The Theater Of John Osborne

Abstract

IN JULY, 1965, JOHN OSBORNE'S NINTH PLAY, A Patriot for Me, opened at the Royal Court in London. It was his ninth play in nine years: it is a high output by current standards and its impact-failures and successes alike-has been enormous. If any dramatist under 40 years old has earned the title of a working professional, it is Osborne; and yet to judge him in that role seems curiously beside the point. It certainly does not explain the sheer magnitude of his reputation in the theater. The last decade has been the most fertile in British drama for a long time, and no one has contributed more to it than Osborne; but the importance of his contribution is more often defined in terms of its consequences than for its own sake. It undermined dead conventions and brought the sound of living speech into the theater; it introduced the anti-hero and enlarged the permissible range of subject matter; it prepared the terrain for other writers. What it did not do was to provide other writers with a language. Osborne may have supplied them with an entrance ticket, but once they were admitted they were by themselves. Unlike Harold Pinter, he has not bred imitators.