Osborne, John 1929–

Osborne, an award-winning British playwright, is the author of Look Back in Anger, as well as Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, and The Entertainer. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13-14.)

[Osborne's] plays are essentially emotional and dramatic statements that apply far beyond the realm of a particular time and place. Osborne's first play to be produced, Look Back in Anger …, is less a play about the rebellion of the educated young man of the lower classes against current society than a play about what it means to give and receive love….

Osborne's The Entertainer (1957) is also more a dramatic and emotional statement than an analysis of the decline of the English music-hall tradition…. The whole play is a fabric of … emotional destructions: Archie and his wife, Archie and his father, the father and Archie's wife. Certainly, all these destructions are made more...

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