Before Anger: The Devil Inside Him and Personal Enemy

[Acknowledgments] Acknowledgments I am grateful to all those whose advice and encouragement have been invaluable in this project, especially to Dr Tina Kendall, Senior Lecturer, Anglia Ruskin University; Kathryn Johnson, British Library Curator of Theatrical Manuscripts; Dr Steve Nicholson, Director of Drama, University of Sheffield; staff in the Reading Room at the Harry Ransom Center, especially Elspeth Healey. For access to his father‟s unpublished memoirs, and for his generosity, I acknowledge the contribution of Chris Duff, son of Patrick Desmond. I am particularly grateful to Gordon Dickerson of the Osborne Estate for his enthusiasm and good humour, and to all at Oberon. These two plays were discovered as part of the Theatre Archive Project (www.bl.uk/theatrearchive), a collaborative project between the British Library and the University of Sheffield. I am therefore indebted to my co-curator of The Golden Generation exhibition, Dr Alec Patton, and to the project leader Professor Dominic Shellard, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for External Affairs at the University of Sheffield, for their support and advice. The publication is dedicated to Ted Freeman and Monday mornings, 17 Woodland Road. [General Intro] „THAT WOULD HAVE MADE QUITE A DIFFERENCE‟: LOOKING BACK BEFORE LOOK BACK… John Osborne made theatrical history when Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court theatre on 8 May 1956. Yet as much as he made history, his story has also been powerfully shaped by the eternal critical and popular concentration on the play – riding waves of acclamation, contestation, and counter-revisionism - that has tied Osborne to the legend of „1956 and all that‟. In recalling the events of 1956, it is easy to slide into the myth of the Young Turk who, overnight, heralded a new beginning at the Royal Court with his very first play. In fact, Look Back was the twenty-six year old John Osborne‟s third play to be produced, as indeed it was the third play to open in the English Stage Company‟s first season at the Court. While recent years have seen increasing critical engagement with British theatre in the years before Look Back in Anger, disputing the once common view of a pre-1956 theatrical wasteland, few writers have concentrated on the theatre of Osborne before this time. Osborne himself made fleeting and disparaging references to his early plays in his autobiography, A Better Class of Person, but believed the texts themselves to have vanished, a supposition reiterated in John Heilpern‟s 2006 biography, A Patriot for Us. However, in 2008, as part of research for the British Library‟s The Golden Generation exhibition (part of the collaborative Theatre Archive Project with the University of Sheffield), copies of the two plays included in this volume emerged from the archives of the Lord Chamberlain. The Lord Chamberlain was the senior official of the Royal Household, whose arbitrary, unaccountable, and often antediluvian pronouncements dictated what could be seen on the English stage until the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. Although showing some signs of age, and filed by staff at St James‟s Palace in idiosyncratic fashion (Osborne is listed at one point as John Caborne), the typewritten texts are complete, and published here for the very first time. While Osborne had written at least seven plays before 1956, the two plays that follow are noteworthy not only for their survival, but also for the fact they were actually staged. As documentation of a young writer trying to settle upon his own distinct style, and of two generic (false?) routes he could have followed, both works are intriguing. Moreover, because the sole extant texts had been submitted for licensing to the Lord Chamberlain, both retain traces of the censor‟s infamous blue pencil, marks of hegemonic social and cultural assumptions in early 1950s Britain. Before Osborne began writing professionally, he was – like so many new playwrights who emerged during the 1950s - an actor. In January 1948 he was hired as Assistant Stage Manager and understudy for a regional tour of the West End hit No Room at the Inn, and it was during this tour, backstage at the Empire, Sunderland, that Osborne began work on his first play, Resting Deep. During the summer, Osborne began a relationship with Stella Linden, the new (married) leading lady on the tour, and it was through Stella‟s encouragement and editing that Osborne‟s early draft would later be produced under the title The Devil Inside Him. When the tour ended in December, Osborne and Stella moved to Brighton, where Stella‟s accommodating husband, theatre producer Patrick Desmond, allowed them to stay in his flat on Arundel Terrace. „Terrence Rattigan was around the corner, stars were above and around us‟: Osborne would always recall his halcyon year in Brighton with Stella with wistful affection, and it was during this period that the two lovers