Four Plays: A Sense of Detachment / The End of Me Old Cigar / Jill and Jack / A Place Calling Itself Rome

by John Osborne, Helen Osborne (Foreword)

End of Me Old Cigar
Sense of Detachment
Place Called Itself Rome
Jill & Jack

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

People best know British playwright John James Osborne, member of the Angry Young Men, for his play Look Back in Anger (1956); vigorous social protest characterizes works of this group of English writers of the 1950s.

This screenwriter acted and criticized the Establishment. The stunning success of Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than four decades, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and television. His extravagant and iconoclastic personal life flourished. He notoriously used language of the ornate violence on behalf of the political causes that he supported and against his own family, including his wives and children, who nevertheless often gave as good as they got.

He came onto the theatrical scene at a time when British acting enjoyed a golden age, but most great plays came from the United States and France. The complexities of the postwar period blinded British plays. In the post-imperial age, Osborne of the writers first addressed purpose of Britain. He first questioned the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak from 1956 to 1966, he helped to make contempt an acceptable and then even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behavior and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.

Reviews

[Catrina Prager · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was such a let-down. I'm a big fan of Osborne's. I think 'Look Back...' and 'Inadmissable Evidence' are some of the most nuanced, intelligent and entertaining pieces of theatre produced in the 20th century. And yet, you stumble upon a collection like this, and no longer know what to say. All the four plays are difficult to follow, vulgar, and certainly not entertaining. While it's clear to see in some parts what the author was aiming at, the sort of biting social satire and commentary that makes Osborne's earlier plays an utter delight is only sketched (faintly) in these four plays.

[Glenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

These four plays are very bad. A Place Calling Itself Rome is the least bad, but it's still very far from good.

The 'angry young man' who wrote Look Back in Anger had, by the 70's, become a confused, out of touch, petulant, misogynist.