Angry Young Luther

When British Playwright John Osborne first looked back in anger, he scarcely turned his head; now he has sighted back some 4 1/2 centuries--to the angriest young man of 1517. Osborne's newest play, Luther, attempts to present the father of Protestantism as a kind of Jimmy Porter of the Reformation. Starring Actor Albert (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) Finney, the play opened this week in Nottingham, a British tryout town, will spend the summer in "off-Broadway" London and on tour, including the Edinburgh Festival and Paris' Theatre des Nations (see below). Like most plays on the road, Luther may change before London's critics first see it next month, but as it reached the Nottingham boards and was prepared for print by Faber & Faber, it seemed sharply disappointing. For all the fathoms of history through which Playwright Osborne has reached for his subject, the resulting play is hardly an inch deep--a well-narrowed portrait of a broadly complicated man.

The Many Sides. With occasionally effective theatrical moments, the play is strung out in pageant-caliber tableaux, beginning with the moment when 22-yearold Martin Luther was received into the order of Augustinian Eremites in Erfurt. Subsequently he is shown on the day he has significant difficulty saying his first Mass; he wrangles with his father, confers with his friend and guide, Johann von Staupitz, nails up his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, speaks forcefully to Cardinal Cajetan, the papal legate, and so on, until in the end he symbolically holds his young child in his arms and tells him: "Don't be having dreams so soon, my son. They'll be having you soon enough."

But the pictures pass too quickly. All the many sides of Martin Luther are more or less touched upon--the brilliant scholar, the skillful dialectician, the linguist whose translation of the Bible molded the German language, the man whose interior life shifted from sharp reason to demonic visions to irrational fervor--but nearly all are glossed over. With hardly a suggestion of the poet who wrote A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, John Osborne concentrates on the crude-voiced Luther whose notable preoccupation with bodily functions produced the line: "If I break wind in Wittenberg, they smell it in Rome."

Dominant Preoccupation. Osborne is not to be faulted for working that line into his text, nor for devoting one passage to the information that the monk was sitting in a privy when he reached some of his major intellectual conclusions. In Osborne's portrait, however, these preoccupations are so recurrent that they dominate the texture of the play and become its central image. "Papal decretals are the devil's excretals," cries John Osborne's monk in a burst of rhyme. Throughout the evening, it seems, scarcely two minutes are permitted to go by in which Luther does not resort to some self-dramatizing scatological simile: "I'm like a ripe stool in the world's straining anus, and at any moment we're about to let each other go."

Osborne has suggested that his imagination was drawn to the great Reformation story by the parallel with present-day conflicts, but these are confined to a few hints about eschatology (the end of the world, resurrection), and a few throw-away lines that are not developed: "We are living in a dangerous time"; or "A man with a strong sword will draw it at some time, even if it's only to turn it on himself." In the end, it is to the level of scatology, not eschatology, that Dramatist John Osborne has reduced one of the most dramatic religious events since the Crucifixion.

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