collaborated on a new play, Happy Birthday. The text has not survived, but in unpublished drafts of his autobiography Osborne hints at the direction his writing was taking. Ironically for a writer whose uncompromising vigour is often seen to have vanquished the previous generation of post-War verse-dramatists, in 1949 Osborne recalled: „I remember seeing The Lady’s not for Burning [verse drama by Christopher Fry] with some excitement, thinking at least here was something different and that perhaps this was a path I might take‟. However Osborne‟s new-found enthusiasm found little favour with his collaborator – „I became uneasily aware that Pat and Stella were intent upon producing plays that would out-Binkie [commercial producer Binkie Beaumont] Binkie in their Binkieness‟ – and by summer 1949 the relationship with Stella was over, and Happy Birthday abandoned. Yet the Patrick Desmond link endured, and after finding Osborne an ASM job in Leicester, Desmond put on The Devil Inside Him in Huddersfield in May 1950. Following his first professional production, Osborne met an actor called Anthony Creighton, joining his shoestring Saga Repertory Company - based first in Ilfracombe and moving afterwards to Hayling Island, Hampshire – as Company Manager, before the inevitable disbanding of the company in late 1950. The following year, acting in Bridgwater, he fell in love with Pamela Lane; they married in June 1951, and the bitter unravelling of their relationship over the next few years was to be acutely charted in Look Back in Anger. But before their marriage was staged with such muscular realism in Look Back, Osborne chronicled it in an altogether more oblique way in The Great Bear: or Minette, written in London public libraries between engagements during 1952. Two notebooks have survived, comprising the first two acts, as well as thirty-nine pages of the third act (which ends, in medias res, with the unfulfilled promise: „Continued in Book III‟). Osborne was clearly still under the spell of the verse-dramatists, and what Jimmy Porter described as „a good slosh of Eliot‟ runs through the play. Of more interest, however, is the way in which its structure, narrative, characters and rhetorical tropes so closely mirror his famous follow-up: Look Back in free verse. Intriguingly, the image of bears and squirrels (the nicknames Osborne and Pamela gave each other) runs strongly through the play. Minette was originally titled The Animal’s Nest, and the animal metaphors and language are both a refuge („I played with you first as an animal, and I was happy‟) and at the same time a paradise constantly menaced: „O those are traps of steel for you to blunder into…these are men to manacle you monsters, to make you dance pathetically, fastened to a chain‟. The bear and squirrel sequence that concluded Look Back was criticised by Kenneth Tynan in his otherwise legendary encomium, and would cost the play an immediate West End transfer, but the image was clearly one that Osborne had been engaging with in his writing for several years, and no whimsical, artificial graft. For the moment, however, Pamela‟s verdict on his work was unequivocal – „dull and boring‟ – and peripatetic years as a wandering player continued, sometimes overlapping with young writers in waiting such as Peter Nichols and Harold Pinter. Osborne completed a new play, The King is Dead, in early 1953, and when Pamela found work in Derby in the autumn, he remained in London with Anthony Creighton, researching and collaborating on a McCarthy play, Personal Enemy. Pamela‟s star was rising at the Derby Playhouse, and in early 1954 Osborne briefly joined her, an unhappy period that marked the beginning of the end of their marriage (they divorced in 1957). In between engagements at the Playhouse, Osborne furiously searched for an agent to take on Personal Enemy, and in letters to Creighton he tracked the changing fortunes of Senator McCarthy, speculating on the likely implications of his fall for their play. At the same time, Osborne looked for a theatre for The King is Dead, and sent a copy to Kenneth Rose at the Playhouse, Kidderminster (where Osborne had played the previous summer), enclosing admiring quotes from Richard Findlater and Dame Sybil Thorndike. Rose was cautiously encouraging, though felt that Osborne went 'completely off the rails' after the first Act; embarrassingly, he was unimpressed by the letters of support, and claimed to have seen at least a dozen recent plays with 'Sybil Thorndike's blessing attached to them'. Personal Enemy was eventually staged the following year by Osborne's old mentor, Patrick Desmond, although by the time it opened in Harrogate in March 1955, Osborne claimed to have lost interest in the work (in fact, he was still sending the script to theatres, including the Bristol Old Vic, after the Harrogate production). An autumn tour of Wales in Pygmalion was followed by a cold and impecunious London winter with Creighton, during which Osborne again collaborated on a new play with