Osborne, John (Vol. 1) - Osborne, John 1929–
Osborne, John 1929–
An award-winning British playwright, Osborne earned fame with his first play, Look Back in Anger. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13-14.)
Osborne … has but one song, and but one way of singing it. The Osborneman, who is both the singer and the song, the actor and the play, has billowed forth in a number of different disguises, his grievances modulated, and his responsibility for them reshuffled (that is how you tell one play from another); but Osborne has never bothered to devise a new rhetoric for him, or a new angle of vision.
However, what Osborne lacks in variety he can more than make up in intensity. Within the confines of his gunny sack he agitates like a religious sensitive. And he always plays it with feeling; an honest tradesman in a dirty stinking world.
What gives some slight movement to the surface doldrums of Osborne's work is the way his interpretation of the Osborneman...
[The entire page is 443 words long]
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