Kenneth Hurren on Osborne, the fallen idol
The End of Me Old Cigar by John Osborne (Greenwich Theatre) Macbeth 'by William Shakespeare' (Young Vic) Laura, adapted from Strindberg's The Father by Steven Dartnell (Theatre at New End) Perhaps because they no longer reach for something to kneel on at the Royal Court, nor even genuflect at all civilly, when he saunters round from Belgravia for a Council meeting of the English Stage Society, John Osborne has transferred his business to Greenwich. They defer to him there quite sensationally. They have given him a 'John Osborne Season' all to himself, and allowed him the other week to direct (if you will forgive a loose use of the verb) a feeble revival of his play, The Entertainer.
They also allow him to flex a bit of muscle, and I am sad indeed to tell you that one of the uses to which he has put it has been to instruct the embarrassed management and its press agents that on no account was I to be invited to review his new work.
It is all very paltry and tiresome and fatiguing. I forbear bringing the incident officially to the notice of the Arts Council, since it was soundly established at the time of a previous dispute of a similar nature that the Council is not prepared to
countenance a discriminatory attitude towards reviewers on the part of theatres in receipt of its grants; and I have no wish to see the splendid Greenwich Theatre threatened in its existence merely because its management has cringed before an essentially trivial manifestation of the Sensitivity of an important chap from Sloane Square whom they, naturally hold in some awe. I am sure, anyway, that they will have second thoughts about it; especially as Osborne cannot, whatever his mysterious wishes, actually prevent me from reviewing anything I choose, and the height of his achievement was to put me to the petty bother and expense of buying my own ticket.
I cannot help but be surprised about all this. While Osborne's own judgement of the drama is notoriously eccentric (I understand that Pyjama Tops is his idea of the most satisfactory play in London), his opinion of reviewers has always been low and, in that context, this is just another 'dog bites man' story Which should raise nobody's eyebrows; yet somehow it does mine. I had thought that Osborne, who has suffered a little himself in his time at the hands of censorship, would be no man to wish to impose it on anyone else; I suppose, though, that there is a touch of the censor in most of us, just waiting for our principles to be corrupted by a whiff of power; still, I prefer my idols not to fall.
God knows what I can have said to upset Osborne, I have relished his eloquent expression of his prejudices and his catholic distastes, the vivacity of his invective and the radiance of his ranting, and have generally felt myself to be among the more tenacious of his admirers. Only the appearance of A Sense of Detachment a couple of years ago caused my regard for him as a dramatist to wilt.
It wilts further, unhappily, with The End of Me Old Cigar, the limp frivolity at which I was a paying customer. Any reviewer in such a situation must, I think, be inordinately keen to write with fervour and favour, just to demonstrate his indomitable magnanimity, and I confess to having approached the piece in that eager spirit of geniality and goodwill. In the event, the play defeated this resolve. At the end of the day! had ceased to wonder why Osborne didn't want me to review it and was wondering instead why he should want anyone to review it.
For even overlooking the tedious and unfastidious grubbiness of its basic preoccupations, and allowing Osborne the benefit of gathering doubts about his increasing indulgence in these things (the suspicion, that is, that he has taken to following the methods of the more scurrilous newspapers which take the side of the angels only after reporting gloatingly the unseemly matters they condemn), it remains a carelessly conceived and executed piece of work. He has never been one to observe the formal niceties of construction in peripheral aspects of his plays: where other writers might hesitate to launch into digressions that are bound to leave loose ends lying about, or to introduce characters for their own sake rather than that of the play, or to discuss at inordinate length others who never appear at all, the liveliness of Osborne's rhetoric and the extravagance of his disaffection have more often than not made a virtue of irrelevance. (To some extent that is so again here: it is hard to resist his charmless bitcheries about the people he dislikes
— all necessarily under fictitious names, I fear, but including, I must assume, at least one former friend — merely on the ground that they have nothing to do with the play.) But he has not before, I think, been so indifferent to coherence and ,plausibility as to make his entire plot hinge upon a circumstance which he later ignores — as he does here when, having established that it is vital that the group of people with whom he is concerned do not know they are being spied upon by hidden tape recorders and cameras, he achieves another effect with a development that assumes that they all do know.
The people are gathered at the country house of a widowed lady, of title but not of gentle birth. Lady Regine Frimley is running the place, in fact, as a sort of plushy bordello for the rich, famous and influential. Her male guest-list, it appears, has included the entire male membership of Parliament, and generally everyone of importance in the Establishment and show business (the last for no particular reason except that this is the world in which Osborne is most maliciously at home). The ladies who do their bidding are all, like Lady Regine herself, 'female chauvinists' to a degree that Ms Steinem and Ms Greer might regard as verging upon a lunatic extreme. The activities of the house are being doggedly recorded on film and tape, and it is the ladies' intention to bring about the female millenium by making all these records public (suitably edited, as I understood it, by someone with the combined gifts of Eisenstein, Welles and John Ford), thus discrediting the entire male sex.
Since, as they say, "it takes two," it may occur to you that the female sex would not emerge too graciously from the exposure, either, but let it pass. Never mind, either, that publication is to be achieved through the despised, male-dominated 'media'. Osborne is only setting up this fatuous Aunt Sally in order to knock it down — which he does briskly in his second act, with all the intellectual aplomb of a man whose talent has rolled to the bottom of the hill, insisting on the one hand (would you believe?) that love will find a way, and on the other arranging a plot-twist so absurdly arbitrary that all that has gone betore seems, by comparison, a model of persuasive logic.
Rachel Roberts, who has the central and centripetal role of Lady Regine, handles the lady's colourfully scabrous loquacity with zestful relish. None of the subsidiary characters, as is customary in an Osborne work, is of much consequence.
The other theatrical occasions of last week were hardly more agreeable. The Macbeth at the Young Vic, has been 're-worked' by Frank Dunlop as 'The Witch's Tale' with a gratuitious framework taken from Middleton and three different actors, masked so as to be almost as indistinguishable as mice, playing Macbeth; it is novel but pointless. Laura is a 're-working' of Strindberg's The Father by Steven Dartnell who felt impelled to adapt it "to meet the demands of the time" — demands that Dartnell interprets as requiring an amplified rock-concert introduction, fairground decor and a sawdust ring as the playing area; it is abysmally acted, and of contemporaneity, or indeed of sense, there is no sign.
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