his flat-mate. Creighton had developed a dramatic situation derived from his experiences working at the telephone exchange, and onto his basic plot Osborne began to add dialogue, and a title: Epitaph for George Dillon. Epitaph is the only preLook Back play of Osborne‟s to have been performed and published after 1956, and a substantially revised version was first produced –to no little acclaim- by the Royal Court in a post-Look Back glow in 1958. In addition to the staging of Personal Enemy, the early months of 1955 saw Osborne begin a new work, eventually titled Look Back in Anger. The play was finished on 3 June, and having been turned down by Patrick Desmond, it was submitted to the usual trial by agents, before eventually ending up at the newly formed English Stage Company at the Royal Court. By now, history seeps into legend, and the events that led to George Devine rowing out towards Osborne and Creighton‟s barge on the Thames, which in turn led to 8 May 1956, are well known. Ten years later, in November 1966, John Osborne gave evidence to the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on Censorship of the Theatre, an investigation that led to the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. As part of his testimony, he mentioned his earlier, pre-1956 work, and recalled his brush with censorship (which he mis-remembers as taking place in 1951). Evidently interested, the committee speculated that „had it not been for the existence of the Lord Chamberlain, you might have made your appearance as a dramatist in this country in 1951 instead of 1956‟, concluding „that would have made quite a difference, would it not?‟ In publishing the two plays of John Osborne to be produced before 1956, we do not take aim at the radical impact or influence of Look Back in Anger. Rather, in bringing to light two intriguing works that are of significance to the story of Osborne itself the story of post-War theatre - we hope to gently underscore the fact that a teleological view of theatre history is never the full story. A legend is an invisible melding of false starts, dead ends, and the capricious vicissitudes of chance: things might always have been different. [Timeline] Chronology of Osborne‟s early work 1929 JO born on 12 December, son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne and Nellie Beatrice Grove. 1948 JO ASM and understudy for „number two‟ tour of No Room at the Inn. JO begins writing Resting Deep in March in Sunderland, completing it in Leeds the following month. Stella Linden joins the tour in summer; helps JO re-write Resting Deep (now re-titled The Devil Inside Him). Stella begins affair with JO. JO and Stella move to Brighton in December, JO acts in Treasure Island pantomime over Christmas. 1949 JO and Stella begin work on Happy Birthday. Short of money, Stella takes job as waitress, JO finds work in hotel. Stella leaves JO during summer. 1950 Patrick Desmond finds JO job as ASM in Leicester. The Devil Inside Him opens at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, on 29 May; JO reunited briefly with Stella for first night. JO joins Anthony Creighton‟s Saga Repertory Company. 1951 Acting in Bridgwater, JO meets Pamela Elizabeth Lane, whom he marries on 23 June. JO gets job in Camberwell, London. 1952 JO writes The Great Bear: or Minette; Pamela on tour. JO begins The King is Dead later in the year (completed January 1953). 1953 JO acts in See How They Run at Frinton-on-Sea in July and August. The programme lists Peter Nichols as Lance-Corporal Winton and John Osborne as The Intruder. Pamela finds work at Derby Playhouse in autumn; JO and Creighton begin to collaborate on Personal Enemy. Fragments of later plays including Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Luther, and A Patriot for Me begin to appear in JO's notebooks. 1954 JO briefly joins Pamela in Derby, before returning to London to live with Anthony Creighton. While at Derby, JO sends copies of Personal Enemy and The King is Dead to several agents and theatre owners. 1955. Personal Enemy opens at the Opera House, Harrogate, on 1 March. JO and Creighton collaborate on Epitaph for George Dillon (opened 11 February 1958), completed by 25 March. Look Back in Anger finished on 3 June. JO begins Love in a Myth in November, finished 5 December; the play was reworked as a musical and staged as The World of Paul Slickey (opened on 14 April 1959). 