The Tiny World of John Osborne

DRAMA

By HENRY TUBE

Lmax wonder that John Osborne lost his temper with the critics last summer; he was, as it were, only honouring his bond to play the role of Devil's Disciple in and out of season. But although his contention that he had worked a year on the National Theatre's adaptation of La Fianza Satisfecha for cold wages seemed at the time no reason for withholding artistic criticism of the result, it is now clear what he meant. Two weeks ago the BBC Third Pro- gramme broadcast a close translation of the play by Joe Burroughs, who also produced it, under the title A Pledge Redeemed. It is to be repeated on Sunday. To compare this version with A Bond Honoured is to reconstruct a year-long drama of almost Faustian proportions, Osborne's struggle with his Bond.

The part of Mephistopheles seems to have been played by Kenneth Tynan, who, either with conscious satisfaction or innocently misjudging his man, placed in the hands of Jimmy Porter's creator a piece from that volume of Lope de Vega's works headed 'plays about the lives of the Saints.' Osborne has recorded his reaction: 'It was in three acts, had an absurd plot, some ridiculous characters and some very heavy humour.' What he found, as we may now judge from the radio production, was a version of the Don Juan story in which the hero/villain, here named Leonido, instead of descending unrepen- tant into hell, is redeemed by the direct inter- vention of Christ in the guise of a Shepherd. Mr Burroughs puts the essential message very succinctly in a Radio Times note: 'Lope believed in God; he believed that good is greater than evil, that the mercy of God is infinite and that sin is finite.'

Osborne's task must have been doubly uncom- fortable: on the one hand, he has always shown himself a playwright exclusively of his own time and place, the voice of disorientated indivi- dualism in an England of conforming triviality— a voice with the accents not of anger, which is a key too high for our society, but of irritation (Porter's.. Maitland's, Rice's)—so that good, evil, God and sin are conceptions well outside his register; on the other hand, he would have every sympathy with his main character so long as he remained impervious to redemption, thereafter none whatever.

It may be that Mr Tynan, our Mephistopheles, had only the best intentions for his Faust, hoping that in the inevitably bitter attempt to cross the barrier of redemption Osborne would be forced to extend his range, to pass from social irrita- tion to spiritual anger. As it turned out, he either couldn't or wouldn't, and A Bond Honoured became his own irascible reaction to a kind of penance. So we find his Leonido, powerless to prevent it, accepting redemption, but with moans and groans and a very bad grace. This is the explanation for the extra- ordinarily muddled impression the adaptation makes on the stage; Osborne and Lope are there together in the ring, but Osborne won't knock the Spaniard down, nor even roundly curse him, contenting himself with the sort of petty vitu- peration one driver uses to another in a traffic incident. The effect is partly saddening, partly comic, as when Leonido, after his redemption, implores his father's pardon (he has recently blinded him with a sword and now confesses to having murdered his mother); in the Osborne version, he can't forbear to say: 'Your tiny heart will not deny me absolution?' Or earlier, where in the Burroughs translation he says that he has now become 'a gentle lamb,' in the Osborne version he says 'a dismal lamb.' Like the driver in traffic or the commuter in rush hour, it is the voice of a child in a pet rather than of an outlaw at bay.

For all this, Leonido, before his redemption, might seem to be a figure 'made to his hand,' if only Osborne would turn his muted roman- ticism on at full volume. In the Burroughs translation, Christ the Shepherd says to Leonido:

You were given more pride and more strength, more courage and more imagination than are commonly given. They showed you much that became contemptuous in your eyes. There is much in life that merits contempt and should be rooted out. You would have up- rooted everything, for to destroy was to you to create.. . . To offend others was to vindi- cate yourself. You stood against all proven belief, all true virtue, because in your conceit you believed that nothing outside yourself existed or was worthy of existence.

A blueprint for an Osborne character. But in the event it would have so dwarfed Osborne's Leonido that he left out the whole speech. For where Lope's Leonido is contemptuous of good- ness, Osborne's has a grudge against respect- ability; where Lope's abjures love, Osborne's shies away from its behaviour patterns; where Lope's strikes at belief, Osborne's girds at con- formity. Lope's hero declares (in the Burroughs translation): 'I am dedicated to the destruction of honour'; Osborne's is wrestling with some- thing more like a blanket, what he calls 'process,' what Mary McCarthy has called 'inertia': 'Me, I had an overstrong instinct, you understand, and this is an island of over-pro- tected people. The range of possibilities in living here shrinks with every year.' The debased target is reflected in Osborne's debased invective: 'Like a basket of old laundry, mucky and no use to anyone . . . you onlooker . . . you almost creaked into life there, old fat bones . . . this low, low, uterine appeasement! . . . old toad!' The tone is of a Billy Bunter who has been reading D. H. Lawrence under his desk.

But in the theatre itself it was the images in particular which betrayed Osborne's dreadful un- happiness in his work, for they were like blocks of lifeless machinery, dragged in to create an impression of spurious 'punch,' but remaining obstinately disconnected, failing to discharge the proper function of dramatic images, to set up echoes in the hearer's mind and so lend space and depth to his awareness of character and situation. Because, of course, in spite of the remnants of Lope's plot hanging about dimly in the back- ground, there is in A Bond Honoured no situa- tion and no character beyond that drab blanket of mediocrity from the toils of which is inces- santly raised this one testy voice of complaint.

However, Osborne's prejudice against the

original could only have been confirmed if he listened to its radio version, A Pledge Redeemed;

not so much from any fault in the translation, which was workmanlike and which, though it wisely avoided any direct attempt at poetic flights, somehow gave one to know that if one

had Spanish there was rich language to be en- joyed in the original; rather from the badness of the production. How long, 0 Lord, how

long must we put up with the villainous standard of BBC Sound Drama productions, the total ab- sence of imagination in their preparation, the wooden acting, the insensitivity to the internal rhythms of a scene, the flat, dogged slog from act to act?

Yet to broadcast the version for com- parison with Osborne's was an unusually bright idea, if not something of a sharp thrust, considering that the Head of Sound Drama, Mr Martin Esslin, demolished A Bond Honoured most thoroughly and brilliantly in the August number of Plays and Players. We could do with more of these sharp thrusts from his department, as well as much more direct reference to the theatre at large, but none of this will go for anything if the plays are so consistently marred in the performance. Marius Goring, though he has established a deserved reputation for re- ligious parts, was miscast as Leonido, too fruitily mature by half, too convinced of his redemption from the outset, while the rest of the cast ploughed through their scripts like Christmas shoppers along Oxford Street, their faces pos- sibly registering good will but their minds else- where. The flaccid production, complete with musical swells for the redemption, only went to prove that the modern Anglo-Saxon's religious tendencies are worth all the contempt John Osborne can spare them.

But must he have refused his own redemp- tion? Could he not have honoured the bond Mr Tynan put upon him with his own salvation as well as that of his reluctant hero? Then his year's torment might well have paid him more than £250 and the critics' jibes. It is not as though he lacks the essential religious fervour, for, ad- monishing his critics from the Sunday Tele- graph's reviewer's column, he wrote: Think of the theatre as an ordeal, as an act of love is an ordeal, as an historical incite- ment. As one of the few acts of communion left to us. Imagine that this may be the last time the Host is raised before your eyes.

Do that, Mr Osborne. if you hate mediocrity and triviality, for Heaven's sake, snap out of them. Do not allow yourself to be hoisted squealing toward someone else's Heaven, but haul us away to yours.