AN “ANGRY YOUNG MAN” WHOSE ANGER STEMS
FROM
LOVE
DR.
K. VENKATA REDDY, M. A., Ph. D.
Among
the four most important talents – Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Harold Pinter
and John Arden – that emerged in the middle 1950s,
Osborne was the one who had the most direct influence on the
theatre of post-war
Nevertheless,
to label Osborne as an “Angry Young Man” – a phrase expanded to become a
pseudo-critical catch–all for the new generation of writers, is to limit him to
purely personal grievances, and to deny his work the freedom to explore aspects
of human predicament other than those producing these grievances. Not that
“anger” is really not the right word, but that it acquires a new meaning and
attains a new dimension in Osborne thereby becoming
a credo. Anger has to be directed against something, and
if one is angry almost about everything, as Osborne precisely is, then one is
not really angry. What we, however, tend to overlook is the idealism behind his
anger. To Osborne, to be angry is to care – care for the well-being and
happiness of mankind. So, the anger which is so apparent in Osborne’s plays is
but an expression of aversion to a life without worthwhile belief or hope. When
faced with the placid, half-living of the masses, Osborne’s emotional wobble
becomes visible, and his love turns to anger. Thus his anger is certainly one
that stems from love, love for humanity, a feeling which finds expression in
his disgust with the fatuity and futility of most of our mores and beliefs.
Osborne’s
plays, then, are not so much products of “anger” as of “feeling,” and as such,
are often mole instinctive than calculated and more passionate than coherent.
He is essentially a playwright who feels, and who conveys the urgency of his
feelings through the art of theatre. He himself makes
this very clear when he says:
I
want to make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think
afterwards. (Declaration, P. 65)
Naturally, his plays
make their effect not by virtue of their intellectual distinction, nor by their
artistry or delicacy of expression, but by their passionate intensity of
feeling.
A
man of strong feelings and convictions, Osborne has never been afraid to state
them, or to demonstrate them in his chosen medium, the theatre. He boldly and
categorically states:
What
is most disastrous about the British way of life is the British way of
feeling, and this is something the theatre can
attack. We need a new feeling as much as we need a new language. Out of the
feeling will come the language.
(The Angry
Decade, P. 99)
To
Osborne the emotional disease of
To
these threats our attention is directed particularly by the powerful rhetoric
of Osborne’s heroes who are visionaries looking forward to some unknown ideal.
Osborne personifies in them the condition the world is in, and exposes through
them evil and injustice as he sees it. It is the strength of their feelings
which charges the plays with electricity. They are emotionally alive and
possess an immediacy of human response, and they are convinced that
they have the right values in a world which has accepted the
wrong ones. Fully responding as they do to life around them, they are shattered
by the lack of effort and the inertia of others. Naturally, the anger of his
heroes stems not so much from the injustices done to them as from the strain of
knowing how different are others from them who are
still capable of loving.
Jimmy
Porter, an articulate “angry young man,” the protagonist of Look Back in
Anger, is certainly opposed to many aspects of modern life, striking out,
in turn, at the Sunday papers, the church, the press, the H-Bomb, the older
generation, the apathy of everyone else, women in general, marriage, sex and
the “Establishment.” Yet his anger is not simply revenge for the injustices he
has suffered. He is capable of vicarious suffering and much of his anger does
come from his love of others and his helplessness to change things. He says,
You
see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be
Angry
– angry and helpless. And I can never forget it.
(Look Back in
Anger, p. 58)
We
see in Jimmy’s anger the various intensities of love–his compulsive physical
desire for his wife, Alison, his affection for his friend Cliff, his tender
care for the old woman, and above all his general love for humanity. Thus,
Jimmy has a compassion and much of his anger is tempered by a plea for justice.
Far from being malicious, his anger concentrates on demonstrating the injustice
of the world.
Archis Rice, the hero of The
Entertainer, is likewise beyond anger in the aggressive sense. He is angry
because of his supposed burden. Surrounded by people incapable of satisfying
his needs, he goes on with the charade of meaningless existence, unable to
admit that he is a flop in the eyes of the public and himself. Bill Maitland,
the hero of another masterpiece, Inadmissible Evidence, is built from
the same elements, with variation of wit, sensitivity, and despair that created
Jimmy and Archis. His anger again is one that causes
little offence. He simply tries to find a way round the banality of it all.
However, his anger is justified by the tepid responses of those that surround
him. His anger, again, is one of care, care for himself and his fellow beings.
George
Dillon, who may be said to be the representative of Osborne’s heroes, is angry
with the Elliot family in the same manner. The way he describes them to Ruth:
Have
you looked at them? Have you listened to them?
They
don’t merely act and talk like caricatures,
they
are caricatures. That’s what’s so terrifying.
They
think in cliches, they talk in them, they
even
feel in them. (Epitaph
for George Dillon, P. 58)
shows that his anger
is not petulant anger but a terrifying awareness of what life could become, a
cry for help, a plea to redeem mankind in the Machine Age, and a gesture of
love.
Osborne,
thus, expresses his anger in many ways. The method of his expression may be the
repetitive curse, the single cutting remarks, or the usual rambling monologue.
He explores many methods in course of his seventeen plays so far written, but
“underlying the theme of anger as expressed in his plays, is his unending
concern to suggest the idea of something better, a dream of a more perfect
existence,” While he strikes out trenchantly against society, he does so from a
basis of love for the individual to whom life is not to be complicated by poses
and wrong attitudes, class consciousness and intellectual snobbery.
What,
in short, Osborne feels up against are the obstacles society has created to
prevent the truth becoming clear. Fearlessly he protests at the irrelevances
with which we unnecessarily obscure our personal expression. Hence his
repetitive bitter outcries against the aristocracy, royalty,
class-consciousness, the church, the press, and politicians, against anything;
in fact, which obstructs the fullest expression of love. Osborne does not
attempt to cure evils or crusade for rights but simply to provide experiences
and let us draw our own conclusions. What at best, he seems to suggest in his
plays is that there is something wrong in a society which isolates human beings
who simply want to be themselves to complete their own development and not
necessarily accept that which society thrusts upon them. What Osborne seeks is
not to destroy the social or moral order, but to create one which will give
back to him a belief in humanity. Thus, Osborne’s anger, far from being
aggressive or petulant, is unequivocally positive. It is but the outward
manifestation of his inward dissatisfaction with the world as it stands and his
deep concern for its betterment. All that he wishes to do in his plays is to
expose those things to which objects and to promote those things which he
believes it valuable to uphold. He uses plot, characters, torrents of language,
only to establish and maintain his fundamental belief that man is essentially
good and simply needs to be freed to be himself.