John Osborne
Список книг автора John Osborne
Tom Jones
Tom Jones was Henry Fielding’s greatest work. The first piece of English prose to be considered a novel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised it as ‘one of the most perfect plots ever planned’. A hero, a heroine, dead parents, adversity, misadventure, mistakes and then resolution, happy ever after. A story told throughout the ages, part of our collective unconscious. Uproarious and unconventional, Tom Jones was adapted by John Osborne for the 1963 Oscar-winning film. Directed by Tony Richardson and starring Albert Finney, it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The novel has been used as a basis for opera and television adaptations as well as Osborne’s much-loved screenplay. Re-published in this new edition, Tom Jones is eminently suitable for stage productions.
Before Anger - Two Early Plays: The Devil Inside Him & Personal Enemy
The first performance of Look Back in Anger in 1956 ushered in a new period of British theatre, and its success established the previously unknown John Osborne as a new playwright of the first rank. Contrary to popular perception, Look Back was not Osborne's first play to be performed, and two of his early plays had already enjoyed professional productions. Copies of the scripts, thought to have been lost, were rediscovered in the British Library in 2008, and are presented for the first time here.The Devil Inside Him (1950) was the 21 year-old Osborne's earliest attempt at a full-length play, and concerns a young Welshman, Huw, at odds with the hypocrisy and imaginative poverty of his community. It was re-written with help from Osborne's then-lover, Stella Linden.Personal Enemy (1955) was written with Anthony Creighton with whom Osborne later collaborated with on Epitaph for George Dillon. Set in small-town America during summer of 1953 – at the height of the anti-communist witch-hunts – the play tells the story of a family torn apart by a country's political, and sexual, paranoia.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
As London slides from one century into the next, a young man is cursed with the uncanny ability to remain both young and beautiful while descending into a life of heartless debauchery. With its glittering dialogue, provocative imagery and radical questioning of sexual and moral freedoms all brought sharply into focus by this brand-new adaptation, Oscar Wilde’s infamous parable has lost none of its power to provoke and disturb. Using Wilde’s original words, a company of sixteen actors and all of adaptor Neil Bartlett’s trademark theatricality, this new stage version of Wilde’s black-hearted parable was commissioned by and first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre in the autumn season of 2012.
Four Plays
Osborne here delivers his trademark eloquence, rage and devastating wit. A Sense of Detachment satirises our heartless, profiteering society, while defending timeless human values. The End of Me Old Cigar examines the decadent lives of a collection of leading media figures. The television play Jill and Jack is a comic gem that satirises the conventions of its own genre while also being a close study of sexual warfare. A Place Calling Itself Rome is a powerful reworking of Shakespeare's Coriolanus .
A Subject of Scandal and Concern
‘I have injured no man’s reputation, taken no man’s property, attacked no man’s person, violated no oath, taught no immorality.I was asked a question and answered it openly.’ Cheltenham, 1842. George Jacob Holyoake is a poor young teacher, making his way from Birmingham to Bristol to visit a friend who has been imprisoned for publishing a journal that criticises the establishment. When he makes a stop in Cheltenham to address a lecture, his words and his overwhelming commitment to speaking the truth will change his life forever. Arrested and tried for blasphemy, and separated from his starving wife and child, Holyoake is faced with the choice of conforming or staying true to his beliefs in a time of injustice and intolerance. Based on the true story of the last man to stand trial for blasphemy in England, A Subject of Scandal and Concern was originally written for television in 1960 starring Richard Burton and Rachel Roberts, and directed by Tony Richardson, and was first seen onstage in Nottingham in the early 1960s. A Subject of Scandal and Concern received its London premiere at the Finborough Theatre in May 2016, marking the first theatrical staging of the play in over 40 years.