1956 Look Back in Anger opens on 8 May at the Royal Court theatre, a month after the nascent English Stage Company‟s opening production of The Mulberry Bush. NOTES The texts of the plays are taken from the Lord Chamberlain's Playscripts collection, held at the British Library Department of Manuscripts. Both texts were exhibited for the first time as part of The Golden Generation exhibition, British Library Folio Society Gallery, 27 August-30 November 2008. The Devil Inside Him. LCP 1950/1608. Resubmitted by Patrick Desmond as Cry for Love. LCP 1961/65. Personal Enemy. LCP/ 7672. A copy of the script was returned to Osborne and Creighton by the Lord Chamberlain's office, and is also held in the British Library's John Osborne Collection. Osborne 158. Other background material taken from: the archive of John Osborne, and Osborne's letters to Anthony Creighton, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Lord Chamberlain's Reader Reports, British Library; Osborne's autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981); John Heilpern's biography John Osborne: A Patriot for Us (2006). [intro to first play The Devil Inside Him] THE DEVIL INSIDE HIM We few, we happy few… Henry V One afternoon she introduced me to the assistant stage manager, a willowy good-looking young man of eighteen. Stella had already told me about him, that he looked like a Greek god and wrote marvelous poetry…A few weeks later, Stella brought me a play he had written…It was very interesting, but useless. In his unpublished memoirs, Patrick Desmond recalls the moment when his wife, Stella Linden, introduced him to her fellow actor and soon-to-be lover, John Osborne. In spring 1948, Osborne had completed the first draft of what he later described as „a melodrama about a poetic Welsh loon called Resting Deep‟, and had shown it to Stella. Schooled in the demands of repertory theatre, Stella immediately identified a lack of structure, and advised a crash-course in the well-made plays of Pinero. Stella‟s supercilious surprise that Osborne had not read The Second Mrs Tanqueray („that, she suggested, accounted for my blundering‟) has its comic counterpoint in Epitaph for George Dillon when the shady producer reacts to George‟s ignorance of I Was a Drug Fiend: „no wonder you write like you do. I thought everyone had seen that‟. Of equal concern to Stella was Osborne‟s soaring language, since any „intimation of poetry in the theatre was pornography to her‟. Nonetheless, Desmond was hoping to take over the Granville theatre in Waltham Green, and Stella hinted at a production of Resting Deep for the opening season… if changes could be made. Accordingly, the two lovers set to work reshaping the play, adding „a few coarse jokes‟, and re-titling it The Devil Inside Him. Over thirty years later, Osborne recalled one of these jokes – the daffy daily woman singing a song called „Oh let me play with your snowballs‟ - with glee, marvelling at how they had sneaked it past the Lord Chamberlain. He was to be less successful in subsequent encounters with the official censor. Waltham Green remained a pipe dream however, and after their tour had ended, Osborne and Stella moved together to Brighton, where they collaborated on a new play. However, Osborne‟s continued attachment to poetical drama became a source of tension, and he remembered „Stella berating me for my inexperience and disastrous tendency to poeticise rather than dramatise‟. As the glorious summer of 1949 drew to a close, so did their relationship; that The Devil Inside Him survived the liaison was due entirely to Patrick Desmond. Producer, director, actor; Desmond was above all an impresario, with an impressive theatrical pedigree dating back to the 1930s. In the 1960s he would set up a touring company with a young Cameron Mackintosh, but he was the kind of larger-than-life figure fated to disappear from the English stage with the decline of weekly rep. Osborne admitted to partly modelling the gregarious theatre producer Barney in Epitaph for George Dillon on Desmond, and it may be no coincidence that an actor called George Dillon was playing in Desmond productions at this time. In early 1950, Desmond secured the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, for a short repertory season, to include The Devil Inside Him. Although Osborne had volunteered to play the leading role in his play, an „exciting young actor‟ was engaged instead (cynically glossed by Osborne as „someone inexperienced and cheap‟), and „the world premiere‟ of The Devil began to be breathlessly advertised as a „turbulent drama with love, hate and murder‟. On Easter Monday [in fact it opened on Whit Monday] 1950 I sat in the stalls of the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, watching the world opening of my play, holding hands with my coauthor…After less than eighteen months in the theatre, I was watching my own play – or a version of it – being performed in a professional theatre. Takings on the opening night were good, and the Huddersfield Daily Examiner hailed the „real dramatic instinct behind the play‟, as well as the performance of Reginald Barratt as Huw („as brilliant a piece of acting as we have seen…for a long time‟). However, audiences waned throughout the rest of the week and, in Desmond‟s words, 'it created no stir‟. Although Osborne affectionately remembered the opening night, he found his „remaining wastegrounds of poetry‟ had begun to pall, and in retrospect seems not to have dissented from the opinion of the official censor: „A conventionally gloomy play about the Welsh as I hope they are not?