"Is That All There Is?"

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I thought it was horrible, even then. Deep misogyny disguised as progressive politics.

- The Entertainer, on the other hand, was a much better piece. (And, if Colonel Redl is any indication, A Patriot for Me is, too.)

I had never read that passage you quote until now, but it doesn't surprise me in the least.

Toxic, wasn't it. And the sense (to me, at any rate) that it was written with a view to being posthumously published - like the Larkin diaries, the impotence of the man spending itself in gleeful contemplation of upsetting future generations.

[Tetrachord]

Osborne obviously thinks that's "all there is"!!

[greenilex]

I was just of an age to find the Angry YM inspiring. We missed the misogyny because all the men post WW2 were behaving weirdly about women, and influencing the free love age-group that immediately followed them. When I say all, please don't assume I mean you in particular.

[Serial_Apologist]

Osborne obviously thinks that's "all there is"!!

[jean]

I was just of an age to find the Angry YM inspiring. We missed the misogyny because all the men post WW2 were behaving weirdly about women, and influencing the free love age-group that immediately followed them...

It was when we spotted the misogyny, and realised that 'free love' meant freedom for men to sleep with any women they fancied and no freedom at all for the women to say no that second-wave feminism was born.

[Conchis]

To call Osborne a deeply complex and damaged person would be an understatement but I don't think the labels that are nowadays routinely pinned on him - mysogenist, homophobe, reactionary, etc, etc, - quite fit. If he'd been a genuine mysogenist, I doubt that the wonderful theatre critic Helen Dawson would have been happily married to him for the last seventeen years of his life. And if he'd been genuinely homophobic, he could not have written A Patriot For Me - which, I'd argue, is the finest play ever written with a homosexual protagonist as well as the most humane. It's got a huge cast so we're unlikely to see another stage production anytime soon, but I'd urge everyone who hasn't read the published text to do so.

Osborne's behaviour toward his own daughter - whom he threw out of his house when she was fifteen - was even more bizarre and reprehensible: he wrote a long, bitter and angry note casting her out from his life, which is reproduced in full in John Heilpern's excellent biography, A Patriot For Us. Her 'crime' was to be ordinary and not to share his interests - but again, you need to read the whole story to have a hope of understanding.

I find his work very inconsistent indeed - Look Back...works as a jeu d'esprit, but I think The Entertainer is a hopeless, saggy mess, containing a few, great 'set piece' speeches. Luther is an effective historical play, which makes the case for the founder of Protestantism as the first 'AYM'. Inadmissible Evidence can work as a vehicle for a virtuoso actor, but I don't think there's anyone alive today who could do it justice. ....Patriot...is a work of genius, as I've said, but after that, it gets very patchy indeed. No play of his since A Hotel In Amsterdam has had a revival - the last twenty-five years or so of his career was very bleak indeed.

[Tetrachord]

I wonder if, in those last bleak years, Osborne ever asked himself, "is that all there is to being a playwright"? It seemed there was much much more to actually being a human being!!

[Conchis]

I wonder if, in those last bleak years, Osborne ever asked himself, "is that all there is to being a playwright"? It seemed there was much much more to actually being a human being!!

His last years sound very bleak indeed: in massive debt to the Inland Revenue (he'd somehow avoided paying tax for his most prosperous years) and with a dwindling income, trying (and failing) to flog his papers to American universities, trying to set up lecture tours, applying for help from the Royal Literary Fund, finally scanning late night teletext for jobs he might do..even at the grand old age of 60-odd. Harsh.