ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Osborne Declares War On Critics

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31093, 23 June 1966, Page 7

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Osborne Declares War On Critics

The playwright, John Osborne, became once more the “angry young man” of British theatre this month by declaring war on London critics for their severe treatment of his latest play. He fired off angry telegrams after reading the reviews of “A Bond Honoured,” his adaptation of a sixteenthcentury Spanish play by Lope de Vega. “The Times” critic, Irving Wardle, described it as practically a one-character play, with Leonido, its atheistie, incestuous, matriddal, rapist and ultimately Christian hero, as one of the most thoroughgoing rebels in European drama.

“Perhaps the original is a

masterpiece—what is certain is that it squared almost too neatly with modern ideas of revolt against an absurd universe, and gave Mr Osborne an open invitation to let fly in his natural monodramatic vein," said Wardle. ; He suggested that after 350 1 years the revival had arrived i too late. “The spectacle of . gratuitous insult, sexual > humiliation, and physical cruelties needs a good deal , more wary handling and intellectual justification than it did a few years ago (one would guess that even the English appetite for sadism is on the wane), and Mr Osborne seems to have gone to work more in a spirit of self-indulgence than of re-interpretation.” ■ The next day a columnist I in “The Times” gathered up

the reviews and asked whether the National Theatre and other companies had gone “just about as far as flesh and blood in the audience can take?” Until recently, “The Times” suggested, scarcely a critic would have dared to risk a charge of being squeamish or bored. Lope, by modern standards, had the lot. The doyen of London theatre critics, W. A. Darlington of the “Daily Telegraph,” summed up the hero economically—“He seduces his sister (who seems very willing), blinds bis father, kills his mother, renounces Christianity, becomes a Moslem, and behaves as badly in his new faith as he had in the old one.”

Others filled In details. Peter Lewis in the “Daily Mail” noted that the hero carved his sister’s race about with a sword, spurned the Moorish girl who offered him love and turned out to be his lost sister. The incestuous sister, he explained, was really his daughter. B. A. Young in the “Financial Times” added the touches that the sororal seduction took pic e on her wedding night and that her birth had followed her mother’s rape by her fatherbrother. All seemed set for success. But there were murmurs. “A decidedly un-cosy play to see performed,” was wrung from Herbert Kretzmer in the “Daily Express.” “BUNKUM” More broadminded, befitting the liberal tradition of his paper, Phillip HopeWallace in the “Guardian” recorded that the hero “does nasty things like raping his mother and blinding his father,” but finds it all “serious and respectworthy up to a point.” He did not say which point. Less charitably, Fergus Cashin in the “Daily Sketch” confessed that he “could not find one stitch of- theatre sense” in the play, while the “Daily Mail” man forthrightly said: “It smells strongly of pretentious bunkum.” After this reception, it was no wonder the producer, John Dexter, said: “That lot should take out their ear plugs more often.”

“IT IS NOW WAR” And Osborne sent his telegrams, most of them prominently published, saying: “The gentleman’s agreement to ignore puny theatre critics as bourgeois conventions that keep you pinned in your soft seats is a thing I fall in with no longer. “After 10 years it is now war. Not a campaign of considerate complaints in private letters but open and frontal war that will be as public as I and other men of earned reputation have the considerable power to make it.” The angry young man of the 50s was sounding off again. CAUSTIC CRITIC

Osborne’s first play, “Look Back in Anger,” staged in 1956, gained him a reputation of being a caustic and unpitying critic of British social institutions.

The main character, Jimmy Porter, had a state-subsidised education, but because he did not attend Oxford or Cambridge he could not “reach the top.” The play had an almost uniformly bad press, but ran for 18 months. Osborne said, “The reviewers thought it a social outrage . . . but the people recognised it as something real, something that was happening to them.” Since then Osborne has protested, about royalty and politics (“Damn you England,” he wrote from the South of France in 1961), and has written the plays, ‘The Entertainer,” “Luther,” Epitaph for George Dillon,” “The World of Paul Slickey,” “Inadmissable Evidence” and “A Patriot For Me,” some of them highly praised.

