the culture of political correctness. (Osborne, like Kingsley Amis and some of the other members of the fifties literary movement known as the Angry Young Men, seems to have moved politically to the Right as he got older). He again gives vent to his feelings in a series of angry speeches, but his targets are now the nineties pieties about race, sex and sexual orientation rather than the "never had it so good" complacency of the fifties. There is often something refreshing about Jimmy's relentless cynicism, shining out like a naughty deed in a goody-goody world, but the main problem with "Dejavu" is that it has virtually no coherent plot at all. The play can therefore seem little more than a series of tirades and cynical jokes serving no good dramatic purpose. I understand that "An Epitaph for George Dillon" was recently revived in the West End. It is set in the household of the lower-middle-class Elliott family. The central character is their lodger George Dillon, a struggling actor and playwright, and something of an Angry Young Man himself, who becomes the lover of the family's younger daughter Josie, and possibly also of her Aunt Ruth, Mrs Elliott's younger sister. Like Jimmy Porter, George can be savagely vitriolic about religion and about the state of society, and also about the bourgeois values of the Elliott family, even those members who have treated him well. The kindly, deeply religious, Mrs Elliott sees herself as the benefactress of a major literary talent, whereas her narrow-minded, pusillanimous and philistine husband Percy harbours a deep resentment against George, whom he sees as a sponger. Osborne seems to be setting up a tragic ending, with the revelation at the end of the penultimate scene that George is suffering from tuberculosis, but provides an ironically happy one instead. George is cured of his illness and achieves a great success with his first published play. The reason the ending is only ironically happy is that George has only achieved success by following the advice of his cynical agent Barney, abandoning his artistic integrity and turning his play into a commercial potboiler. The most telling comment is perhaps that George has now won the respect of Percy, because he has the only three things that Percy values- pounds, shillings and pence. This is another of Osborne's early plays written just before "Look Back", but does not have the same emotional power. Osborne himself describes it in the introduction to this volume as an "inferior run-up", and the description seems apt. Although Jimmy Porter can behave badly, particularly towards his wife, in many ways he is a character who keeps the audience's sympathy. An actor would have to be gifted indeed to make the bitter, sarcastic and often hypocritical George into a sympathetic figure. "The World of Paul Slickey" is a satirical musical set in the world of journalism. The central character is a gossip columnist married to the daughter of an aristocrat, which allows Osborne to take pot-shots at both the newspaper industry and the upper classes, as well as Conservative politicians, capital punishment and the Government's defence policy. In the introduction, Osborne states that this play was responsible for his becoming "the only living playwright to have been pursued down the London streets by an angry mob", although he does not give further details of this incident or what might have incited the mob to such anger. Perhaps, before the days of "That Was The Week That Was" and the "satire boom" of the sixties, audiences were not used to seeing their political masters treated so disrespectfully. Certainly, some of the satire seems a little heavy-handed, and the scene near the end in which a woman changes sex and then, as a man, falls in love with her own sister, must have seemed very strong meat in the more innocent fifties.
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