In 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger exploded across the English stage with intense anger in a bitter indictment of modern British life. A mixture of despair and black humor were contained in the attacks on humanity, social classes, politics, economics, and the educational system leveled by Jimmy Porter, the drama's main character. Jimmy's expressions of wrath were frequently indiscriminate and overwhelming. While he attempted to expose his wife to the realities and meanings of life so that she would be moved out of her complacency, the underlying hurt which motivated Jimmy's actions was so massive that it controlled him as often as he controlled it.

For a quarter of a century critics have classified Look Back in Anger as one of the turning points in the history of twentieth-century English theatre. They have pointed to Osborne's choice of topics, his working-class characters, the realistic language, setting and situations which characterize the play, and which have influenced a generation of playwrights. Look Back in Anger is both a good play and an important one. In spite of all the acclaim, however, it is not great, nor is it as thoroughly innovative as has been claimed. What does raise it above its predecessors is its emotional power, an emotional power that is so strong that it almost serves as a substructure. And it is clear that mis emotion surges forth out of Osborne's own experiences and being.

Between 1956 and 1965, when A Patriot for Me was produced, Osborne wrote seven dramas, a teleplay, and three filmscripts. Many of the topics found in Look Back in Anger are dealt with in these works, but the quality, power, and vigor of the anger steadily declines. The studied seriousness of the themes in A Patriot for Me and their treatment suggest a cool detachment in Osborne's approach to his material by this time.

A Patriot for Me was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London on June 30, 1965. For five years the Lord Chamberlain had refused to license the play for public performance unless certain cuts and alterations were made and Osborne refused, so the play was staged by the English Stage Society "by arrangement" with the English Stage Company as a club production which placed it outside the Lord Chamberlain's jurisdiction.¹ The question of censorship is important, for once again Osborne explores territory heretofore avoided in the British theatre: homosexuality. Whether this topic is really what the play is about, or whether it is used as a means of expressing a more significant theme is another question.

The plot is simple, though Osborne's revelation of his main theme is so distended that the audience feels that they are caught in the midst of a film co-directed by Antonioni and Fellini in which no one is quite sure what is going on (and they are not involved enough to care to find out). In Act I Alfred Redi's homosexuality is gradually exposed. In Act II he is faced with the consequences of his sexual preference and he is seen trying to function in several social situations. In Act III society forces him to commit suicide.

Despite this simple plot, critics have not come to a consensus of opinion, other than the common complaint that the play is vaguely "unsatisfactory."² But when looking at the play in retrospect and in the context of Osborne's later works, certain meanings do become clear. For example, the lengthy exposition of the homosexuality theme allows the dramatist to demonstrate who is involved in such activities, and how they are involved, and it permits him to point out how difficult it is to tell who is homo-sexual. At the same time that all levels of society are presented, the importance of the establishment is emphasized throughout Act I so that when the Baron's drag ball is presented in Act II, Osborne is striking at the very heart of society.

The first clue of Redi's homosexuality appears when he serves as Siczynski's second at the duel with von Kupper, who has called Siczynski "Fräulein Rothschild."³ The theme of the death of characters who do not fit into society in Osborne's later works is established early in this play when von Kupper kills his homosexual opponent easily and mercilessly. Similarly, there is a forewarning of Redl's end implied in Siczynski's observation "you're not what they call sociable" (p. 18) by the juxtaposition of these elements. Later, Redi will admit to the Countess Delyanoff that he has never confided in anyone, that the only ones he might have trusted "were killed" (p. 58). Since von Kupper has accused Siczinski of homosexuality, and since the implication is that Siczinski, having died in Redl's arms, is one with whom Redl could have discussed his problem, it may be assumed that homosexuality is the secret which Redl is trying to hide. Ironically, Redl's inclinations are so obvious that even a stranger in a café recognizes them: "I know what you're looking for" (p. 67). It has been suggested that Redl's "failure is one of self-awareness," and that he does not know of his homosexual nature until the climax of Act I,⁴ but this seems unlikely. The point of the play does not revolve around Redl's "self-discovery" so much as it does around his attempts to avoid exposure. After all, half of the drama takes place after the revelation occurs. Moreover, there is very little feeling of inner conflict over his sexuality. Instead, what dominates is his fear of being found out as a homosexual, a spy, or both, as he acknowledges to Oblensky (p. 114). Redl's "stricken" look in the café confrontation is a result of his realization that he can no longer hide, and the audience becomes privy to what has been bothering him in the very next scene.

In A Patriot for Me Osborne's concern is more with society than, as in his earlier plays, with an individual's plight. Redi is an individual, certainly, but his problem is symptomatic of a larger set of circumstances that have a broad, impersonal application. This determines and simultaneously grows out of the dramatist's techniques. Osborne states in a program note for the play's premiere that "The story… is true." The drama's historical basis limits the author. As with his literary adaptations, the result is not as forceful as when he works with his own premises. The locale and time of the play (Austria and Hungary between 1890 and 1913) create a distancing effect which produces less emotional content than in his preceding plays. This is reinforced by the sense of a detached observer, perhaps a carry-over of the technique employed in Inadmissable Evidence (performed the previous year). The audience is not presented with the protagonist's point of view, as was the case with Jimmy; Redl is characterized through other people's eyes. And it is not the prototypical Osborne hero who emerges. In some ways A Patriot for Me is a one-man play, but Redl is not another Jimmy. Dashing, attractive, sometimes warm, he is described by Colonel von Möhl as overpowering and forceful because of his disciplined character (pp. 51-52), though members of the Baron's party and Oblensky (p. 97) have different opinions. Like Jimmy, Redl comes from the working class: he is the eighth of eleven children, and his father was a second grade railway clerk. Unlike Jimmy, he tries to escape his heritage and/or his sexuality through hard work. He is extremely successful at the War College, and the Baron and Kunz comment that he throws himself into his work in order to change his circumstances (p. 82), which may apply to both situations. His sister's death does not move him (he thought about it for ten minutes). He is naturally reticent, and instead of imposing his personality on those around him, à la Jimmy, he tries to hide his true self. Still, his willingness to commit suicide with the pistol given him by his superiors is not to avoid the issue of being a traitor in the service of the Russians, but as the ultimate expression of his individualism.

