Osborne John Osborne Plays 2

The Entertainer; The Hotel in Amsterdam; West of Suez; Time Present
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30084-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

This second collection of John Osborne's dramatic work includes The Entertainer, The Hotel in Amsterdam, West of Suez and Time Present. 'A lifelong satirist of prigs and puritans, whether of the Right or Left, he took no hostages, expecting from other people the same unyielding, unflinching commitment to their view of the truth which he took for granted in his own. Of all the British playwrights of the twentieth century he is the one who risked the most. And risking most, frequently offered the most rewards.' David Hare, Spectator 'Osborne was an instinctive writer, but he had genius in his early years for capturing the national mood and conveying undiluted feeling... one wonders whether any of the bright new talents will have the courage to do what Osborne did in the past: to encapsulate on the tiny stage the state of the nation at large.' Guardian Praise for The Entertainer 'The rancid, dead-accurate domestic dialogue is a joy, with clichés dropping like bats from the ceiling... the play becomes a flamboyant coronach for England's lost greatness, enshrining one of the great characters in modern drama.' Daily Telegraph 'Like all Osborne's best work, this is a play about personal failure, individual desolation, the frustration of a community. One of the reasons why Osborne changed the face of English theatre is that he made passionate personal drama out of a national malaise.' Sunday Times

John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Osborne, John

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

‘Working with Devine at the Royal Court, I was forced to reassess my ideas. I changed my acting career just when it needed a shot in the arm. My career was becoming predictable, solid and rather dull … Archie leapt off the page at me and he had to be mine. I began to steep myself in the old music-hall tradition. It wasn’t too difficult because it was there in John’s play – that, and so many other things. The play was enormous, a huge canvas. The winds of change were there all right. I was in step with the new wave, in step and marching … I will always be grateful for those days and look back on them with affection. Archie Rice: there he stands in the bright spotlight, alone, laughless but smiling. A bowler hat, a cane, eyebrows, a gap in his teeth, and dead eyes …’

From On Acting, by Laurence Olivier

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Journalists insist that I wrote the part of Archie Rice in The Entertainer for Laurence Olivier, just as reference books have it that Look Back in Anger was originally titled On the Pier at Morecambe. These dumb speculations have a way of perpetuating themselves as fact. The true record may not be of much account but it is hard to justify tampering with it.

One evening in the autumn of 1956, I went on my own to the Chelsea Palace. Max Miller was on the bill. Waiting for him to come on, I watched an act, the highlight of which was an impersonation of Charles Laughton playing Quasimodo. I had seen it before. A smoky green light swirled over the stage and an awesome banality prevailed for some theatrical seconds, the drama and poetry, the belt and braces of music-hall holding up epic. This, the critics would later tell me, was the Brechtian influence on the play.

Music-hall was on its last legs but there were still a few halls in and around London for me to visit, not yet quite defeated by grey, front parlour television. I made notes for the play. I knew I was on to the problem – remembering George Devine’s dictum that all problems were technical ones – and I was even confident enough to give it a title. I’d been listening to a record by a trumpet-player called Bunk Johnson. He was something of a legend, whose reputation had been revived by a few enthusiasts who had found him working in the Deep South as a truck driver, old and forgotten. They bought him a new set of teeth and he made a short comeback. One of the tunes he recorded was an old Scott Joplin number, ‘The Entertainer’. It was graceful and touching and seemed apt for the play.

Sometime in early February 1957, George telephoned me. He was meticulous about not hectoring writers and so I was surprised when he asked, ‘How’s the play going, dear boy?’ ‘All right.’ ‘How far have you got?’ This was most unlike him. He knew my powers of evasion. ‘Oh, I’ve finished the second act. Almost.’ ‘I see. I hate to ask, but something’s just come up. I don’t suppose you can tell me if there’s a part in it for Laurence?’ ‘Laurence who?’ ‘Olivier.’

George persuaded me against all his practice. ‘Would you mind awfully if I asked you to let me have the first two acts?’ Believing us both wrong, I agreed. Olivier’s response was immediate and astonishing. He wanted to play Billy Rice, Archie’s father. Letting him read just two acts had confused everyone. A week later I rang Tony Richardson, the director, and told him I had finished. ‘Read me the last page,’ he said, and I mumbled Archie’s last speech down the telephone to his final line, which Olivier found incomprehensible and made devastating. ‘Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night – and I’ll come and see YOU.’ It was to be Olivier’s face but, I hoped, my voice – possibly my own epitaph.

