Lest anyone should innocently visit the Shubert Theater, which now houses John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, I must warn you that the play is lousy, and that you will only be puzzled, annoyed, embarrassed and disgusted if you waste time and money on it. It did well in London; of course. It is concerned with a typically English character, the ugly, dishonorable, squalid, ambitious, and doomed figure from the constipated middle class, who has been dissected accurately by Anthony Powell in his realistic novels. Those who have seen Osborne’s earlier plays, especially Look Back in Anger, will recognize the Enraged Young Man, central figure in all his plays, in whom he feels such obsessive interest.
In an England preoccupied, almost morbidly, by class-consciousness and largely devoid of perceptive literary criticism, Osborne’s agony has been glibly attributed to his having lower- class origins. So far as Osborne’s Young Man is a proto type of vicious class hatred, he is, I suppose, a familiar figure on the island landscape. It is true that he is a victim— of society and of the Socialists. Consumed by fierce snobbery and ambition—the result of an education his parents never expected him to have —he finds in young manhood that the traditional, legitimate satisfaction of these passions is impossible. The Socialists have given him, a working-class boy, the education of a superior class—which they have ruined. And this education was never, and could not have been, the high-road to the Top which the Socialists pretended it was. Meanwhile, the economy of the nation is quite ruined; workers will not work, capitalists will not invest, the Empire which made a difference to every aspect of English life is now annihilated, and everybody is rather poor, especially boys who had nothing to start out with and depended on the hope of entering the solid English middle class.
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