Word: angers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...John Osborne wrote, "is the one unforgettable feast in my calendar." It was the birthday of the playwright's beloved father Thomas, whose early, lonely death would scar young John for life. On May 8, 1956, in London, Osborne's play Look Back in Anger had its premiere -- a seismic shock that seemed to signal the birth of a new urgency and the death of the reigning theatrical gentility. "When I saw Look Back in Anger," said John Gielgud, a star of the old school, "I thought my number...
...when Osborne, 65, died of diabetes and other complaints. And Osborne was not such a radical that he couldn't find use for the great old British lions; in The Entertainer he gave Laurence Olivier his meatiest modern role as a decayed vaudevillian. But with Look Back in Anger, the 26-year-old actor-author, who never went to university and who, only a year before, was playing callow Freddy Eynsford Hill in a road-company Pygmalion, forever changed the face of theater...
...manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight. The acid tone, at once comic and desperate, sustained Osborne throughout a volatile career as playwright, film writer (Tom Jones) and memoirist (A Better Class of Person). More important, it stoked a ferment in a then sleepy popular culture. Anger's curdling inflections and class animosities were echoed in the plays of Joe Orton and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a direct descendant), in Dennis Potter's savage TV scripts and in a generation of performers, from Albert Finney to the Beatles, whom Osborne's example...
...Osborne the stage was a cage. And prowling inside was Anger's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, a bear with poisoned claws, a creature of sadistic, pathetic, possessive, unflagging rage -- rage at the world in general and at any woman in particular, notably his wife Alison. His simmering emotional violence may provoke Alison to break into tears, shy a hot iron at him or walk out. Yet Jimmy sees himself as a Byronic figure, the last righteous romantic. No one can feel things as intensely as he; no one can feel so bereft or betrayed. He can connect with people only when...
...population experts see a future tide of babies as a problem to be solved; the Pope sees these infants-in- waiting as precious lives, the gifts of God. The church's doctrine that condoms should not be used under any circumstances has provoked, in the age of AIDS, deep anger. Henri Tincq, who writes on religious subjects for Paris' Le Monde, sums up this reaction, "The church's refusal of condoms even for saving lives is absolutely incomprehensible. It disqualifies the church from having any role in the whole debate over AIDS." As heartless as John Paul's position...