At the beginning of 1957, the muddle of feeling about Suez and Hungary, implicit in The Entertainer, was so overheated that the involvement of Olivier in the play seemed as dangerous as exposing the Royal Family to politics. There was some relief that an international event could arouse such fierce, indeed theatrical responses, with lifetime readers cancelling the Observer and rallies and abuse everywhere. The season was open for hunting down deceivers and self-deceivers. A special meeting of the English Stage Company was convened to make a decision about the production of The Entertainer at the Royal Court. Left and Right became allies. Olivier was an undisputed coup, but an embarrassment also. It was decided to drop the play.

Neville Blond, the Chairman of the ESC and its Council, was a Manchester textile magnate and sometime government adviser on transatlantic trade. His wife, Elaine, was a Marks & Spencer heiress. The pair of them promptly issued an invitation to Council members for lunch at their flat in Orchard Court to discuss the matter. Over the next few years I attended a few parties at Orchard Court, a gloomy mausoleum block behind elaborate wrought ironwork near Selfridges. These were sumptuous spreads given in the manner of a Christmas party for servants and tenant farmers. Mrs Blond would itemize the value of the pictures on the walls and the price per yard for the upholstery. We were not expected to stay long. On that first occasion, she told the Council, ‘You’d be barmy not to do the play. With Olivier wanting to act in it!’ ‘You see,’ said Neville, less stridently, ‘we owe it to the boy.’ In the event, George Harewood’s casting vote carried the day. The Entertainer would go ahead.

Lord Chamberlain’s Office,
St James’s Palace, SW1
20th March, 1957

Sir,

The Entertainer

I am desired by the Lord Chamberlain to write to you regarding the above Play and to ask for an undertaking that the following alterations will be made:–

Any alterations or substitutions should be submitted for approval.

Yours faithfully,

Assistant Controller.

The ESC, the Council and the Lord Chamberlain were contained and we were in business. It was too late for reservations or quibbling. Olivier had to fit Archie in during April for five weeks before his summer commitment to Titus Andronicus. The opening was announced and within a few days every seat for the short season had been sold. I was anxious that Olivier should not be tempted into the snare of making Archie funny. It would have been an understandable mistake for an actor unused to little less than worship. As it was, people perpetuated the myth that the character was based on Max Miller. Archie was a man all right and one which most people, especially maidenly middle class reviewers, found unfamiliar and despicable. What could possibly be interesting to the civilized sensibility in the spectacle of a third-rate comic writhing in a dying profession?

Max Miller was a god, certainly to me, a saloon bar Priapus. Archie never got away with anything. Life cost him dearly, always. When he came on, the audience was immediately suspicious or indifferent. Archie’s cheek was less than ordinary. Max didn’t have to be nauseatingly lovable like Chaplin. His humanity was in his sublime sauce, Archie’s in his hollow desperation. Max got fined £5 for giving them one from the Blue Book and the rest of the world laughed with him. Archie would have got six months and no option.

Olivier took this point from the outset. We all paid visits to the remaining London halls. The Chelsea Palace, the Met in Edgware Road and Collins’ in Islington were all about to be swept away. When I wrote that the music-hall was dying, I hadn’t been aware that the bulldozers and iron balls were poised quite so close to home. I was especially keen that we should go a few times to Collins’, where I had witnessed some of the worst acts imaginable. We missed a Scots comedian called Jack Radcliffe who did a very eerie deathbed scene. I thought the spectacle of a ‘dying’ comic in a sketch about death performed to an almost comatose audience would help an actor who could hardly have witnessed such a farewell to hope and dignity, let alone taken part in it. We did see a more robust act by a Cockney, Scott Sanders, whose signature tune was ‘Rolling round the world, waiting for the sunshine and hoping things will turn out right’, which he played on a series of pots and pans hanging on a barrow. He was loud, brisk, seldom funny and looked as if he knew it, hurtling through his act hoarsely before retreating to the pub next door. ‘Why have you got that lemon stuck in your ear?’ ‘You’ve heard of the man with the hearing aid? Well, I’m the one with the lemonade.’

One of Olivier’s central problems was to persuade audiences that such poetic awfulness could be authentic. The pressure of time was no bad thing and we threw ourselves into what was a unique venture for everyone. Soon, though, there were disturbing rumours about the domestic life of Olivier and Vivien Leigh. I was not privy to this, although I hoped that they were not true for the selfish reason of safeguarding my play and protecting it from prurient interest in Britain’s most famous and near-royal couple, which would surely divert attention from what was happening in the theatre itself. Vivien’s watchful presence at rehearsals was the most dangerous threat to the production’s progress and everyone was aware of it. She always sat quickly and quietly, occasionally asking her chauffeur for a light, intent on Olivier. It was,...