Osborne's Language
By MALCOLM
RUTHERFORD Inadmissible Evidence.
(Royal Court.)
THERE iS at the moment in repertoire at the Vic- toria Theatre, Stoke-on- Trent, a production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger that has all the freshness of a first perfor-• mance, as if the play had only just been written. The building is a converted cinema, the audience can scarcely any of them have had much experience of theatre in London or have known of the impact Anger had when it first appeared in 1956. Yet when I saw it they listened to and took every word. There again was the flashing dialogue, amid the spite and desire to hurt was Jimmy Porter's compassion for Alison, the hero articulate about everything but himself and, above all, Osborne's ability clinically to dissect a love affair, yet to under- stand it in a way unapproached by any other present dramatist. The creaky machinery was there, too—the intervention of Helena and the unconvincing appearance of Alison's father. And now as before these failings could be overlooked because there was so much else besides. Osborne's triumph is almost entirely one of language. Without artifice, he has a way of making his characters speak so that the rightness of their words is never in question. His critics must take issue with the thing said, never with the way of saying it.
Inadmissible Evidence is not, I think, such a good play as the first, though I do not believe the comparison greatly matters. It is recognisably by the same author and the old gifts remain. The new hero, Maitland, is middle-aged; his spleen is still mixed with tears. He has all of Jimmy Porter's ability to turn a phrase. Like Jimmy, he can plead that he is a good, kind man at heart. He is equally unable to help him- self. Significantly, some of the play's best moments are when Nicol Williamson as Maitland just mumbles into the telephone and one knows so well the words and feelings at the other end of the line. To his mistress whom he has let down: 'I know you do—I love you—it doesn't make much difference, does it?' Again : 'I wanted to be with you-1 wanted to talk to you—I wanted to be with you.' Banalities yes, even lies; they are not without feeling. Osborne's heroes have only one choice: either they make speeches or they lapse into clichds. They are fascinated with words—witness Jimmy's delight as he brandishes the dictionary and reads out the definition of 'pusillanimous' or Luther's obses- sion with strong language. There is an actor, an Archie Rice even, in all of them. They fall into the clichds only when they have to talk about them- selves. The only time Jimmy and Alison are happy together is when they escape into the world of squirrels and bears where they don't speak but squeak. The solicitor, Maitland, hasn't even this com- fort. When he is confronted by a secretary he has made pregnant, the lame words come tumbling out : 'when you look back I don't think you can say it was fraudulent.' When the posturing's over, Osborne's heroes are just as inarticulate as everyone else. Jimmy has Hugh's mum whom he idealises into someone he can talk to, since she only weeps and smiles. Maitland has no one. And no one but Osborne can handle this break- down with such understanding.
It has been said that Inadmissible Evidence is about guilt, that it is about one man on trial. Rather it is about fragmentation, about the dis- solution of a middle-aged man as he realises
that he has nothing around him to cling on to. To say that he is on trial is to rationalise, as Maitland does himself in the dream which is prologue to the play. What can he be on trial for, except for being alive, for being Maitland? The man who has seen through and rejected pre- vailing standards can judge himself only against those standards. His offence is always nameless, for there is no offence, only the sense of failure. Awake in his office, where we see him for the rest of the play, he has not even the consolation of the judge and of someone else to order his sentence. 'All my life,' he says, 'I've always been afraid of being found out.' The tragedy is that there is no longer anyone to find him out, or to care. Like Jimmy Porter, he harks back to a world where all is order and all decisions are ready made. He nourishes a private guilt at a time when guilt has become indefinable.
Maitland half tears himself, half falls to pieces. He follows in his office a kind of ritual: talk, take a pill, demand a glass of water, look at a file, ring up his wife, ring up his mistress, talk, make advances to a secretary, see a client, ring up a colleague but try his mistress first, and round again. The story of his disintegration is his loss of control over this sequence. The once skilled operator who could run all the affairs he wanted to as well as being a reasonably suc- cessful solicitor has lost all power, so that at the end he is reaching for the telephone at the same time as for his pills, more from habit than purpose. His talk has become incoherent. The cur- tain falls on him collapsing in tears on to his desk.
So that the play, more even than Look Back in Anger, is something of a monologue. And again the machinery creaks. There is a succession of clients, all women seeking divorce, all played by the same actress. The supposition is that they might all be ex-mistresses, come to utter their reproaches. It does not work. For Osborne's characters never discuss anything. Either they shout or they find what communication they can through cliches. The next morning, to a secretary he has made love to on the office floor, Maitland can only say, 'Get home all right?' It was only half-past seven,' she deflates him. If he'd been tough he would never have mentioned it. Being the basically kind, weak man he is, he has to say something and he means it well. Her reply, her casualness almost shock him. Until he can rail again he hardly knows what to say.
I do not think it a fault that in these railings he should range from aphorisms about youth and the Daily Express to self-pitying confessions about his own sex-life and sense of failure. At times he seems to take more pleasure in words than he does in sex. I don't do anything, he admits once, 'I just talk about it at great boring length.' Even the broken syntax, the half-formed topical allusions seem to me exactly right. It's right, too, that his targets are so obvious. What Maitland is fleeing is the desperate banality of it all. He knows it, just as he knows he cannot escape from the boring, lying ordinariness that most of his affairs give way to. Be articulate while you may, he seems to say, you can only do it solo; anything to keep me from what passes for communication between people. Nicol William- son plays him superbly and with a physical charm and innocence which add immensely to the sym- pathy. And there is one other performance by Arthur Lowe as Maitland's assistant which is quite remarkable.
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