DIARY JOHN OSBORNE
Got anything coming up at all?' the doctor asked as I lay prone. At least he inquired with mild interest, probably (and rightly) wondering about his fee; unlike the lout at dinner recently who turned to me and asked, 'Do you ever write anything these days?' By now I should have learned to block such questions, yet I wanted to dent his head with my poor old oeuvre, some 30 modest volumes, and bound in brick. Congreve, I remember, sensibly gave up before he was 30, continuing to be unre- servedly honoured until his Abbey burial 40 fallow years on. Did Proust or Joyce suffer this dismissive interrogation in the consult- ing-room or dentist's chair? Is it only writ- ers who are baited in this manner? Are painters asked if they are painting anything, or musicians if they are composing? Are accountants asked how the accounting is going? Newspapers, naturally, dwell on production-line progress: `Not a full-length play for five/eight/twelve years.' Yes,' said I to the doctor, knowing that nothing could interest him about the treadmill of a day- labouring playwright. To console his real anxieties, I added, 'I have an old thing being revived at the National Theatre.' 'Really?' he said, puzzled. `Do you get paid for that?' Of course not. It's a free service, a part-time amusement, an idle hobby to keep me from watching pornographic movies. That's why I'm lying here.
Ihave been intrigued by the success of the current revival of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan was under the general frown when I first joined the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and both George Devine and Tony Richardson were aPPalled when I confessed to being moved by the play. They regarded this as a heresy, a blasphemy against my own emotional and critical credentials. I remember the original West End production vividly. I was accom- panied by a friend, an ex-bomber-navigator and DFC, who had been one of Rattigan's lovers. He had also toured in one of those camp Gang Shows, with titles like Boys in Light Blue, and possessed proud pho- tographs of himself in a line of high-kick- ing, tutu-clad heroes, including the famous Playwright-director himself, wand in hand, singing, `I'm just about the oldest fairy in the business'. Peggy Ashcroft's perfor- mance as Hester Collyer had been unfor- gettable, particularly the scene in which she Pleaded with Freddie Page, her ex-RAF ,,,1°Yer, grounded in adolescence and now in night from this battlefield of insatiable and unequal desire, to stay one more night. A few years later, when Dame Peggy and I Were appearing in one of Brecht's most fir,indY unimpassioned plays, The Good °man [now Person] of Setzuan, I asked her if she had enjoyed playing Hester. 'Not much,' she said. `I got awfully tired of it. You see, she was such a silly bitch.'
The fact that the original script con- cerned two homosexual lovers, which I only learned later, didn't affect my initial response to the play, viewed from my own aching marital despond. Years later, Ratti- gan wrote to me chiding himself for not having pursued his original intention. He needn't have done so. The Lord Chamber- lain would never have countenanced it. That would take another 15 years of tedious attrition to remedy. This `respectable' version of The Deep Blue Sea became very popular in provincial reperto- ry companies, although I suspect that their middle-class audiences were a little scepti- cal or alarmed that any of their kind could be seized by such incontinent passion. Even more unforgivable, that a Harrods-home- body should lose control, so unlike the cir- cumspect heroine of Brief Encounter. Sub- sequently, I went to join my first wife in the company at Derby Playhouse where she was playing Hester, and very well too. It was shatteringly ironic to witness the power of a character whom I identified as a tally for myself in the degrading turmoil of our own marriage. That night the auguries seemed horribly clear: she was the very counterfeit presentment of Freddie Page.
Abibliophile friend has just send me a handsome early 19th-century edition of Luther's Bondage of the Will written in answer to the Diatribe of Erasmus on Free Will. It is over 30 years since I embarked on '1 have this strange feeling we've been down here before.' a crash course of Luther's works when I was writing a play about him. I wasn't ready for it then, and I have often regretted youthful over-reaching, not yet encased in a restricting breastplate of procrastinating caution. Luther's diatribe against the gentle Erasmus is spell-binding, a brutal, volcanic flow of scalding vituperation: You take care to be on every occasion slip- pery and pliant in your own speech. My dear Erasmus, you speak honestly but think wickedly; but if you think it necessary, you speak wickedly and think rightly. How copi- ous an orator! And yet you understand noth- ing of what you are saying ... For you crawl upon the ground, and enter upon nothing above what is human.
On it goes, 400 pages of bare-knuckle prose, vicious body slams and low blows. `Distasteful,' the modern observer would say, and so often it is, but at such a level of exalted fire-power how it rouses the blood! It brought me to think about one of the few technological toys which I find pleasurable — the fax. Julie Burchill and Camille Paglia have been conducting a toe-to-toe dialogue by fax, which sadly spluttered out in disor- derly hair-pulling. But what a fancy boon, with its unconsidered response of the still- throbbing unsubsided wound, it would have been to Luther and Erasmus. Or to Caesar and Pompey, Elizabeth and Philip of Spain, Wilde and Queensberry, Ruskin and Whistler. What murderous fun the very greatest of damners and haters might have had with their fax: Hazlitt, Tolstoy, Shelley, Byron. Who else? A game for dropping off to, dreams of the impaling master classes.
Ever since I wrote to the Times com- plaining of a crass EEC ban on the import of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, I have con- tinued to receive parcels of the real thing from kindly people all over the world. Some months ago, in this column, I owned up to a fondness for the sound of the bag- pipes. Invited to lunch with an attractive lady historian of these parts, I found myself sitting beside an engaging young solicitor from Chester who turned out to be Neville Chamberlain's grandson. Not only this, but he had brought an impressive set of pipes to play for my pleasure and the surprise of the wild life crouching in these blue remembered hills. More recently, another thoughtful soul appeared at my front door, unkilted and with a German accent, who disarmingly offered me an afternoon of cosy pibrochs by the fireside. It is all very gratifying, if slightly dotty, and surely says something about the pools of good-will existing in readers of discerning journals. But perhaps I should take care in making known any darker, exotic preferences.
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