Redl finally does make Jimmy-like statements, but they do not come until his Act III monologs when he berates his ex-lover's wife, his current lover, and Spanish society. The monolog technique is not utilized in the first two acts because Osborne is too involved in establishing the character of the society to explore his protagonist's character. A combination of other techniques and the play's meaning prevent a clearer picture of Redl from developing. The coup de théàtre ball scene, the humor ("Queen Victoria was quite clearly a man"—p. 83), the parallel between the scientific gobbledygook of the pseudo-Freudian, anti-homosexual Dr. Schoepfer (Act II, scene 2) and the crazy Mischa's ramblings (Act III, scene 3) contribute little to an understanding of Redl, for instance. The abundant sensory images (the smell of peppermints, the foul tasting mouths, the sounds of different characters walking, of music, of crowd noises, and of love-making) keep the audience physically aware, yet except for Redl's moans and his reactions to light during sexual activity, they provide scant information that will lead to insights into his character. Further complicating the issue are the inordinate number of parts (92), and the swift movement through twenty-three scenes. Osborne may have improved his techniques for dealing with peripheral characters and creating realistic social milieux, but the delineation of Redl suffers. Shakespeare was able to impart an immense amount of information about his characters by quickly shifting from scene to scene (as with Hal and Hotspur); Osborne's episodic treatment seems to be an experimental attempt to recreate the effect of cinematic structure through rapid jump cuts between public and private scenes. Unfortunately, his talent for strong portrayals of his protagonists is diluted in the process.

In spite of the critics' consternation over this turn of events, it is obvious that Osborne has chosen this path purposefully, and that he has accomplished what he set out to do. Because his concern is for society in A Patriot for Me (by definition "patriot" refers to society), his attention to the individual must perforce be diminished. In fact, too fully-developed a protagonist would destroy the drama's effectiveness because homosexuality is not the subject of this play; it merely serves as a metaphor. The protagonist's personal troubles are symbolically inter-locked with a diseased society. Actually, homosexuality becomes equated with more than just a corrupt society; it is also related to power and to the decay of civilization. Osborne's presentation leads to the conclusion that Redl's world picture is not of a "deviant subculture"—it is the world.⁵ Two characters in the play make observations that support this thesis. First, Kunz replies to the Countess' ironic "I can't think of anything more admirable than not having to play a part" by saying, "We all play parts" (p. 49). Second, the Baron interprets the gay life at his ball (and presumably of the world) with the prophetic announcement "We are none of us safe" (p. 77), an early sounding of the themes of uncertainty and frustration that dominate the later plays.

Oblensky's role is a key to understanding the play, for it is through him that the audience becomes aware of certain things. For instance, he reads aloud the love letter to the Countess in which Redl complains, "This is a difficult time" (p. 62). A commentary on the faltering love affair, this also reflects the general Angst suffered by a goalless, decadent society. In the third act meeting during which Redl is reprimanded for initiating the arrest of one of Oblensky's best agents, the espionage officer states, "It isn't any fun having no clear idea of the future is it? And you can't re-make your past" (p. 114).

Many critics have been unsure how the title and the drama are related, even though Osborne explains the title in the program note mentioned above. His explanation is straightforward and enlightening: "It was the Emperor Francis II who first used the term 'A Patriot For Me'. One day, when a distinguished servant of the Empire was recommended to him for special notice, his sponsor re-marked that he was a staunch and loyal patriot. The old Emperor looked up sharply: 'Ah! But is he a patriot for me?' The Hapsburgs… were not interested in German patriotism… they were interested only in Imperial patriotism." As with many of Osborne's allusions, there seems to be no direct application of this story to the play. But the words, with the emphasis on "me," suit Redl perfectly. His loyalty is not to a society into which he does not fit, his friends, his fellow-officers, his religion, or his country—his loyalty is to himself. He is his own patriot and object of patriotism. The social element in Redl's death is underscored by the fact that representatives of society supply him with the instrument of death, and the final scene, in which Oblensky examines Dr. Schoepfer's dossier in the same way that he did Redl's in Act I, indicates that everything will continue as before. Society is willing to exploit both sides to gain its own ends.

There is a paradox in the need to use an individual to show the workings of society. When an individual places loyalty to self above loyalty to society, society destroys the individual in an automatic self-protective response. That Redl dies because he does not fit looks forward to West of Suez and Watch It Come Down.

Between the premiere of A Patriot for Me and today, Osborne has continued his prolific output. Eleven new stage dramas, including adaptations of Lope de Vega's La Fianza Satisfecha (as A Bond Honoured), Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabier, and Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, a "reworking" of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (as A Place Calling Itself Rome), six tele-plays, two filmscripts, and numerous newspaper and journal articles have appeared.

The two most notable features of this list are the increased number of plays written for television, and Osborne's interest in literary subjects. As might be expected, this interest is reflected in the themes of the plays he wrote during the same period. Moreover, his characters typically are involved in filmmaking, television, or writing, and literary allusions are abundant. Interestingly, as these elements become more important in Osborne's writing, there is a corresponding diminishment in emotional impact and in his characters' vitality. It is as though he has adopted the nonchalance and emotional sterility of Look Back in Anger's Helena. Gratification has replaced antagonism as the operative motivation.

In two of Osborne's more recent major plays, though—West of Suez and Watch It Come Down—a new ingredient is apparent, and it is clear that there has been another shift in the perspective out of which Osborne writes, as fear for the future evolves as his main concern. This shift is especially significant when the emotion that underlies Look Back in Anger is compared with these two dramas, for the emotions are opposites. Two minor dramas which signal this transition both opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1968. Time Present (first performed on May 23) and The Hotel in in Amsterdam (first performed on July 3) stand between A Patriot for Me and West of Suez in terms of both content and technique.

Time Present is really not much more than an extended character sketch. Pamela is in some ways just another Jimmy. She can be cruel, telling Constance that "perhaps" she meant to upset her,⁶ and announcing that she has turned down "better" people, but she is not as vital as Jimmy is. Possibly this is because her posturing precedes her father's death.

Pamela, whose long-lasting love affair ended the previous year, has moved into Constance's apartment. The differences between the two roommates' furnishings provide the first clues to Pamela's character. Constance, a Member of Parliament, has decorated the apartment with modern, straight-lined Scandinavian furniture. In contrast with Constance's neatness, the untidy Pamela has cluttered the room with relics from her actor father's past: a wall poster features him in the role of Macbeth and a faded production photograph of him in Shakespearean costume stands on the table.

In an awkward exposition, the kind that a Harold Pinter avoids at all costs, Osborne provides more information about Pamela through dialogs between her mother, Edith, and her younger sister, Pauline, before his protagonist appears on stage. Physically, while Pamela is attractive, she is not pretty; like her father, she is a talented performer; her relationship with her mother is not close (they are not even "friends"), but she and her father are quite close. Further details evolve out of the contrasts between Pamela and Constance or Pauline.

The theme of the play is simple, too simple perhaps. Pamela needs, but is unable to respond to others. "I believe in love," she says, "Just because I don't know how to doesn't mean I don't" (p. 28). Constance, too, observes that "You need love more than anyone I've ever known" (p. 72). But Pamela rejects her closest friends. "Look after Murray," she tells Constance, and Murray, Constance's lover and the father of Pamela's unborn child, is dismissed in favor of an abortionist's services.