‟ The Devil Inside Him is, however, far more absorbing than the Lord Chamberlain, or perhaps its author, would give it credit for. The opening scene would have been familiar to rep audiences of the time: a mysterious lodger - redolent perhaps of The Mousetrap’s Mr Paravicini - creeps down the stairs of the boarding house, and we don‟t have to wait long for the introduction of a comically garrulous daily woman, and a precociously seductive servant girl. As the play advances, however, an exploration of the cost of being true to oneself - of finding a place in an indifferent world – emerges. These are concerns familiar to Osborne‟s later heroes, and to the roll-call of Osborne‟s (sometimes) happy few, to the Jimmy Porters and the Colonel Redls, can be added a new member of the band of brothers: Huw Prosser. Huw is established early in the play as an elemental, almost animalistic, foil to the hypocrisy of so-called civilised village society. Lengthy stage directions detail Huw‟s way of eating („There is a strange almost primitive delicacy about the way he eats and drinks. Perhaps it can be best compared to a rabbit‟) in sharp contrast to the socialised routines of his parents who „continue with their meal stolidly‟. Later, in everincreasing flights of verbal extravagances, the sterility of the house is opposed to the integrity of the natural world: I can show you the softness of the mists, wandering like strangers amongst the marshes; where the sad music of the wild birds runs like mountain water over the strings of the young reeds. I can show you the smell of dead bark freshly chipped from its tree; the urgent smell of early morning and the hushed smell of the evening. Yet the natural world is not idealised, and Huw‟s job at the village butcher allows for an early intimation that the truth of the natural world barely conceals its primal violence: „Have you ever seen a pig slaughtered? They hold its head, grip its ears and sit on it, like sitting on a bicycle. And they cut its throat just as you might cut an apple. And it screams.‟ While this may not seem obvious table-talk, for Huw it is the honesty of his description that counts, an honesty that his father is unable to face („Such a pity he couldn‟t have worked in the Insurance Office with his cousin David‟, is all he can muster in response). As the play progresses, it becomes clear that the village is paralysed by the prospect of such plain speaking, and numbed by fear of an ill-defined outside world. The icy minister, Mr Gruffuyd, accords himself the power to define and root out evil in the village‟s midst, and in so doing employs the language of medieval witch-hunts: „The devil is inside you, Huw. Can you feel him? Living in the filth inside you?‟ In Gruffuyd‟s determination to expel „the voice of the devil, the tempter‟, the play dramatises a repressive society not dissimilar to the hysterical paranoia of McCarthyite America that Osborne would turn to in his next play to be performed, Personal Enemy (1955). More prosaically, the puritan Welsh minister is perhaps also a jab at a fellow actor in No Room at the Inn whom Osborne suspected of spreading gossip about his affair with Stella (his „Welshness and Puritanism made him a likely double dealer‟). In the confrontation at the end of Act III, the underlying structure of the Minister‟s cruelty is subtly dissected by Burn (a medical student and raisonneur of the piece), when he articulates a charge directed at crusading hypocrites throughout the ages: „You can‟t stamp out what doesn‟t exist. You create evil. You want it…that‟s your business, isn‟t it? Denying life and creating your “evil” myth, making beauty into ugliness.‟ The play is a plea for resistance to this stultifying world-view, an appeal for a unity of mind and soul, and for „all the good things that life has to offer‟. In light of this, what then are we to make of the act that defines the play‟s narrative, and the character of Huw: his murder of the servant girl, Dilys, at the end of Act II. Or rather, almost at the end of Act II, for a crucial, single page, wordless scene is interpolated before the Curtain, which suggests how we might read this sudden irruption of violence. The murder scene is indicative of the way the play as a whole is positioned intriguingly between two theatrical eras. On the one hand, a good murder is a staple of the well-made rep thriller, and a common conceit to accelerate and concentrate narrative. It can set up a who-dunnit in the best Christie tradition, the characters assembling in a single room for a classic unmasking scene: the daily woman in the kitchen, or the shady commercial traveller with the candlestick? However, by showing the murder on-stage, and by allowing the other characters to quickly understand the identity of the killer, this approach is effectively denied. Is it then an act of isolated madness (Osborne later termed Huw „a Welsh loon‟), an acte gratuit? The detailed stage directions to the wordless scene suggest that by choosing to strike against the moralising