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Plays 3: A Patriot for Me / Luther / Inadmissible Evidence
This third collection of John Osborne's dramatic work includes three classic plays for the stage which confirm his reputation as one of the greatest British playwrights of the twentieth century.
A Patriot for Me
'It is a landmark play in its open treatment of homosexuality and in the breadth of its historical canvas... few post-war plays have dealt so brilliantly with the way the individual, in rejecting the ethos of his society, also uncannily reflects it.' Guardian
Luther
'The language is urgent and sinewy, packed with images that derive from bone, blood and marrow; the prose, especially in Luther's sermons, throbs with a rhetorical zeal that has not been heard in English historical drama since the seventeenth century.' Kenneth Tynan
Inadmissible Evidence
'This is a work of stunning and intemperate power, a great bellow of rage and pain... there is a self-lacerating honesty about his writing that few other playwrights have come close to matching.' Daily Telegraph
A Patriot for Me
'It is a landmark play in its open treatment of homosexuality and in the breadth of its historical canvas... few post-war plays have dealt so brilliantly with the way the individual, in rejecting the ethos of his society, also uncannily reflects it.' Guardian
Luther
'The language is urgent and sinewy, packed with images that derive from bone, blood and marrow; the prose, especially in Luther's sermons, throbs with a rhetorical zeal that has not been heard in English historical drama since the seventeenth century.' Kenneth Tynan
Inadmissible Evidence
'This is a work of stunning and intemperate power, a great bellow of rage and pain... there is a self-lacerating honesty about his writing that few other playwrights have come close to matching.' Daily Telegraph
280 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1998
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About the author
John Osborne
259 books111 followersPeople 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.
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