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Playwright Osborne, 27, grows perceptibly peevish these days when he is called an "angry young man." Applied to him, the phrase is indeed growing threadbare and inaccurate. Perhaps in an effort to delimit his own brand of anger, Osborne states his aim in the current issue of Britain's longhaired Encounter: "I want to make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think afterwards." Whatever their deficiencies, Look Back in Anger and his The Entertainer (TIME, April 22) attest to Osborne's own tremendous capacity to feel. It is often hard to tell whether his sentiments are mere sediments of old thoughts or the seeds of new ones, but he easily qualifies as the foremost apostle of his personal gospel: Feel now; think later!
Osborne's feelings obviously come from his mother's side. She hails from a family of London pub keepers, now publess, and carries on the tradition as a practicing barmaid. His mother's mother is "a tough, sly old cockney"; his daydreaming maternal grandfather foresaw him as Britain's Prime Minister. Though Osborne's father's people were of the repressed middle class that Osborne deplores, he recalls his paternal grandparents as "kind, charming" folks. That grandfather informed Osborne that a socialist is "a man who doesn't believe in raising his hat." Today John Osborne is an amorphous sort of socialist, a literary leftist, distantly descended from the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw (who usually thought first, felt later). An elegant dresser, almost a dude, lanky Playwright Osborne likes to raise the roof, seldom raises his fancy hat to anything.
Uncontaminated by any university teachings, Osborne chucked school at 16, briefly languished as a copy-grinder for trade journals, drifted into the theater as a tutor to a band of kiddies playing the provinces in the hardy perennial No Room at the Inn. A year later he was an actor, and soon a repertory manager as well. He now boasts: "Any actor can usually flummox any writer, but they can't do that to me, thank God!"
As the closest thing to a British existentialist, Osborne, despite his meandering manner of expression, has used his actor's eye and ear well in imbuing his drama with a strong theatrical sense.
In a small mews cottage in London's arty Chelsea, Osborne lives with his wife, Actress Ure, and spews out his ferocities. He plans to bring out a new play next year, doubtless in the angry vein. The objects of his disfavor are legion. He regards Britain's explosion of an H-bomb as "the most debased criminal swindle in British history." He likes to refer to London journalists as "the cheap-jacks of Fleet Street," and to Britain's royalty as "the gold filling in a mouthful of decay." Socialist Osborne will not define his own socialism: Why should he "prop up any journalist who wants a bit of easy copy or give some reviewer another smart clue for his weekly written-up crossword game?" Why does John Osborne want his anger to spread to others? "To become angry is to care."