John Osborne

Caryl Churchill
 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
• R. Williams: room – at first used by Naturalists
to present people in their everyday, realistic
settings; then it turns into a trap. Room in
Osborne’s play: not a rich bourgeois room like
in Ibsen’s plays, but a poor, working-class
room, historically defined.
• Jimmy represents a generation of lower-class
young people who lost their faith in the Labour
Party government.
 Osborne
• ’red brick’ universities vs. Oxford and
Cambridge
• Alison’s brother Nigel: one of the ruling elite.
Hiding behind platitudes, incapable of
imagining the lives of working class people, or
grasping alternatives to the given social order.
Nigel attended a public school (reserved for
the ruling classes, children of officers and
administrators), producing future politicians.
 Osborne
• Education as one of the ISAs: Nigel has been
conditioned to have a very vague knowledge
about life. ’He’ll end up in a cabinet one day’.
• Church: also one of the ISAs – Bishop of
Bromley supporting the manufacture of the H-
bomb.
• No brave causes left: after the Spanish Civil War
and WWII, no better world was produced, only
a more hypocritical one.
 Osborne
• Jimmy as a modern Hamlet: ’Whether 'tis
nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms
against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end
them?’ (Is it better to suffer or to oppose?)
Jimmy cannot oppose his enemies, but by
means of suffering and anger he shows that
he does not accept the given state of affairs.
 Osborne
• Jimmy is angry because the people around him
neither suffer nor oppose: Cliff, Alison. ’Let’s
pretend that we’re human beings, that we’re
actually alive’.
• Alison – Ophelia (an obedient daughter).
Indifferent, passive, with a small timid mind
(pusillanimous). She met Jimmy when he and
Hugh were gatecrashing upper-class parties,
fell in love with his fire and vitality
 Osborne
• However, Alison refuses to take part in Jimmy’s
suffering. She has a kind of passion in sex, but
it’s ’the passion of a python’ – suggesting
passivity. She does not participate in Jimmy’s
spiritual experience nor share his political
views.
• Helena – Alison’s friend; conventionally
Christian. Longs to live in a pre-industrial world
(’in a lovely little cottage of the soul’)
 Osborne
• Emotional virginity: those who have never
truly suffered or felt angry. Jimmy lost his
emotional virginity when he was taking care of
his dying father.
• Helena and Alison perform a formal ritual,
rather than a true act of compassion: Jimmy
asks Alison to stay by the deathbed of Hugh’s
mother.
 Osborne
• Sainthood: for Osborne, a negative term – it
denotes someone who has never become a
complete human being. Helena leaves Jimmy
because loving him is ’morally wrong’. Jimmy:
’They all want to escape from the pain of
being alive.’ Helena only had ’hothouse
feelings’. You can’t fall in love without dirtying
up your hands – life is contaminating.
 Osborne
• Jimmy to Alison: If you could have a child, and
it would die. Perhaps after such an experience
she might become a human being.
• Bears and squirrels: Jimmy and Alison cannot
establish intellectual communication, but they
resort to a level of uncomplicated affection
and emotions, where they can be ’all love and
no brains’.
 Caryl Churchill, Owners
• Fromm, To Have or to Be: having as an existential
choice. Two forms of having: existential having
(natural impulse) – to have and use certain things
in order to survive (shelter, food, clothes, tools).
• Characterological having (pathological; result of
the impact of social conditions): passionate drive
to retain and keep. Existential mode centred on
selfishness, egotism, craving for possessions.
 Churchill
• Capitalism: not only appeals to human avarice
and greed, but generates them to sustain itself.
• Marx: capitalism produces an impoverished
human psyche. Reduction of meaningful
human relations to the world.
• There are many ways in which we can
appropirate an object or human reality in
general: senses, thinking, feeling, observing,
acting, loving.
 Churchill
• In capitalism, we only feel that an object is ours if it
exists for us as capital or if we utilize it in some way
(cf. Tennyson and flower).
• Patriarchy: owning living beings. Even the poorest
man can be an owner of property in his
relationship with his wife and children. (Fromm)
• Marion in Owners: originally considered property;
rebelled against her passive role. The most highly
cherished quality: not creativity, but making a
profit.
 Churchill
• Marion identifies with the mainstream
patriarchal tradition: the Bible, Columbus,
Scott of the Antarctic. ISAs (family, education,
health service): she remains a subject. 'If you
want a girl I'll buy you one.'
• Alec’s baby: substitute for love. Final loss of
the capacity to love: 'I might be capable of
anything.'
 Churchill
• Alec: 'Learning things wasn't any use.' A
movement beyond language and culture: 'the
bottom fell off a pail'.
• The Buddhist tradition: absence of craving for
material possessions; need to give up
possessive love. Alec's new attitude to love:
altruistic, selfless love; willing sacrifice.
• Worsley: overall failure of life and death.