John Osborne: A Casebook

On May 8, 1956, Osborne'sLook Back in Angeropened at the Royal Court Theatre and marked the renewal of British postwar theatre. The impact of the play has been such that its revival in London in 1989 was announced with the claim that every night somewhere in the world the play is being performed. This collection of new essays provides a variety of perspectives on key elements of Osborne's work: his inventive realism and nostalgic modernism, his cultural critiques and gender configurations, his linguistic strategies and theatrical techniques. Osborne's plays display a continuing, and often explosive, power to provoke-though perhaps for different reasons now than formerly-and the time is ripe for a review of Osborne's alternately revolutionary and old-fashioned work, for it continues to flourish. These essays reexamine the pivotalLook Back in Anger, provide a retrospective review ofThe Entertainer(1957),Luther(1961),Inadmissable Evidence(1964), andA Patriotfor Me(1965), and consider the implications of Osborne's most recent work,D j Vu(1991) in which Jimmy Porter is revisited 30 years later. Though it is a commonplace that the revolutionary inventions of one era become the familiar practices of another, this collection celebrates the power of Osborne's theatre and clarifies the controversies it continues to provoke.