Pamela is unable to accept her friends' love because she is living in time present. Osborne includes an excerpt from Ecclesiastes as an epigraph in the printed version of the play: "A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to get and a time to lose: a time to keep and a time to cast away." Unfortunately, Pamela is not capable of moving from time to time. More appropriate for her are the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton": "Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ and time future contained in time past." Clearly, Pamela is not an existential heroine. In some ways a familiar Osborne character, isolated and antagonistic, she chooses not to adjust to a changing world. Pauline, who is involved in the drug culture, hippie mentality of the mid-1960' s, states, "Your scene is really out" (p. 25). Pamela, noting that she and her sister are not close and know very little about one another (which she sees as "no loss"—p. 22), replies, "Just like my father." And this is the key to the play, of course. Pamela is not trapped so much in her own past as she is influenced by her father's past. Her relationship with her father is symbolized in his chosen name. Born Tristram Prosser, Pamela's father, unlike Pamela, tried to escape his past and his Welsh heritage by adopting the name Giddeon Orme.⁷ For Pamela the significance of the surname may lie in the components or/me—which complete her identification with her father. In Pamela's vision, Sir Giddeon's prime was during an era of class and taste, and she finds herself unfit to compromise with the vulgar, modern world that surrounds her. As a rejoinder to her sister's criticism she says, "It's impossible to argue with someone wearing such cheap clothes" (p. 25).

Time is important in this play. Constance asserts, "Time is in short supply in the present" (p. 33). Pamela suggests that "we should keep it in its place. Whenever we can. Just because we can't win." But in fact she is paralyzed by time. It is significant that while she is thirty-four, she contradictorily admits to being both twenty-six and twenty-nine. The great irony is that the present in which she is trying to live is actually already past.

Time Present is the first of Osborne's plays which look back not in anger but nostalgically. In an interview Osborne has said "the theatre as I know it… has probably got a limited life… the literate theatre of words and rounded psychological characterization is a decadent art form." He goes on to say, however, that he intends to continue writing for the stage, and it may be herein lie the seeds of his lack of success with this drama. Pamela's world is much narrowed from Redl's; hers is a stage, and she speaks of it in terms of "timing." Her concern is with a style of life. She is not motivated by a workingclass consciousness, economics, or politics, and her resultant calm detachment is the reverse of Jimmy's. This is true of the supporting characters in the play, too. Pamela speaks bitingly and bitterly about a competing actress, Abigail, but when Abigail appears, the confrontation is anything but dramatic. Pamela's foils are not fully realized as characters; they are straw men, and consequently Pamela herself never quite comes to life as a character. The play lacks the energy and enthusiasm of Look Back in Anger. It is too cerebral. Redl is less abrasive and less funny than Jimmy, and the characters in Time Present are still further removed from life. Indeed, one of the most important presences in the play never appears on stage. In Act I Sir Giddeon is already in the hospital dying; in Act III he has been dead for several weeks.

Even the generation gap is not seriously considered. Pauline is a caricature. Her philosophy of life is not meant to be taken as an alternative to Pamela's lifestyle. She is too foolish, and the slang which fills her speech and delineates her as a representative of time future was the play date out of date when the play was mounted in 1968.⁸ Of course, this may be part of Osborne's course, this even may the be part future is becoming the past. Ultimately, the audience does not feel for Pamela, though the problem of how to avoid her fate has been raised.

Osborne's style interferes with the effectiveness of the drama, too. His writing has become more ostentatious and obvious, and the repetitive pattern in his phrasing seems artificial. For example, "He is, he is dying" (p. 19) and "my own, my own walls" (p. 59) probably do not carry the intensity of emotion intended. So, also, is it with the use of literary and political allusions. Although there is some reflection of the characters in their names and their references to Addison (p. 43) and Vietnam (p. 27), the allusions lend as much to building a cultural milieu as they do to an understanding of the immediate situation. Actually, at times it appears that the inclusion of a reference for its own sake is at least as important as the associations connected with it.

As Osborne proceeds from this point, death, the arts, homosexuality, and related topics become more and more central in his writing. In relation to these subjects the past becomes increasingly important. The plays are set in the past, or the characters are linked to a past in such a way that they are somehow out of joint with the present. And this lack of connection with the present is reenforced by the foreign element: the characters were born abroad (Pamela in India) or the play takes place in a foreign setting as though to reiterate that Osborne's protagonists are not at home in today's England.

In The Hotel in Amsterdam the characters are again greatly influenced by an off-stage presence, and while they are a part of the art world of modern London, they have tried to escape both, in this case by fleeing to a foreign locale. This play is a little more thematically complex than Time Present, though, and it is also more entertaining. In large part this is due to Osborne's better handling of his characters.

The situation is minimal. A group of three married couples takes a long weekend vacation together in Amsterdam as a means of escaping their boss, the movie producer referred to only by his initials, K. L. These characters are different from Osborne's earlier ones. Stylish, well-to-do, fortyish intelligentsia, they come together for a chance to reaffirm what is valuable in their lives—the need for and the enjoyment of the others in their small group. As Laurie, the most articulate, witty, and vocal member of the gathering notes, "it's not natural. It's bloody unnatural. How often do you get people so different as we all are still all together all friends and who all love each other" (p. 98). This sentiment is immediately undercut by Annie's parody of a Barbra Streisand song ("people who need people are the ghastliest people in the world"), but this is done in a Noel Cowardish manner which looks forward to West of Suez. In fact, these characters are relatively well-adjusted, and while Laurie, Osborne's new hero, contains some of Jimmy's self-pity, he is also affectionate and able to express his feelings for his friends. The invective is missing.

Almost no dramatic action takes place on stage; this is because the group is a collection of talkers, and their topics do not lend themselves to action. As Annie comments, "I can tell you what everyone will do—just talk. About what to do, where to go, what we should wear" (p. 114). Even if the social commentary and class consciousness of Look Back in Anger were present, these people would not do anything about them. Their targets are comparatively insignificant: the Welsh, Japanese, and Americans, travel, mothers, homosexuality, sex (with a Freudian linking of mothers and rape), sleep, the generation gap, the pill. When class differences are mentioned, it is only in passing (p. 90). The characters are too concerned with having escaped their "monster" of a boss for several days and with congratulating themselves for having done so.

The combination of escape and congratulatory motifs is an interesting one. Very early in Act I it is made clear that the characters are, indeed, escaping (p. 89), and this theme is repeated throughout the drama. They are sure that K. L. will be amazed at their "naughtiness" (p. 93). Yet Margaret's contention that "Here we are congratulating ourselves on escaping from him and we've hardly stopped talking about him" (p. 94) is so obvious that it really does not need to be stated. And in Act II, after having been in Amsterdam for two days, Gus's "we really have had quite a time" (p. 121) has a hollow ring. The continual restatement sounds too much as though everyone is trying to confirm or to convince everyone else that this is true. There is an amusing and revealing parallel in Laurie's joke that only an annual notice of one's birthday in the London Times is confirmation of one's existence (p. 102).

