Posterity likes to unpeel labels. We are now told how diverse all the supposed Angry Young Men were in reality. Amis for one, Heilpern tells us, ‘refused to be buttonholed in their company’ (I think he means pigeonholed. Oh God what a book this is). Yet looking back, I can’t help thinking that the unleashing of some pent-up rage does seem to be common to that generation. This is how they startle, Osborne and Amis and Larkin and Pinter too: the sudden explosion of anger in polite society, the obscenity in the iambic, the lava spouting out of the dining-room table. The rage is always lurking, rage against the deceitfully bland, the manipulative evasion, against all feeling-suppressants, the rage occasionally overblowing into sheer flatulence, like that great expulsion of wind, ‘Damn You England’, composed beside Tony Richardson’s pool in the South of France.
This does not mean that they congregated and drew up manifestoes. Each had his own private kingdom of anger. They no more formed lasting alliances than do extreme nationalist movements in different countries. In that Olympus of Grumpy Old Men, the 1400 Club (reserved for those members of the Garrick Club who cannot abide sitting down to lunch before 2 p.m.), Amis and Osborne refused to address each other directly, and would speak only through third parties.
There is something else they have in common too and Osborne has in abundance, which is an ear for ordinary speech, for its loops and repetitions and jumps and hesitations, its sudden flaring up and dying down again into banal set phrases. In his best four or five plays, The Entertainer and Inadmissible Evidence especially, there is an almost magical flow to the monologues as well as to the conversations which manages to be both wholly original and utterly down-to-earth. That is the real break with the theatre of Coward and Fry and even Rattigan. And when Osborne revivals come across as dated, as people now and then complain, it is usually because the actors have forgotten how people talk.
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