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 statesmen is passed comes the time of the jeerer; Osborne became the beloved Thersites of the British theater. As the climate changed, he did his best to change with the times, and became more and more successful, wealthy, upper class and conservative. But his one true note—his fulminations—no longer fitted the new perspective. England, its upper crust somewhat reshuffled, was becoming a homogeneous place again, and with Osborne safely ensconced in his room at the top, nothing remained for him to do except inveigh against the middle class (Inadmissible Evidence) or the lower class (The Hotel in Amsterdam).

In the latter play and in Time Present, Osborne goes to absurd lengths to find something to assail, even as his development into a reactionary proceeds apace: in A Bond Honoured even God comes off scot-free. In A Patriot for Me, the only thing Redl, on the verge of suicide, can harangue against is—the Spaniards! His psychologically and dramatically unwarranted attack on them is surely the most gratuitous farewell speech ever written. In future Osborne plays the characters may be reduced to denouncing cigarettes or the London telephone directory; the objects of invective have become so remote or stale that a late Osborne play is just a bunch of sour gripes.

A Patriot for Me seems to deal with ambition and self-in-dulgence fighting it out against the background of a similarly schizoid but also narrow-minded and corrupt society. It is some kind of dance on top of the volcano, some sort of Walpurgisnacht hurtling into Götterdämmerung, in which social orders, races, sexes, even fellow homosexuals oppose, torment and persecute one another—but of all these things Osborne tells you no more than a high-school sex orientation lecture tells about human relations. (pp. 218-19)

What Osborne cannot do is write about tenderness and love, hetero- or homosexual. (p. 219)

Feeble vignettes succeed one another: A Patriot for Me is as superficial a passing parade as Luther…. The wit is pathetic ("You were born with a silver saber up your what-not") and only the pathos is good for a laugh ("It's the time of night when people die. People give up"). Loosely and flaccidly, the play follows a fascinating career, and ends with a bang from a Browning and a whimper from Osborne. (pp. 219-20)

You might expect a play whose high point is a drag ball to be a bore; what you would not expect is that even the drag ball is a drag. (p. 220)