The Hotel in Amsterdam is a slice of life. A very special kind of life, to be sure, but a slice of life nonetheless, and it is the differences between the characters and their interactions that make this so. In general each has a personality (perhaps the mixture represents civilized society: e. g., Dan is from a working-class background, Gus is slow but solid). At the same time, the group dynamics, the give and take, the supportiveness are elements which flesh out the play and simultaneously demonstrate Osborne's advance in characterization. The reality of their situation and their exchanges are more vital than the posturing in Time Present. These people do not play roles when they are together in the way that they do for K. L., according to Gus (p. 93), and thus they come closer to self-knowledge and to knowing each other than do any characters in Osborne's work since Inadmissable Evidence. This extends so far as the perceptive Gus' recognizing that K. L. may be an indispensable linkage in their relationships (p. 117). The irony is that the group is defined by its exclusion of K. L. The double irony is that K. L. apparently needed them. "Where would K. L. be" without his writer and editor, Laurie asks facetiously (p. 100). Apparently the answer is that without his friends he is dead. When K. L. commits suicide, it is with the knowledge that the group is gone and cannot save him, unlike the sham suicide staged by Margaret's younger sister, Gillian.

The ending is melodramatic; the climax does not fit. There have been vague comments about K. L.'s vulnerability and reliance on the group, but they have been countered by the group's words and actions. The tragedy at the end of the drama seems tacked on, separate from the rest of the play. One critic suggests that the conclusion serves as a warning rather than a prophecy of disintegration, the unconsummated love avowed by Annie and Laurie as a potential for reneval which is undercut by the ending.¹⁰ But what if Osborne's point is that K. L. died because he was not supported? In the final analysis, however, K. L.'s death may be nothing more than exposing the audience to the senseless violence that marks West of Suez and Watch It Come Down. It may also be an indication that Osborne did not know how to end this play effectively.

Stylistically The Hotel in Amsterdam does incorporate some interesting developments. The monologs are snorter, wittier, and less vindictive than previously. More important, though, is Osborne's use of language. Words themselves are important, as evidenced by the characters' concern with Dutch and Laurie's "Italian." Osborne's attempts to reproduce banal, everyday conversation, with some wit thrown in for characterization (in spite of Laurie's sophomoric humor—El Fag Airlines and the Golden Sanitary Towel Presentation), emphasizes the slice of life surface of the play. A limited optimism may be found in the presence of Constance, a successful representative of modern society, on stage as Time Present closes, and Laurie's curtain line that the group probably will not return to Amsterdam, "But I expect we might go somewhere else" (p. 143), offers the possibility of a similar gathering. But there is a touch of sinister irony in the fact that these extremely verbal characters frequently resort to vulgarities. This use of vulgar language in the mouths of cultured and sophisticated people is more than an example of the liberating effect of the ending of the Licensing Act; it is an early psychological signal of the evolving fear which will permeate West of Suez.

A Sense of Detachment, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre on December 4, 1972, has largely been ignored by the critics, and rightly so. Osborne's use of language for its shock value as an attention-getter, like Henry Miller's, has overwhelmed his content. An anomaly in Osborne's canon, and possibly an attempted parody of 1960's happenings, psycho-drama, and plays like Hair, the drama comes across as nasty and dirty, the sort of thing that might be expected of an undergraduate Beyond the Fringe or Goodies revue.

Osborne focuses on a diversity of subjects normally touched only in passing in his other dramas (sex, the generation gap, politics, religion, the battle of the sexes), and in part this may account for the work's failure. It affects a purposeful formlessness, and the stage directions call for improvisation, but within the limits of insult and bad taste.¹¹ The sense of unstructured happening produces moments of low-brow fun, yet the overall result is something like a Godard film, a lack of connection mixed with stridency, because of the author's aggressive attack on his audience.

The employment of theatrical devices—music, records, film projection, characters seated in the audience, references directed at the audience, literary and theatrically based jokes—are simultaneously used to deride these same devices and to involve the audience as though, in Grand-father's words, "all life is a theatre" (p. 13). This curious mixture is emphasized by the apparent detachment of the actors, and the playwright for that matter. There may be general agreement with the criticism of the two actors placed in the audience, however. Osborne's low opinion of his audience parallels that stated in his non-dramatic writing and interviews, and the playwright may well intend to drive the play-goers away. Given the coarse, vulgar language and the raunchy topics expounded upon in Act I, there is little wonder that the post-intermission stage directions begin "As the audience returns, if it does" (p. 27). For those who do return, the second act is more of the same, reenforced by the juxta-position of pornography and quotations from a variety of poems and songs on miscellaneous subjects, though commonly revolving around love. Does this mean that pornography and love are equatable? The play ends on its most positive note as the Chap and the Girl embrace in preparation for sexual activity.

The social satire incorporated in this non-play is hardly redeeming. It seems that Osborne has momentarily slipped a cog; but A Sense of Detachment surely exemplifies the psychological set that drives the dramatist to express his frustrations and fears more seriously in other plays during this period.

Osborne's next two major plays have dark endings. While they are separated in time by a very minor work, West of Suez and Watch It Come Down represent the dramatist's new view of life. There is an extension of certain themes that began to be developed in Time Present and The Hotel in Amsterdam, and their tone reflects Osborne's concern with the implications of the new world that he sees.

West of Suez was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre on August 17, 1971. Like The Hotel in Amsterdam, the drama is about a small group of sophisticated English men and women who are in a foreign locale, but the earlier play's seeds of anxiety become portents of fear for the future as they blend with nostalgia for the past and the combination is overpoweringly significant in Osborne's development. The movement from anger to fear is now complete.

The action takes place at the villa "Mesopotamia" on a sub-tropical island which is "neither Africa nor Europe, but some of both, also less than both."¹² Like the settings in Graham Greene's novels, it is a place conducive to deterioration. As Frederica notes, "Nothing heals, every-thing goes rotten or mildewed. Slimy" (p. 39). That the Tigris and Euphrates valley was the cradle of western civilization, that there are no longer British military posts in Mesopotamia, and that the island setting is between two worlds, literally and figuratively, has more than co-incidental bearing on the play's meaning.

The characters also reflect a way of life that is on the wane. When Frederica says "Ah—home to England" (p. 61), she is speaking ironically, for all of the major characters are foreign born. Wyatt, his four daughters, the Brigadier, and Lamb were born in exotic former Empire outposts in the East: Srinigar, Ceylon, Singapore, Mesopotamia, Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur. As the play un-folds, it will be seen that many of their professions are passive. Wyatt and Lamb are writers (with writer's names); Patrick, Robin's husband, is a retired brigadier who is "happy pottering around" (p. 18) and serving as a leftover representative of Colonel Redfern's Edwardian world; Edward, Frederica's husband, is in pathology, a field of medicine "Somewhat inhuman and requiring a detachment that's almost unscientific" (p. 15); Robert, Mary's husband, is a teacher; Wyatt's secretary lives on what his employer does; and Alastair is a homosexual hairdresser. There are also several Americans on the scene: Harry seems to be a beachcomber, the cruise ship tourists are "Helpless and hopeless" (p. 31), and Jed is a special case, a professional student. More about Jed later.

