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

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JOHN SIMON

John Osborne's A Patriot for Me is about as unnecessary a play as I have ever seen. (p. 218)

Altogether, Osborne is a perfect example of a playwright who voices the mood of a particular moment in history: Look Back in Anger was, to a degree, the expression of English working-class anger against the upper classes, which at last could be reviled with impunity. But it was even more the venting of a self-destructive rage such as overtakes a country that sees itself fallen from political eminence to feeding on memories. And to men too young to have lived them, such memories become a source of especial irritation. Osborne had not so much written a play as tapped a vein.

But there was something that he genuinely possessed: a gift for raillery, invective, lacerating tirades whose victims could be anyone or anything, and whose power, though rhetorical rather than dramatic, could nevertheless buffet the stage. When the time of heroes and...

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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