John Heilpern
John Osborne.
Knopf, 527 pages, $35
In this biography of John Osborne, John Heilpern presents with depth and complexity the life of one of England’s so-called Angry Young Men. The term describes a set of loosely affiliated writers in the 1950s—including Osborne, Kingsley Amis, and Alan Sillitoe—whose characters rebelled against the society around them. It was Osborne’s first successful play, Look Back in Anger, that gave rise to the phrase.
Look Back opened on May 8, 1956, and was immediately attacked by British critics. Endorsements from the Observer and The Sunday Times temporarily saved the production from extinction, though they still weren’t strong enough to vault Look Back to successful ticket revenues. The play’s target audience—those between the ages of twenty and thirty—was not a group that commonly patronized the theater. It was not until the BBC aired an eighteen-minute snippet of Look Back that the show took off, establishing John Osborne as one of Britain’s most talented contemporary playwrights.
Heilpern affirms a standard interpretation of Look Back as reflecting Osborne’s first failed marriage (which was followed by four others). Mary McCarthy compared it to Hamlet with Jimmy Porter as the Danish prince, his close friend Cliff as Horatio, and Jimmy’s wife, Alison, as the victimized Ophelia.
The language in at least four of Osborne’s plays was toned down by censors in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Lord Chamberlain flirted with rejecting a license to The World of Paul Slickey