The opening dialog between Frederica and Edward seems to be setting up a Noel Cowardish atmosphere as the couple wittily discusses servants, sleep, relatives, and similar shallow subjects. Their talk is at cross-purposes, for they are not truly listening to each other. Ironically, Edward tells his wife to "Listen to those birds" (p. 12).

Later Wyatt will observe pompously, "Birds chatter and that is their mortal flaw. Chatter sins against language, and when we sin against the word, we sin against God" (p. 57). Despite Wyatt's pronouncement, like the characters in The Hotel in Amsterdam, these people are talkers, and anyone who talks so much does not have time to listen, which will cost them dearly when their civilized battle of the sexes is pushed aside by more critical events.

Actually, language assumes the importance of a character in this drama. Frederica and Edward consciously play with words in their extended opening dialog. They talk about Miss Nomers (p. 13), joke about bird lovers ("If one can still use [the term] in the feathered sense"—p. 14), refer to Edward's medical specialty as "Blood and shit" (p. 15), and comment on the "syntactical swing" of their sentences (p. 16). When Wyatt speaks, it is in a consciously abbreviated style filled with counterbalancing italics (e.g., pp. 38-41). In contrast, long-haired Jed is almost speechless until his diatribe at the end of the play. Asked where he is going, his answer is simply "Wherever" (p. 50). Apparently a rootless student, his subsequent comment that "Anyplace is home for me" (p. 69) seems to be an extension of his "Wherever," but, as his later outburst reveals, the fact that he feels at home everywhere is especially chilling in its implications.

Language is important to Wyatt and his sophisticated companions because it is a badge of their culture. The dark-skinned servant Leroi's sole words are an announcement that Mrs. James has arrived (p. 69), and Frederica complains that none of the servants listen to orders. One of the characteristics of the ex-patriot British is their propensity for working around native cultures by transporting English social elements wherever they go, and this often includes listening to the BBC. The pseudo-economic, pseudo-sociological jargon of the program descriptions which Robert reads in Act II are not from the real world. In fact, in tone they are suspiciously similar to the pornographic descriptions recited in A Sense of Detachment.

The literary allusions that self-consciously lard the dialog are further cultural indicators. There are references to St. Paul (p. 18), King Lear (p. 34), George Moore (p. 38), Yeats (p. 38), Rupert Brooke (p. 41), Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (p. 44), "Papa" Hemingway (p. 68), Samuel Johnson (p. 72), St. Augustine (p. 72), and the King James Bible (p. 73). Wyatt even has a hat that belonged to George Moore, a self-revelatory Irish novelist. This is fitting, given Wyatt's self-centered nature.

The most amusing allusion is to Osborne's own Look Back in Anger when Robin repeats Jimmy's words ("as someone said"): "if you've no world of your own, it's rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's" (p. 35). Jimmy is speaking almost sentimentally about Colonel Redfern's world, a world that no longer exists, but which was solid and secure and comfortable. By referring to his own earlier work Osborne recognizes his personal alienation from the contemporary world, recognizes tàiat the source of his alienation has changed (his literary, artificial insertion suggests that he has lost the intensity and the ability to create strong emotional impacts based on sincere feelings which characterized that play—instead of creating anew, now he must rely on quoting from his past). He is also clearly stating the theme of cultural decline.

Having established the above in an almost Shavian fashion, Osborne introduces an interview format to express Wyatt's apolitical nature. This apolitical stance is obviously related to the cultural element, and ultimately it is the cause of what happens, for it is nothing more than a form of blindfolding. Mrs. James begins by asking Wyatt, "What do you think of as being Utopia?" to which he answers, "A place without pain, passion or nobility. Where there is no hatred, boredom or imperfection" (p. 71). She then asks, "What do you think of man?" and he replies, "As a defect, striving for excellence." This is the context within which all of Wyatt's answers must be considered. He desires a comfortable world and he is living as though such a world is real. For example, in a world that has a servant class he can answer the query, "In these changing times, do you still believe that words in themselves have any meaning, value or validity?" by saying "I still cling pathetically to the old bardic belief that 'words alone are certain good'" (p. 74).

Wyatt cannot see because of his love of words, or he loves words because he cannot see—the result is the same. "What are your feelings about the island and the people," Mrs. James asks. "All the good things I've seen of the island seem to be legacies of the British, the Spanish and the Dutch.… As for the people, they seem to me to be a very unappealing mixture of hysteria and lethargy, brutality and sentimentality" (p. 75), Wyatt replies.

The colonial mind set is appealing because it is easy to live at the expense of others—if there is no sensitivity to the plight of those others. Mrs. James wants to know "What do you think about the class situation in England?" Wyatt answers, "Like many of the upper class, I've liked the sound of broken glass" (pp. 75-76). Throwing champagne glasses into the fireplace following a toast is fine, so long as there is no worry about the expense of replacing the glasses and there is someone to clean up the mess.

The two most important questions come near the end of the interview. Mrs. James asks "How would you describe yourself politically?" and Wyatt states "I wouldn't attempt to." In spite of this, the play's ending is foreshad-owed when Mrs. James asks, "What do you dread most at this stage of your life?" Wyatt's answer is ironic in its foreshadowing and in its perceptiveness: "Not death. But ludicrous death. And I also feel it is in the air" (p. 78). It is too bad that he is not as perceptive anywhere else in the play.

A final language/culture connection is seen in the way that the natives are described. Frederica's contention that they are an odd ethnic mixture of "Lethargy and hysteria" and "Brutality and sentimentality" (p. 12) is obviously contradictory (and probably a repetition of her father's stereotyping). In Act II she demonstrates her lack of sensitivity when she comments on the islander's music: "I suppose they think it has a simple, brooding native charm and intensity. Which is about the last thing any of them have got. Anyway, they never stop playing it" (p. 81). This is the kind of insensitivity that Jimmy railed against, and it may be founded in the same class basis. Edward is more insightful. He finds the natives "Perched between one civilization and the next."

When armed islanders step out of the bush and shoot down Wyatt, everything comes together. The ending is shocking, not because the native uprising is barely expected, but because the senseless violence has not been prepared for. That it is Wyatt who dies, though, is fitting, for he represents the attitudes and values against which the natives are rebelling. He claims that "Protest is easy. But grief must be lived" (p. 73), yet he mouths the words without understanding them. Edward and Frederica's combined "We can't be—/ Responsible for others" (p. 19) is ironic as applied to doctors, but actions in the play demonstrate the results of generalized applicability in political and social terms.

