There appears to be something improvised, even haphazard, in the way Osborne moves from one play-style to another. There are no long-deliberated changes from one mode of language to another (as in Eliot), nor does there seem to be a compelling inner movement (as in the gradual compression of language in Beckett and Pinter). Yet one can see in Osborne's zig-zagging line of development two main play-forms—the room-based and the open-stage play—and two distinct stage languages—histrionic self-expression and the dialogue of characters intended to be socially, or historically, representative. The tension between these two modes of language keeps recurring in both types of play. Sometimes Osborne attempts to create an interplay between the two modes of language within a double or shifting structure: in The Entertainer through connecting Archie Rice's domestic talk with his music hall 'turns', in Luther through the shift from the private interior of Act I to the 'epic' propensities of the other two acts. The histrionic monologuist keeps re-entering the large-scale 'open' plays; and the dialogue of more or less monologue-centred plays keeps expanding (or thinning out) to catch, in almost gratuitous sketch-like scenes, the language, the up-to-date idiom, of this or that contemporary cartoon type…. In all this we find versatile inventiveness at the cost of imperfect artistic control. And we recognise Osborne's at once generous and anxious urge to embody both the inner and the outer world; to express troubled psychic states and to represent all kinds of 'interest'—voices, social movements, scenes. In brief, the urge towards wholeness.

Yet it is precisely in his language that Osborne has been least able to develop, to match his ideal conception of a drama that is at once personal and social or communal. There is a recurrent loss of 'felt life' in his dialogue of relationship, group, and large-scale public events, both in the contemporary and the historical or quasi-historical plays. (In the latter Osborne has found it particularly difficult to give life to 'the potentially fascinating dialectic' between an ideology or an institution and the principal character—the potential Brechtian direction.) By contrast, he has given a new voice to the isolated or wounded character, the play seen through a temperament, the line from Strindberg. (pp. 194-95)

In a witty simplification, Mary McCarthy wrote that Osborne 'like a coloratura or countertenor, finds that he is limited to parts of experience, as it were, already written for his voice's strange timbre'. In other words, Osborne cannot extend the range of his dramatic language—though he keeps straining to do so—through a personal creative limitation. Yet, is it not possible that such a limitation is intensified by the difficulty, in our time, of creating a language that has dramatic life both on the personal and on the communal plane? (p. 196)

Osborne's drama, which keeps striving towards some balance of the personal and social in the dialogue itself, repeatedly makes one conscious of an acute imbalance. Frequently, the imbalance is exactly what is being dramatised. In the early and contemporary plays the hyperarticulate character (George Dillon, Jimmy Porter) defines himself by rejecting, with ribald contempt, the language as much as the values of a group (the clichés of the Elliot family, the genteelisms of Alison and her sort). In a later play like Inadmissible Evidence Osborne goes much further—towards a curiously externalised form of solipsism: the self-alienated monologue of Bill Maitland absorbs solid clusters of vocabulary from the social world—technology, legal jargon and so on—only to spit them out again as alien stuff. (p. 198)

There is much in Osborne's dramatic language that seems to connect with the desire to 'hear the words out loud', in order to reach some certainty (if only the reassurance of 'I talk, therefore I am'—as Mary McCarthy suggests). Histrionic rhetoric in particular is inseparable from the feeling that words are self-authenticating. Further, Osborne is essentially a verbal dramatist…. Perhaps it is no accident that the term 'old-fashioned'—also used by Osborne about the form of his first play—is now applied to his 'allegiance to words', in a context that makes it clear that Osborne is aware of the shrinking area of meaning through words. The power of language is asserted against its felt decline. The texture of Osborne's rhetoric itself embodies this tension—the attempt to gain new theatrical vitality for what is, after all, an 'old-fashioned' language. (p. 204)

[There] is considerable stylistic variation in feeling in Osborne's rhetoric of self-dramatisation, both in particular speeches and from one play to another. It may not be what Eliot called 'an improvement in language', but it does amount to a revitalisation of rhetoric.

The limitations of Osborne's rhetoric seem to be these: it is an over-externalised rhetoric, which cannot accommodate 'thinking aloud' or genuine inwardness: it has 'no time for' pauses and silences, reflection and implicit self-seeing…. It is a rhetoric which amplifies a mediocre speaker, or intensifies a naturalistically based idiom; it does not create a new dramatic language capable of expressing unexpected states of mind and experience—though that might be too much to expect. At the same time the energies of this rhetoric seem to be too much at the mercy of moments of empathy releasing the right kind of verbal paroxysm—with the risk of sheer exhaustion. By now Osborne himself seems to have got tired of rhetoric. Inadmissible Evidence was the last play where rhetoric was consistently expressive; the later plays either avoid, or (as in Time Present) look back on that style fitfully.

It is probable that Osborne would be more at home in a theatre which still had a central rhetorical convention—somewhere between Elizabethan drama and Victorian melodrama. As it is, his persistent naturalism has tended to inhibit; and his 'restless search for a style' has only rarely—in The Entertainer and in Inadmissible Evidence—led to a roughly satisfying fusion between the structure of the play and texture of the dialogue—releasing and controlling a 'full-blooded' theatrical language. (pp. 211-12)