of the village, and by assuming the consequences, the murder is in fact a truly existential – and thus transformative - act. This is another Huw…He seems to stand up straight mentally and physically for the first time…None of his movements are hurried, neither are they unsure. It is an act that visibly re-defines Huw and his ethical configuration within a new freedom. We might compare this total transformation in Huw to the new-found selfawareness and decisiveness of Sartre's existential hero, Orestes, after the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in the play Les Mouches, Sartre's existential gloss on the Oresteia (produced in London as The Flies in 1947). For all Osborne‟s later fulminating against the pretensions of the prevailing French drama, he was reflecting deeply on the Existentialists‟ emphasis on the vertiginous imperative of choice and freedom. In one of his early notebooks, among notes for Sartre‟s classic existentialist novel L’âge de raison (Age of Reason), Osborne grudgingly admitted: „I can't help feeling that those existentialists for all their raffishness have got something…We really do seem to be dominated by choice.‟ However, there is failure at the heart of the play‟s narrative and extra-digetic spaces, and it is a failure of language. Huw‟s action is a step towards selfhood, but (like Orestes) it is an alienating act that he is unable to share, except, briefly and tentatively, with Burn. „Every loveliness I have known has been a secret one‟, Huw admits, and his early reading of Sonnet CVI - „Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise‟ - points at his inability to engage fully with his fellow human beings through language. Despite the clarity of the manner in which he assumes his act, communication – defined by Burn as „the way from our loneliness‟ – is beyond Huw. Similarly, Osborne‟s dramatic language cannot quite convince in its attempts to enclose his tilt at conventional morality, and his bold appeal to the strength of the individual. The „flashes of poetry‟ ultimately distract from his keenly felt convictions, and it would take a few more years before the violence of Osborne‟s passion would find a more apposite means of expression through the demotic furies of Jimmy Porter in his third play to be produced: Look Back in Anger. [The Devil play text] The Devil Inside Him was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, on 29 May 1950, with the following cast: MRS EVANS MR STEPHENS MRS PROSSER DILYS HUW MR PROSSER BURN MR GRUFFYD June Ellis L. J. Meddick Hilda Stanley Stella Linden Reginald Barratt Alan Bromly Tim Turner Maurice Durant Directed by Stella Linden, scenery designed and painted by A. S. Saunders. The Devil Inside Him was revived under the title Cry for Love (attributed to „Robert Owen‟) by Patrick Desmond at the Pembroke Theatre, Croydon, on 8 January 1962. [intro to second play Personal Enemy] PERSONAL ENEMY It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar. John Osborne‟s second play to be produced, Personal Enemy, is set in small-town America in August 1953, in the middle of Plath‟s „queer, sultry summer.‟ Amid an atmosphere as feverish as the close summer heat (referenced with conspicuous frequency by the characters), Cold War tensions within the United States were intensifying; on 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted in SingSing for conspiracy to commit espionage, while the unsatisfactory ceasefire agreed in Korea a month later did little to calm anxieties about waning American military and moral supremacy. Personal Enemy addresses these Cold War tensions through the microcosm of the Constant family, who live unremarkable, „apple-pie‟ lives in an imaginary allAmerican town. Even in the suburbs, the Cold War is never far away: early on, we learn that the family‟s elder son, Don, has been reported killed in Korea, while back home, his sister describes the all-pervasive atmosphere of fear: Things are brewing up all around us now. You can feel it everywhere, Mom. People are frightened. While the Rosenbergs are never specifically mentioned, an atmosphere of domestic paranoia is thus clearly established, and references to blacklisting, testifying before Committees, or a character‟s dismissal from the State Department make this play a rare example in 1950s England of „committed‟, social-realistic Cold War theatre. In drafts of his autobiography, Osborne describes the genesis of Personal Enemy, when he was living in London with Anthony Creighton, leaving Pamela in Derby: The McCarthy trials were at their height and I became interested in them. They seemed like the material for a play and something for me to absorb myself in until perhaps such time as Pamela came back. Osborne spent several weeks reading transcripts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the American Library in Grosvenor Square, and developed the text from his own editing of the transcripts, combined with Creighton‟s „rather ludicrous melodramatic plot‟. After finishing the draft, Osborne sent a copy to Sam Wanamaker (himself, a highprofile victim of McCarthyism), and was surprised when the actor replied, offering to discuss the play. If Osborne later dismissed the significance of Personal Enemy, claiming he only began to collaborate with Creighton „out of laziness or want of companionship‟, a letter sent by Pamela from Derby suggests the prospect of the Wanamaker meeting had given him hope for the work: Bully for Bears [Osborne] going to see Wanamaker. I can just imagine the interview!