Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Howling from the Sidelines
By Fintan O'Toole
John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man
by John Heilpern
Knopf, 527 pp., $35.00
In the last play he wrote before his death in 1994, John Osborne returned to where it all began. As the curtain comes up on Déjàvu, the audience is meant to experience the sense of uncanny familiarity alluded to in the title. Two men, Jimmy and his sidekick Cliff, are lounging about with the Sunday newspapers and a woman called Alison is behind them, doing the ironing. We are back at the start of Look Back in Anger, the play that, in 1956, transformed Osborne from obscure actor to spokesman for a generation.
Review, 4469 words
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