Colonial types in an imperialistic setting create a cultural metaphor in West of Suez. Osborne demonstrates that both colonialism and culture are things of the past. They are not viable in the modern world. This is not his main point, however. For one thing, he does not appear to be especially fond of his characters. Wyatt, the most engaging, does not come on stage until a third of the way into the drama, and in spite of his wit, he is pompous and shallow. Collectively his family are non-productive aesthetes whose main delight is in the sound of their own idle verbosity and bickering. With the exception of Jed, the killers are not developed. There hardly can be sympathy for a group which is invisible and unknown until it steps out of the darkness for a few moments of butchery. And Jed's tirade destroys his credibility because it is filled with meaningless revolutionary rhetoric and clichés: "Fuck all your shit.… You're pigs, babies" (pp. 82-84). Critics point out that this most forceful dialog in the play strikingly resembles Osborne's "Damn you England" letter to the Tribune, and one wonders if the dramatist "created the chatter only to destroy it."¹³ Perhaps this should be taken a step farther. Wyatt spoke about chatter previously, and it may be that Jed is chattering just as the sophisticated characters do, but in a different idiom.

Again, language provides the key to the play. American revolutionaries may help shoot down seventy-year-old men, and American tourists may overcome civilization with litter, cartons, beer cans, cokes, and more hotels (pp. 23, 32), but these are merely symptoms of the disease before which Osborne cringes. The use of four-letter words by cultured characters is too facile to be part of their stereotyping, or to be a means of devaluing the language with which they play, so the words represent more than Osborne's rejection of the characters or their words; they represent insecurities and fears that psychologically can be manifested only in this way. Jed's alternative forms of expression are dismissable. So what is left? Frustration and despair.

The play's title reenforces Osborne's theme. It is a perverted allusion to Somerset Maugham's fifty-year-old drama, East of Suez. Maugham's play has little relevance to this work other than that it is about problems Englishmen face when they do not understand a native population. Possibly more important is the simple reference to an earlier, grander, more civilized time. The focus on Suez is interesting, of course, since the Suez Crisis in 1956 was devastating evidence of the Empire's decline. By placing his drama west of Suez, Osborne moves beyond the Edwardian period into contemporary times, and he draws attention to the symbolic setting sun of the Empire.

The final lines sum up the play's meaning. Standing over the murdered Wyatt, Edward recalls an old English saying: "My God—they've shot the fox" (p. 85). Fox hunting is the prototypical English upper-class sporting activity (expensive, complex, rigid, meaningless activity). Shooting a fox, therefore, is the grossest conduct imaginable. It is contrary to the social code and is done only by outcasts and enemies of society.¹⁴ It is proper that this interpretation is uttered by a pathologist who has diagnosed the situation to someone whose background is lacking the elements which would give the saying any meaning. And this explicitly expresses the theme of West of Suez: culture and the members of cultured society can be destroyed without reason and without warning by those who neither know nor care what they are destroying. There have been numerous examples of this throughout history, from the Thugees to the Boxers to the Mau Maus, but Osborne must have felt horribly like a prophet when barely a year after the play opened eight people were massacred by natives with submachine guns on a golf course on the island of St. Croix.

The End of Me Old Cigar, first performed at the Greenwich Theatre on January 16, 1975, is the slightest piece that Osborne has written for the stage. It is on a par with some of his lesser television scripts, like Jill and Jack (fittingly published in the same volume), and like A Sense of Detachment, it seems something of an anomaly.

In Act I of this social satire Lady Regina Frimley and her female friends are established as fighters for women's liberation who are trying to gain control of Great Britain by having "enticed almost every man in England"¹⁵ to a large country house where the men have been filmed, without their knowledge, while being seduced. The film is to be used to embarrass the men into giving up their role of running the world's affairs. The characters are pure stereotype. Aggressive, plain, unwashed man-haters mingle with shy, downtrodden housewives in working for this common cause, and they speak in clichés befitting their stereotypes.

The upshot is that the women's plans break down under the pressure of good old romantic love and masculine superiority (the housewife finds her appointed conquest more attractive than her assignment, and Lady Regina's male consort tells the victims everything and provides them with a key to the film vault). The battlers for women's rights degenerate into ineffectual recriminations and name calling, and the play ends with the quotation, "A WOMAN IS A WOMAN BUT A GOOD CIGAR IS ASMOKE.!" (p . 56) .

Patently anti-feminist, the play is a male chauvinist's view of women at their worst. While funny at times in its obvious play on spoken and conceptual clichés, it has none of the power of Osborne's previous works, and he seems to be trying to get by on vulgarities and superficial stylishness. Osborne may realize what has happened to his style and technique and be trying to move from the depressive negatism that has characterized his latest dramas. Perhaps The End of Me Old Cigar is self-parody. It may be amusing, but it is not good drama.

Watch It Come Down, first performed at the Old Vic on February 24, 1975, may be the culmination of thematic lines that began appearing in Time Present. The overriding fear and frustration that underlie Osborne's latest dramas and break through so violently in West of Suez are present, perhaps even in greater intensity, yet Osborne's statements are clearer and his style is more controlled than previously.

The movement from A Patriot for Me's European past to the present in West of Suez's former colonial setting terminates in today's rural England in this play. Having established his concern for a kind of character in West of Suez, Osborne brings his fears home to his British audience by placing Watch It Come Down in a familiar locale. As a metaphor, the converted country railway station presents the image of a faded past, but more significantly, it says that what happened on an anonymous, foreign, sub-tropical island can just as easily happen to native-born Britons in merry old England. The parallels between the two plays are devastatingly significant; Watch It Come Down corroborates the theme of a culture under attack.

The characters are typical of those in Osborne's plays during this period. Some of them are admirable; all of them are cultured, bright, and artistically sophisticated. As a film director, Ben Prosser represents the new "plastic" arts. He is successful, with Oscars and awards at Cannes, but he does not like "people," and he is weak.¹⁶ Friends, however, are important, and his sexual desire for important, his ex-wife, his wife's painter sister, and Jo seems to be stimulated more by his liking them as human beings than by attacks of satyriasis (e.g., pp. 38-39); there is a sense of the comradeship that is present between Laurie and Annie in The Hotel in Amsterdam. He also loves his daughter and his dog.

Ben's wife Sally, a writer, is cruel. She is ready to inflict pain at a moment's notice, as when she derides Marion and Ben's daughter (p. 18), yet her cruelty is a defensive reaction to situations that might expose her vulnerability.

As Ben says, she "can't face the future" (p. 28), a conclusion that she repeats in despair later.

Ray, a homosexual in the "rag trade," is a sophisticated version of Look Back in Anger's Cliff. He is pleasant; he is sensitive; he likes those around him; and he is either helpful or used by them, or both. This latter aspect of his personality is important thematically. Ben and Sally are game players. They are as witty and bitter as Edward Albee's George and Martha:

SALLY:… The only joke you don't see is yourself.