… I shall kick myself if you come up here or go to any rep job just as things start happening to Personal Enemy. In fact, little came of the meeting in January 1954. „Knowing nothing about America‟, Osborne had expected Wanamaker „to fault the technical details‟. Instead, Osborne records that the older actor expressed admiration for the play, but worried that it was too critical of America for British audiences to accept. Seeing in this „tepid endorsement‟ the kind of self-imposed fear that Personal Enemy denounces, Osborne later wrote: „for casuistry or timidity, I thought his verdict took the Binkie Beaumont biscuit‟. With immediate hopes for a production dashed, Osborne was on more familiar ground in sending the text to producer Patrick Desmond (indeed, he originally conceived the melodrama as „a superior kind of Patrick Desmond package‟), who agreed to produce the play at the Opera House, Harrogate, in March 1955. In preparation, Desmond submitted the text to the Lord Chamberlain‟s office for licensing, and soon ran into difficulties caused by the censors‟ identification of „dubious lines‟. Not, as we might suppose, concerning the explicit criticism of Britain‟s war-time ally and references to the Communist Party, but because of the equivocal sexuality of the two Constant sons, and the carefully codifed suggestion of homosexuality. The mid 1950s saw the Lord Chamberlain embark on ever more furious attempts to uphold the ban on the representation of homosexuality in the theatre; after all, as Lord Clarendon mused in 1951, the subject was „very distasteful and embarrassing in mixed company‟ and „might start an unfortunate train of thought in the previously innocent‟. Although the ban was relaxed post-Wolfenden Report, the censors‟ radar was particularly attuned in 1955, and even references codified in reaction to the existence of censorship were in their turn disallowed; in vain did Osborne and Creighton imagine the younger Constant son, Arnie, would be allowed to read Walt Whitman‟s Leaves of Grass, and a reference to the title is crossed through in blue pencil, and stamped: „DELETED BY THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN‟. In fact, even within the narrative, the depiction of the sons‟ sexuality is necessarily ambiguous. The play overloads early references to Arnie‟s long, soft hair, his „refined‟ nature, his „long and delicate‟ hands, even his gardening style („I‟ve never seen a man handle flowers the way he does‟), while Don is not entirely „clean and decent‟ and - even worse – is „a poet‟. When the FBI Investigator combines these early intimations with accusations of deviant political sympathies (a historically astute and accurate observation by the authors), it all becomes too much for the Lord Chamberlain‟s examiner, who strikes through the lines: Mr Constant: Just what are you implying? Investigator: (with deliberation) You know just what I mean, Mr. Constant – they go together: Communists and - However, by the third act, a well-timed pregnancy seemingly re-establishes an acceptable hetero-sexual status quo („Never fails. Get someone in the family way in the Third Act- you‟re half way there‟, Barney counsels the young writer in Epitaph for George Dillon). This is to the relief of the mother in the play‟s diegetic space, but to the consternation of the baffled censor, who by now was struggling with the complex interplay of signifiers. At one point, the assistant examiner noted in the margins that „this could be political not sexual‟, the implication being that the latter represented a far graver danger to audiences than the former. To test his suspicions, the examiner, St Vincent Troubridge, passed the play up the chain. At this point, the senior examiner intervened, concluding that „the perverted element seems to be a gratuitous addition to an anti-Communist theme‟, and that „all traces‟ should be removed, a suggestion endorsed by the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Scarborough. So fazed by the suggestions of homosexuality was the senior examiner, that he seems to have mis-diagnosed a play that –while hardly toeing a CP line- is openly critical of HUAC. In one of the play's reviews, The Harrogate Advertiser predicted that „if ever we have un-English activities inquisitors on this pattern, our sense of humour will see us through.