Osborne, John James

Osborne, John James (1929–94), playwright, who made his name with Look Back in Anger (1956, pub. 1957), which was followed by Epitaph for George Dillon (1957, pub. 1958; written in the mid-1950s in collaboration with Anthony Creighton); The Entertainer (1957, which starred Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, a faded survivor of the great days of music hall); Luther (1961, based on the life of Martin Luther); Inadmissible Evidence (1964, the tragedy of a down-at-heel solicitor, Bill Maitland, plunging rhetorically towards self-destruction); and A Patriot for Me (1965, set in Vienna, based on the rise and fall of Redl, a homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian army). His later works (which include West of Suez, 1971; A Sense of Detachment, 1972; Watch it Come Down, 1976; and Déjavu, 1992, a sequel to Look Back in Anger) became increasingly vituperative in tone; his outbursts of rage against contemporary society frequently exhilarating, for the anger that made him known as an ‘Angry Young Man’ remained one of his strongest theatrical weapons, but he also expressed from time to time an ambivalent nostalgia for the past that his own work did so much to alter. His autobiography A Better Class of Person appeared in 1981 and Damn You, England, a collection of reviews and other pieces, in 1994. (See also kitchen sink.)