An "Angry Young Man" Whose anger stems from love

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 Britain. The appearance of his Look in Anger on the 8th of May, 1956, at the Royal Court Theatre, London, marked the real break-through of “the new drama” into the British theatre. And representing as he does the new dramatist par excellence, Osborne remains “the first of the ‘Angry Young Man’ and the biggest shock to the system of British theatre since the advent of Bernard Shaw.”

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 Britishway of life is the British way of feeling, and this issomething 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 England is apathy, and his single-minded devotion is to battle withthe deadening inertia. He explores the state of enuii of people whose material aims have been fulfilled, but who are bored and exasperated because of their fundamentally commercial outlook in the absence of other positive social ideals. Perceiving that there is no place for warmth, purity of feeling or emotion in a computer-crazed world, he endeavours to prevent us from becoming machines, using the theatre as his weapon to attack those aspects of society, either traditional or materialistic, that suffocate initiative, deny feeling and frustrate the individual.

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 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 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 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.