‟ While the reviewer may have found the zealous Investigator to „verge on the farcical‟, I want to suggest that McCarthyite inquisitions carried a contemporary English resonance for the play's authors. Post-war persecution of homosexuals was not confined to the Lord Chamberlain, and the conviction of Lord Monatgu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood on indecency charges in March 1954 – during the composition of Personal Enemy - was one of a number of high-profile prosecutions in this period. The Montagu case is described in Dominic Shellard's biography of Kenneth Tynan as England‟s „closest experience to McCarthyism‟, and Osborne was deeply affected by the police actions: 'so pointless, stupid and vindictive…how can sex between two consenting adults be CRIMINAL?' In letters sent to Anthony Creighton from Derby, it is evident that Osborne was following the trial attentively, and on one occasion he relates 'inside information' from a friend that 'there's no doubt the police are out for blood now…it's going to be quite a witch hunt.' Some of this concern clearly seeps into the play's depiction of the persecution of the Constant family; for all the charges of homophobia that would later be levelled against Osborne, in 1954 he was adamant that the three defendants in the Montagu trial were 'martyrs in a new battle', and it was 'up to the undoubtedly strong enlightened minority to exert pressure in high places'. To the censors‟ fury, Personal Enemy had been sent for licensing just a few days before the intended opening, Patrick Desmond rather bizarrely claiming he had not realised it needed to be licensed as „it is an American play‟ (in fact, the canny Desmond was to play on the vogue for American theatre by promoting the work as „the European premiere of the sensational American drama‟, a disingenuous line apparently swallowed by reviewers). The late submission led to chaotic scenes in rehearsals as cast and author attempted to incorporate the Lord Chamberlain‟s swingeing cuts, and make sense of the narrative without the disallowed vital plot device. The consequent incoherence of the censored play was remarked on by reviewers (The Stage noted „some confusion in the story‟, while the Harrogate Advertiser wondered if the narrative obscurity was „perhaps because of the censor‟s hand‟), and in such unpropitious circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the play was quickly forgotten. Yet, for all the awkwardness of the early exposition, and despite the reliance on the hoary conventions of the rep thriller (shadowy figures appear at the door, revelations fall conveniently at curtain lines), the play is an acute, and occasionally subtle, dramatisation of the dangers of betraying one‟s personal integrity by conforming to external pressures. For a dramatist whose early acclaim rests on his acute staging of the ennui of post-War English youth, we may find Osborne‟s early interest in American society surprising. Yet, beyond the socio-political actuality, what 1950s Cold War America offered the neophyte writer was a powerful dramatic situation: the characters must choose, for themselves and for others, and in taking a stand, we feel something that transcends their everyday lives is at stake. If Look Back in Anger’s Jimmy Porter bemoaned the lack of „good, brave causes‟ in post-War England, at the conclusion of Personal Enemy, Mr Constant comes to the realisation that „it‟s time somebody made a stand against all this being kicked around‟, and seems to have rediscovered his self-respect through his resolve: „You know- I‟m quite looking forward to it.‟ Moreover, in contrast to the alienation felt by Huw in The Devil Inside Him, Mr Constant feels a communion with others through his contestation of power structures, and his final words to his wife before he goes to testify are both personally and politically affirming: „You know another thing? We haven‟t been so close together in years, as we are now.‟ Personal Enemy is no masterpiece, but in its interweaving of personal and national destinies, its examination of the need to confront feelings of fear and shame with an often lonely courage, even in its references to „the devil‟s work‟ and the suggestion of „so many witches‟ lurking beneath the surface of the American Dream, the play is not beyond recalling a contemporary classic that would precede Look Back in Anger in the Royal Court‟s opening season. I am talking, of course, about Arthur Miller‟s The Crucible. In presenting, for the first time, the uncensored text of Personal Enemy, we hope to reclaim it from the destructive intentions of the Lord Chamberlain‟s censors, as well as presenting a play not, perhaps, without resonance for our own times. [Personal Enemy play text] Personal Enemy was first performed at the Opera House, Harrogate, on 1 March 1955, with the following cast: CARYL KESSLER SAM KESSLER MRS CONSTANT MR CONSTANT ARNIE CONSTANT MRS SLIFER THE REV. MERRICK AN INVESTIGATOR WARD PERRY Mary Kean David Lawton Ursula Granville Douglas Malcolm Barry England Maud Long C. Lethbridge Baker Alan Foss Tom Conway Directed by Patrick Desmond, settings by Oliver Richardson.