The sad thing is that the gift doesn’t last. ‘We theatre scribblers average about a dozen years or so,’ Osborne said gloomily. ‘Nobody ever wrote a great play after the age of 40.’ The ear dulls, the successful playwright floats away from his original material on a tide of champagne and ties up at the port of Thespia, where they speak a different language.
The conventional line is also to chart a falling away from Jimmy Porter in his radical rage inveighing against the church bells to Squire Osborne on his knees in the parish church with a ‘Save the Book of Common Prayer’ sticker in his back window. Can this be the same person who vehemently refused to be confirmed and was sacked from school for knocking down Mr Heffer the headmaster? Well, yes, it can. Perceptive critics like Harold Hobson (who looks better and better in hindsight) spotted from the start the elegiac note in all Osborne’s plays. Even in his early thirties he was singing old music-hall songs with John Betjeman, and, though it is hard to imagine in that sea of booze, when he was married to Penelope Gilliatt prayers were sometimes said after dinner in Chester Square.
In fact the only time I clapped eyes on Osborne was in church, at a confirmation service in a dimly lit side chapel in Westminster Abbey, or rather I think it was a combined baptism and confirmation for those who had somehow missed out on the first leg, including John Osborne’s much loved godson, Ben Walden, later a good actor and one of the few people he never quarrelled with. Just before it started, in stalked this tall, reddish-grizzled man in a huge green overcoat with complicated flaps. He looked like an old-style actor-manager who had been transported from some other time, the time of Sir Henry Irving perhaps or even the Crummleses, and had been left stranded by the time machine. He was absurdly stagey, exuded melancholy from every flap, no flincher from the glass or from anything else. He looked magnificent, terrible but magnificent.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.