The Most Angry Fella

After a miserable childhood, an unsatisfying stint as a subeditor on a British trade paper (Gas World) and a so-so fling as a repertory actor-manager, John Osborne looked back on his 26 misspent years in anger. When he brooded about his estrangement from his mother and his wife (divorced by him for misconduct last week), he got even angrier. The manners and morals of Britain's middle class drove him to total fury. There was little left for him to do but take his violence to the public. So John Osborne sat down and wrote a play titled Look Back in Anger.

It was not a very good play, but it was so noisy, so bouncy, and its wheels spun so fast that most onlookers caught the illusion of movement. Soon after Anger opened last May in London's equivalent of an off-Broadway theater, Playwright Osborne was hailed not only as Britain's angriest young man, but as the theater's rediscoverer of Britain's neglected lower-middle-class snob. Anger's hero, afflicted by a miserable childhood and his flops as a vacuum-cleaner salesman and a bandleader, speaks his outraged pieces on such hallowed British institutions as the scandalous News of the World, gaitered bishops, church bells, U.S. evangelists and dear old Mummy ("My God, those worms will need a good dose of salts the day they get through her!").

Steam & Sentiment. What Anger lacked in plot, sense and good taste it made up for in steam and sentiment. If Playwright Osborne succeeded in being only half-acid, his admirers did not seem to mind. One evening last autumn Sir Laurence Olivier went backstage after a performance, politely wondered aloud if Osborne might have a part for him in any new play. Very much in character, Osborne superciliously replied: "I don't know--possibly." Then he began remixing a batch of anger in process called The Entertainer so that its lead--a sodden, cynical, third-rate music-hall trouper--would fit Sir Laurence. Last month, having just chucked a reported $250,000 by bowing out of a Hollywood film version of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, Olivier startled Britain's effete theater world by accepting the Osborne role. In a small, dingy London house last week, Sir Laurence stepped onstage as The Entertainer at a salary of $126 a week.

Suds & Tears. Playing a lewd, brash burlesque comedian, Sir Laurence often lifted the play--a juvenile soap opera in its triter lines--to the heights of a new Pagliacci. Most critics agreed that Olivier, with real virtuosity and superb support, had disproved the footlight adage that actors can be no better than their material. But Playwright Osborne was not disparaged too severely. Of all theatrical talents, perhaps the uncanniest is an ability to write the sort of humdrum drama that great actors can instinctively exalt. On this bittersweet basis, John Osborne got his share of the applause. But the tears, including those of Actor Olivier's wife Vivien Leigh, were strictly accorded to Sir Laurence.

Excesses of spleen and puerility are seldom a playwright's assets. John Osborne, who can rant as forcefully as he rambles pointlessly, would doubtless be a bore as a mellow young man. But if he risks less anger some day, he can probably say more.

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