DEFENDERS When his latest telegrams made the headlines —such as “Old Man of the Theatre Taking On the World Again”— some people rallied to Osborne's side.

Joanna offered her interpretation (“as an ordinary theatre-goer”): “The development of the megalomania which reaches proportions that prevent the rest of society leading any kind of life they might to live. But society is equally to blame because it bows to strength however evil. It does not use the mirror of evil to reappraise its own image and fight back; 400 years old and still valid.” The poet John Betjeman described the play as profound and the opening night as “tremendous, using that word not only as praise but

also in the sense that it left one trembling.” Long appreciative notices had appeared in the Sunday papers, he observed, because the critics had had time to digest the play. The playwright John Arden made an eloquent plea for a literary-history approach to criticism—the critics should have known and discussed de Vega, and the degree of Osborne’s adaptation.

TIME AND SPACE An overnight critic for five years, Laurence Kitebin reminded that space and time were the main enemies. “I remember with admiration the dedication of my colleagues and their anxiousness above all to be fair in the hurried exercises of their power,” he said. “Without them there would be nothing between the public and the pressures of theatre publicity.” Kitchin’s suggestion was that notices should be prepared at final rehearsal to be published on first night after further consideration (a system which the “New York Times” insists on) something that theatre and press always claimed the other would not tolerate.

T. C. Worsley, drama critic now concerned with the box, was delighted by the outburst:

It is so wonderfully characteristic in several different ways. Mr Osborne, not having been corrupted by a Public School education, is a stranger to the old-fashioned Roman virtues of stoicism and dignity, not to mention logic. When he is hurt, he howls, and his how! is heard aM the way to Fleet street. It Is charmingly childish, isn’t it? No-one has any right to do anything but love him—for we shall wait in vain to hear him rejecting from the housetops the priase that the Sundays lavished on his new play. He accepts that as his due. Then again his action reminds us that we are all liberals now except in the one area which affects us personally. Mr Osborne is a doughty champion of every liberal cause except one. He would fight (or anyhow howl) to the death to be allowed to print bis four-letter words. He roars (and quite rightly) against the illiberal censorship of the Lord Chamberlain over the theatre. But when it comes to the critics, his liberalism utterly deserts hltn. Them he would like suppressed. He really is a most delightful person.

Herbert Kretzmer (of the “Express”) returned the fire:

Osborne Is In a perpetual, petulant paddy about something. It must be very tiresome for him. Though he is far and way the best dramatist we have, he has not yet, as far as I know, attained the status of a divinity. Until he does ... I beg leave to approach him with something less than abject reverence. Osborne totally misconceives the function of a drama critic on a large national newspaper. We are not writing for posterity, or even next Christmas. We are writing for tomorrow morning, in terms that our readers can instantly understand. ... We write snort and we write fast. That is the system here. It may not be a perfect system, but it is the only one we’ve got and I don't see it changing. It works.

All John Osborne has the right to expect of a critic is that he is honest, that he doesn't feel an emotion in the theatre and then deny it in print, that he puts down as accurately and as sensibly as he can, without writing down to those who read him, what he has felt about a certain show on a certain night. The rest is none of Osbornes's business.

Irving Wardle (“The Times”), who was singled out for a personal attack (four page telegram) by Osborne, answered that he “would be happy to oblige if Osborne felt like a punch-up.” And a scholarly voice was heard from Cambridge, that of Professor E. M. Wilson, reminding that only very corrupt texts were available of the de Vaga source play, that it was doubtful authenticity, and although the Spanish Inquisition had belatedly included it in the Index in 1801, there were much better plays about converted bandits written in the period.

- A former Auckland pianist, Robert Walton, will play his own composition “Dream World” for piano and orchestra in his next broadcast for 8.8. C. radio next month. The work was written in Auckland in 1962.