BEN: You should have been a writer, (p. 29)

Like George and Martha, they go too far occasionally. When Sally assails Ben's relationship with Marion and his daughter, his response is indicative of his pain: "Will you… for one minute, just stop that fucking pile of shit spewing out of your fucking mouth!" (p. 19). When they go too far, they are sorry (pp. 19, 31), but they are incapable of forcing themselves to comfort one another, even though they want to, so Ray's role is to provide sympathy and understanding. He also serves as their tool; he is used to inform Glen, Jo, and Shirley that Ben and Sally are separating. Although the couple does not intend to separate and is only pretending in order to evoke their friends' reactions, ironically they admit that a separation is possible, and Ray explains to Glen that it is almost as though they want their friends to make a decision for them (p. 49).

The game playing is symptomatic; Ray's analysis is that they "Didn't know what they were doing" (p. 50). Ben "had heavy moral scruples" about testing his friends (p. 13), but play with them he does. He also states that the "one thing" that he has not been able to do is tell Sally the truth (p. 33). Her response is "I'm tired of this." The game gets on their nerves, yet they cannot separate games from reality, as is evident when she interrupts Ben's call to Marion and when Ben retaliates by tearing the new outfit that he has brought Sally (p. 34). This is apropos of Osborne's theme of degeneration of the artistic/aristocratic class, involved with game playing because they are no longer vital, certainly not in a Shavian sense. The world from which they sprang, the world of Sally's dead father, who was in "The Colonial Service" (p. 15), is no longer in effect and it has been replaced by play. When Sally recognizes this ("All the days are long the way we live"), Ben cannot help her escape the trap in which they are both caught: "Oh, knock it off for five minutes. Do your cabaret somewhere else" (p. 14). There is a lack of communication. Ben says, "I don't think you really.… Have feelings for anyone. Except dogs.… How little you know." Sally answers, "How little you know" (p. 55). Yet there is feeling. When Ben is shot, Sally cries, "Oh Ben, don't go. Don't leave me" (p. 57). Her personal grief becomes a class lament, though, when she continues, "We all, the few of us, need one another."

Glen and Jo contrast with Ben and Sally. Throughout the play Ben and Sally's outbursts of bitterness and violence are followed immediately by tender moments between the second couple, as when the opening confrontation over Ben's family is juxtaposed with Jo's affirmation that Glen "really [is] so very gentle" (p. 20), and Ben's ripping of Sally's present is followed by a quietly affectionate scene. Ben and Sally are emotional, irrational, and noisy, and the action of the play centers on them. Glen and Jo are the intellectual center of the drama, and they articulate the thematic meaning for which Ben and Sally supply the practical examples. Glen is dying. Admirable in a washed-out way, a remnant of an earlier era, he is a homosexual novelist who has come to the last page of his latest book (p. 20). His spectacles are broken (p. 40), but he is the most perceptive character. Glen delivers the play's intellectual commentary throughout. His first statement focusing on Osborne's theme details contemporary England: "Suspicion, cupidity, complacency, hostility, profiteering, small, greedy passions, tweedy romance.… Beef barons, pig and veal concentration camps.… The Country. It's the last of England for them, the one last, surviving colony. This is England.… The fuzzy wuzzies from Durham and the Rhondda are at the last gate" (p. 21). The country is explicitly representational for all of England, and the appellation "fuzzy wuzzies," traditionally applied derogatorily to pagans in foreign countries, is ironically used to label residents of rural and lower working class Britain. Furthermore, Ben and Sally become symbolic representatives of their class when Glen continues in words that appear to be an extension of the above thoughts, but that refer to his friends: "How did it happen? They needed one another. But no more. Who's going?… Is this really it this time?"

The theme of transition, of people caught between dying and emerging cultures, is called up by Glen's allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming." "So," he says, "it does all fall apart" (p. 22). His perceptiveness is further demonstrated when he continues, "We've seen the future and it doesn't work." And he offers a reason for what he sees happening. Books, his culture symbol, are declared "an outmoded form of communication" (p. 23). Later he expands on this when he explains that he became a writer to "show us what we are yesterday and today. They're starting to wonder. But too late. My book's no good. It's too late. The century pulled the carpet out from me" (p. 40). One of Ben's moments of insight corroborates Glen's view: "How can you be a romantic in a world that despises imagination and only gives instruction in orgasms?" Ben also sums up Glen's role as a representative of bygone times: "I loved him because… he made his own life out of the twentieth century and what a bad one it was. The century, I mean" (p. 52). As Sally notes, "What isn't broken? Dead? Disappearing?" (p. 43).

Jo lends credibility to Glen's perceptions because of her own character and her linking with him. Jo loves Glen, and she needs love. Her nature is so immersed in love, in fact, that she sees herself as love (p. 37), and interpersonal relationships, the love that she simultaneously requires and symbolizes, may be a source of salvation—"It's like religion without pain" (p. 39). Her mode of escape is couched in similar terms: "Release us from ourselves and give us each our other." Thus, when she says that "Glen is the life. If he goes. It all. Goes" (p. 43), she reenforces the impression that Glen is the key, and his pronouncements thereby gain additional substance. Her suicide underscores her contention that "it all goes" if Glen dies, and ironically conceals her sense of love as a source of salvation.

Jo unifies several other threads of plot and theme, too. In various guises the characters seek escape. Ben, for instance, looks to hide in women's arms. Actually, they all share a need for physical contact, for touching, from Jo's tender stroking of Glen's hand (p. 20) to Ben's wanting to hold her (p. 47). But there is no escape, for time has run out. Jo sees the end approaching: "The time is short and all our heads are sore and our hearts sick, oh, into this world, this century we've been born into and made and been made by" (p. 39). Even before events prove her right, Jo's words are confirmed by Sally ("… it is the time. Because it's running out, and we should be running away"—p. 45), and by Marion ("There's been a lot of time. A wasteland of it"—p. 53).ⁿ

The group gathered at the railway station hearkens back to those who stayed at the hotel in Amsterdam. In the earlier play the problems stemmed from the personalities involved. But in this play the problems are proof that the world is "all so bad, so brutish, so devilish, so sneering" (p. 51). This is the England described by Glen, and by Sally, who catalogs the "nasty, brutish issue of English Country Life" with armies of Japs and Texans who "slaughter" a "Wildlife Vietnam": "No, there's not much in the land. Fish and animals, yes; and the pigs who own it and run it" (p. 17).

