Contemporary Arts -

Broken Mould

Epitaph for George Dillon. By John Osborne and Anthony Creighton. (Royal Court.) MOST tragedies turn the limelight on to the big man in decay. From King Lear to Citizen Kane, from Othello to Willy 12bman, our pity has been sought for the dying has-

been. Mr. Osborne deals in an even more sorry and desperate figure—the living hasn't-been. His heroes are little men rotten before they are ripe. They not only court failure, they go to bed with it, marry it, and live unhappily ever after with it.

Jimmy Porter, Archie Rice and now George Dillon are cut ,to the same flawed pattern. Before Nature made them, she broke the mould. They are romantics who believe that the accolade of genius in this age is not the Queen's sword on your shoulder but the lynch mob's rope round your neck. What makes them so angry and snapping, what turns the draught Bass to bile in their glasses, is the fear that they may never be martyred.

This is why Jimmy Porter lives in his attic and works at a sweet stall. This is why Archie Rice waits for the policeman's knock on the door. This is why George Dillon marries into a Grove family and settles down by the telly among the lumpen- bourgeoisie.

Every provincial poetry society or WEA group has its George Dillon—the arty smarty with his lank hair, his bad-taste rhetoric, his little-boy charm and his unfinished play/novel/sonnet sequence. The local Dillon always wears his family like an, embroidered strait-jacket. He is worshipped by his mother, fondled by his sisters, and contemptuously subsidised by his father. It takes a war, a slump or a revolution to flush him out of his furnished womb at the top of the house. In a play by Chekhov or a film by Fellini, the boy never leaves home.

John Osborne and Anthony Creighton have neatly turned this pattern inside out like a glove. Their Dillon has already escaped to London, been an aircrew officer in the ware married a famous actress, actually completed several plays, and is within a few rungs of success. Almost at the top of the ladder, he discovers a tendency to vertigo. So back he burrows into the bosom of someone else's family.

Here he can hate his adopted. father without being haunted by the memory of CEdipus. He can be cuddled by his adopted mother without the guilt of incest. He can seduce his adopted sister without the Eumenides peeping through the key- hole. The cuckoo has lost his nerve. Instead of kicking the alien eggs out of the nest, the intruder surrenders at the final curtain and becomes a tame bird.

By a brilliant and courageous stroke of insight, striking while the irony is hot, the authors make Dillon not savagely bitter at his defeat but instead tearfully grateful. This seems to me the knock- out punch which ends a real championship fight. One critic, Kenneth Tynan, has magisterially rapped Osborne and Creighton across their knuckle-dusters because they do not explain whether Dillon is a genius or a mediocrity. But surely the answer is (a) that the title, Epitaph for George Dillon, is a clear sign that the hero has sold out his talent by burying himself alive, and (b) that the question of genius is irrelevant.

Osborne's most valuable gift to the modern

theatre is his demonstration that failure is as agonising and as dramatic for the third-rater as for the genius. Just as defeat in love is as cruel and poignant for the plain woman -as for the great beauty.

It is not accidental that John Osborne's glitter- ing success should have been bitilt on the observa- tion of three tarnished failures. The whole steam- power of his writing comes from this identifica- tion with his main characters. He seems to stand outside himself and say : 'Look at you, Osborne. Here you are, over-articulate, weakly charming, self-centred, rather callous. Your only excuse is talent, and judging by your achievements so far the chances are you're a phoney.'

Almost every young man with creative preten- sions has said the same kind of thing to himself in the mirror. But few writers since Pepys have dared rip out that part of themselves in words with such blinding candour and frightening honesty. To a great extent Osborne has been aided in his self- dissection by being an actor. To the superb talent for slangy, sinewy dialogue, he has added the mummer's instinct for seeing each individual as a frustrated matinee idol with his favourite tricks of gesture and posture. Jimmy Porter, Archie Rice and George Dillon are all actor-entertainers—one amateur, two professional.

Mr. Creighton, too, is an actor. Epitaph for George Dillon has the faults of an actors' play. It is primitively constructed. Two flashbacks take place up in the air on a sort of diving-board in order to give us information about the characters

which could have been conveyed in a page of dialogue. Not only are these inserts preposterously staged, they are so woollily written that the audience misses essential clues to later action.

Then there is the much-praised second act where Robert Stephens as Dillon, and Yvonne Mitchell as the bright young intellectual aunt of the family, fight a friendly ferocious duel with un- buttoned rapiers. This should tumesce inch by inch, like he second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, until the climactic 'touché' when they spit each other on their weapons. The director William Gaskill beats them on with a knout. But the authors continually let the tension sag through wilful neglect of narrative technique. They break up Dillon's speeches into consciously theatrical monologues to which the aunt responds with ironic applause and criticism.

Robert Stephens, with the slightly obscene charm of a moulting teddy bear, and Yvonne Mitchell, a gazelle with a college education, are characters impeccably observed and shrewdly played. But the lower-middle-class household (again the actors'-eye view) are seen from the outside like grotesques fleetingly noted in a theatrical digs. The father, the elder daughter and the clergyman are stock comic relief borrowed from the railway buffet of Brief Encounter.

Fortunately for the balance of the play, the fond mother and the foolish other daughter are miraculously incarnated in Alison Leggat and Wendy Craig. Dillon thinks he is seducing both with his schoolboy Casanova act but unerringly they suck him into domesticity—Miss Leggat as the Godfrey Winn mum caught between a cup of tea and a good cry, Miss Craig as the 6.5 Special Delilah half-sk if& and half-sniffle.

Epitaph for George Dillon has all the fascina- tion of a forgotten desk drawer—stuffed full of surprises, disappointments and discoveries. It con- tains enough red meat for a month's digesting.

ALAN BRIEN