John Osborne: The Angry Young Man of the English Theater

The press release for 26-year-old John Osborne's first produced play, Look Back in Anger, which opened on the 11^th anniversary of Victory-Europe Day (May 8, 1956), called the dramatist "an angry young man." After the stunning success of the play, the term "Angry Young Man" became the abel for a generation of Englishmen born before World War II but who came to maturity after the defeat of Nazi Germany, when the sun that was the British Empire was sinking into the sunset. So seminal an event was Look Back in Anger, the American drama critic Clive Barnes dated Mary 8, 1956 as the "actual birthday...of modern British theatre."

Tony Award-winner John Osborne, one of the most important British playwrights of the 1950s generation that revolutionized English-speaking theater, was born on December 12, 1929 in London, England. His father, Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a native of Newport, Monmouthshire, was a copywriter, and his mother, Nellie, was a Cockney barmaid. In 1941, John's father died of tuberculosis when he was 11 years old.

"We all of us waited for him to die," Osborne remembered. "The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss."

John Heilpern, in his 2006 biography John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man, believes that the death of his father and that of an older sister (also from TB) were the formative events of Osborne's life. Along with his unhappy first marriage (which informed the acidulous portryal of Anger protagonist Jimmy Porter's fictional marriage), these deaths were the genesis of Osborne's anger. Osborne's hatred of society, as elucidated on stage, was rooted in his life, not in politics. (For Osborne, the fact that May 8th was his father's birthday, as well as the day his career as a major dramatist was launched, assumed an almost mystical significance for him.)