Word: epitaph
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After Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer had made John Osborne famous, he raided his trunk and came up with Epitaph for George Dillon, a product of his early, hungry years. Though it was written in collaboration with Anthony Creighton, Dillon shows unmistakable signs of being Osborne's work, and as such it was produced in London and New York. (If Creighton does not receive his due from audience or critics, it is because most of them have never heard of him, and have no way of knowing what...
...Epitaph for George Dillon is the first of Osborne's attempts to jolt British drama out of the drawing rooms in which it has lived and dozed for many years. It is set in an utterly drab and ugly middle-class house in a London suburb--and a complicated setting it is too, with sitting room, kitchen, hall, stair, and bedroom all simultaneously visible...
...wife is not a rational act on Dillon's part, but an admission of defeat; a retreat into the ghastly middle-class morass that he describes so frequently and with such emphatic relish; a form of suicide. Having effected this mock-death, he speaks his own epitaph, in which he convicts himself of total futility...
Shall I recite my epitaph to you? Yes, do recite your epitaph to me. "Here lies the body of George Dillon, aged thirty-four--or thereabouts--who thought, who hoped, he was that mysterious, ridiculous being called an artist. He never allowed himself one day of peace...He achieved nothing he set out to do. He made no one happy...he loved no one successfully. He was a bit of a bore, and, frankly, rather useless. But the germs loved...
...glued onto it a cloying narration and a sound track that often seems loudly superfluous. Even as the lemmings plunge crazily toward the ocean-a sight that needs no gratuitous comment of any sort-the orchestra swells to bursting and the voice of the narrator booms their gooey epitaph: "And so is acted out the legend of mass suicide . . . It is not given to man to understand all of nature's mysteries...