I was wrong
Lloyd Evans
The Hotel In Amsterdam Donmar John Bull's Other Island Tricycle
Some devotees of the theatre may know John Osborne backwards but for us layfolk he seems barely worth bothering about. His genius gave us — what? That rancid autobiography, a thuggish sourpuss called Jimmy Porter and a heavy-handed symbol for post-Suez Britain embodied by Archie Rice. The roles of Rice and Porter, despite being played on film by Olivier and Burton, leave a peculiar taste in the throat, the whiff of a clever but purposeless swindle, a stench of rotten roses. No, I never liked John Osborne. The ill-structured plays, the corrosive snobbery, and all those coarse, garrulous characters with their sighing and panting and weeping, their self-important hatreds and the sad attempts to start a bonfire of the vanities with a handful of damp twigs. Nor did I ever understand the 'revolution of 1956' at the Royal Court, an eruption so tepid as to prompt one mystified onlooker (Steven Berkoff) to comment, An ironing board? I mean, come on.' You can probably guess where I'm heading. The surprise mid-column reverse. First you rip him to pieces, then you raise him from the dead, and, yes, I was astonished by The Hotel In Amsterdam, which is the work of a theatrical master. How could I have been so wrong? This is a challenging, risky and hilarious satire, slender on plot but brilliantly deft in its characterisation. The scenario is simple. A clique of friends, all employed by the same tyrannical movie producer, escape from London for a weekend in Amsterdam. They check in to a five-star hotel and sit around doing not very much except flirting, bitching, carping, drinking — and planning the next day's repetition of same. These affluent, weary-of-themselves sophisticates will not appeal to everyone. Osborne writes without restraint in his very own 'grand style', that is, in the meanest and most heartless tone of invective he can muster.
Early on, the central character, Laurie, calls his mother 'a turd'. A few moments later he announces, 'I would like to rape an air hostess.' Another character observes, 'People who need other people are the ghastliest people of all.' These comments are received in an atmosphere of waggish approbation, and here lies the play's daring and its appeal. Fully selfaware and reckless of all censorship, Osborne uses his venomous eloquence to examine the cheerless, self-orientated nature of the human spirit. This is heartsurgery with the sleeves rolled up.
Laurie, a scriptwriter, is as close to a dramatic self-portrait as Osborne ever came. All the characters revolve around him: Amy, the ever-helpful bovine secretary; Gus, the hero-worshipping loser; and Margaret, the tetchy tough-as-boots wife. How easily Laurie might have come across as a spoilt, preachy, over-privileged oaf strutting around the shag-pile carpet, knocking back the malt whisky and mouthing off. But Tom Hollander's radiant and cunning display compels us to see him as his friends do, as the life and soul of the party, the adorable, incorrigible, indispensable wit. I forgot that I was watching a rehearsed performance, so free was Hollander of any practised gesture or premeditated cadence. Beneath his comic diatribes, Laurie is a desolate, tragic figure. When the central action of the play unfolds and he declares his passion for another man's wife, I sensed a lifetime's emotion compacted in a single pixel of furious intensity. 'I love you.' It was the only thing that happened all evening but, God, it made my nape crawl and shift with recognition.
Another awakening at the Trike. George Bernard Shaw, eh? Well, I knew about him from those vast, teetering monuments to his genius. Which do you prefer? Saint Joan, with its endless rhetorical pomposity, or Pygmalion, a masterpiece of sexless whimsy? John Bull's Other Island came as a revelation. Regarded as Shaw's most personal play, it offers insights into his character that rarely get a chance in the face of all that blustering oratory. Here is Shaw as a sensitive and rootless philosopher with a taste for rhapsodic lyricism and a heartfelt love of nature that comes close to religious idealisation. Sadly, his comments on Anglo-Irish relations are heavily dated in an age when Ireland owes its first overseas allegiance to Brussels rather than to London. But the play's themes are modern in unexpected ways: the sanctity of land, the spiritual impoverishment of big business and the exploitation of client-states by swaggering foreign potentates. A smirking and self-confident Englishman remarks of Ireland's future, 'Home Rule will work wonders — under English guidance.' He might be speaking from the Oval Office directly to Baghdad.
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