Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Osborne, John (Vol. 11) - John Lahr

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JOHN LAHR

Osborne's craft has always been overrated. His ability to manage plot and invent startling stage images is marginal; his language, that brute verbal overkill which sizzled the '50's and early '60's has turned from taut, sometimes beautiful explosions of rancorous poetry to more theatrical badinage in the last decade. All his texts suffer from a literary sloppiness which mirrors his own intellectual disarray. His adaptation [of The Picture of Dorian Gray] isn't so much 'executed' as excreted. Osborne had an opportunity to bring new theatrical life to a tale whose longeurs and elusiveness put the vehicle into disrepair even as a novel. But just to red-pencil the novel as he does and then mount it on stage is to turn the theatre into a library instead of a playing area. Epigrams are dramatic events on the page; but on stage, they pall without the counterpoint of action. Reading Wilde's novel requires at least one's eyes are open. The stage adaptation...

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1. Introduction
2. John Simon
3. John Simon
4. John Lahr
5. Andrew K. Kennedy
6. E. G. Bierhaus, Jr.
7. Lawrence R. Ries
8. Copyright