With the violence and corruption implied in these descriptions, Osborne has come back to the islanders of West of Suez. Although the natives are not seen in Watch It Come Down, the confrontation between alien cultures is as destructive as it was in the previous drama (though the "muddied, grasping, well-off peasants from public schools and merchant banks" (p. 17) are more cruel and uncivilized in their actions than were the untutored natives). The conflict is epitomized by two events: the murder of Ben's dog and the assault on the railway station. The appalling incident of the dog's death and the characters' reaction to it are foreshadowed when Ben reports that "Major Bluenose" has offered 5 to any of his men who shoot Ben's dogs. The Major has also complained about Ben's cats worrying his sheep (!), and the "layabouts lolling about" (p. 16). Unable to accept those who do not belong, the local residents attack them in a senseless, lawless, violent way. As Sally describes it, "We saw them from the top of the hill, helpless. They tied [Ben's dog] to a tree and set all the male dogs on her. And then they shot her… In front of us" (pp. 41-42). In a frenzy of uncontrolled fury and frustration over their loss and their impotence, Ben and Sally fly at one another, smashing, kicking, and tearing as the curtain falls on Act I. Striking out at each other in their grief is a reflection of the inner turmoil inherent in Osborne's world view.

The assault which brings down the final curtain in a flurry of anti-intellectual destruction is prepared for in the scene that foreshadows the dog's death when Ray accuses the Major of arranging the "smashing up the windows here last month." With Glen's death, Jo's suicide, and Ben's murder, the most talented, likeable, civilized, and social characters are removed. They may be homosexuals or effete literati who were never at the "center" and whose passion and primary success was in insignificant word play, but they would never shoot at the body of a dead woman. Dr. Ashton, the one outsider who appears, is an educated man, a professional who should heal and relieve suffering, yet his response is to blame the victims for not being "popular" with the "yobbos" (p. 56).¹⁸ His lack of emotion may be stereotypically British stiff upper lip; his complete lack of sympathy and continuing condemnation of the sufferers is something else. "You've brought this on yourselves," he says reprovingly to a group who has done nothing more than move into a neighborhood, an action so sinister for the locals that they must destroy what they do not like or understand. The doctor's statement, "you do lead odd sorts of lives, don't you," again blames the victims and sums up the attitude of the yobbos (an attitude graphically portrayed in Sam Peckinpah's 1971 film Straw Dogs). He is not understated; he is coldly alien. Sally's reply has the ring of Osborne's truth to it: "Yes.… We do. Most of us. You must be glad."

The title of the play combines concepts from Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and Yeats' "The Second Coming" in a modern idiom. A revolution is taking place in the twentieth century. This is a barbaric age; the old order is falling. The significance of the title also is revealed in Glen's anecdote: "I saw two signs.… One was a little triangle of green with a hedge and a bench. And a sign read: "This is a temporary open space'… the other was a site of rubble near the Crystal Palace… where bank managers and cashiers fled at the beginning of our… century. It said 'Blenkinsop—Demolitionists. We do it. You watch it. Come down'" (p. 50). The linking of open spaces and demolition (near a cultural center) is obviously another reference to Osborne's primary theme.

Once more his theme is reflected in his stylistic elements. There is still pretentiousness in some of his constructions ("They're: splitting up"—p. 21), as though he is flaunting self-conscious, artificial literary techniques in the faces of those he despises and fears. More important, however, are his use of language and literary allusions to augment his themes. In general he is hardly more subtle in expressing his themes through dialog than he was in previous plays—indeed, Glen openly states them. Sex is an important metaphor, and the language reflects a preoccupation with sex. On the one hand, the outburst by Ben ("stop that fucking pile of shit") is neither civilized nor sophisticated. On the other hand, there are times when language and meaning combine perfectly. When Sally talks to Ben about his visit with Marion, she asks "Did you fuck her?" (p. 19). Not did you sleep with her, or make love, but the harsh, shocking, even brutal "Did you fuck her?" Sally is striking at Ben, trying to hurt him by degrading his relationship through these terms, but there is simultaneously a masochistic, self-inflicted punishment aimed at herself. By using these words she is exacerbating the pain which she feels that she deserves because of the nature of her own relationship with Ben.

Similarly, the playwright's allusions are better integrated, too. While there are relatively few literary references, they tend to be associated with death (Leo Tolstoy, p. 10; Hamlet, pp. 15, 19; Armageddon, p. 22; Christ's cross, p. 41) or cultures in upheaval (Yeats, p. 22; the Theatre of the Absurd, p. 41). Appropriately, the allusion to The Death of Ivan Ilyich goes beyond the novel's theme, for Tolstoy died at a remote railway junction.

Overall, the combined effect of Osborne's tightly packed style, witty, real characters, and integration of language, allusions, and themes is to make good drama. Watch It Come Down is the best written of his latest plays—in spite of the disturbing, unsettling events depicted. His control makes his statement all the more powerful.

With the performance of West of Suez, Osborne's new concern for the future emerges fullblown; Watch It Come Down confirms and reenforces this theme. When he wrote Look Back in Anger, Osborne was indeed looking back in anger at an insensitive world and time. He was filled with rage. Now he is looking at another insensitive world and time, but he is looking forward and with fear. Where once he was aggressive and sought to goad his contemporaries into a life of feeling, he is now desperate in his fear of a world which is attacking him, and which will crush him and his way of life.

¹ The cuts demanded are published at the end of the Faber edition. Interestingly, the Lord Chamberlain's office was abolished in 1968, a fact which may be significant in Osborne's later work.

² Mary McCarthy and Kenneth Tynan engaged in a celebrated literary feud over its meaning in The Observer (London), July 4 and 18, 1965, and Ronald Hayman concedes to being mystified (John Osborne. New York: Ungar, 1972).

³A Patriot for Me (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 17. All subsequent page references to this play refer to this edition.

⁴ Simon Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne: An Assessment (London: Gollancz, 1969), pp. 139-40.

⁵ This is pointed out by Harold Ferrar in John Osborne (New York: Columbia University Press, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers series, 1973), p. 36.

⁶Time Present and The Hotel in Amsterdam (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 36. All subsequent page references to these plays refer to this edition.

⁷ This leads to several levels of irony, since the name Orme is of Celtic derivation, too. Interestingly, the name Prosser recurs in Watch It Come Down.

⁸ For example, "turned on and dropping out" (p. 21) and "trip" (p. 23).

⁹ Trussler, p. 195.

¹⁰ Ferrar, p. 41.

¹¹A Sense of Detachment (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), see pp. 14-15. All subsequent page references to this play will refer to this edition.

¹²West of Suez (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 11. All subsequent page references to this play refer to this edition.

¹³ Hayman, pp. 135-36.

¹⁴ There are also some interesting reverberations with the character of Volpone here.

¹⁵The End of Me Old Cigar and Jill and Jack (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 20. All subsequent page references to this play refer to this edition.

¹⁶Watch It Come Down (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 10. All subsequent page references to this play refer to this edition.

¹⁷ Marion's agonized reference to Eliot is filled with irony, for they have had time and yet they have accomplished nothing, and will accomplish nothing with more time. At the same time, her wasteland allusion resounds with double irony because of its statement about what that time holds in store.

¹⁸ Yobbos is derived from the children's game which reverses the spelling of words. It has come to mean oaffish, violent, Teddy-boy types.