Observations: A look back at anger

111 Never before staged, John Osborne's 1972 play A Place Calling Itself Rome will be given a reading at London's King's Head Theatre on Sunday. When Osborne wrote it, he was several years into his fourth marriage, to the actress Jill Bennett, whom he called "a pretty scalpel" and "Adolf". This adaptation of Coriolanus was the first of three plays that were rejected everywhere. The other two, The End of Me Old Cigar and a dramatisation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, finally got a showing at the Greenwich Theatre in 1975, but the 30 producers and directors to whom Osborne sent his version of the Shakespeare tragedy greeted it, he said, with "iron apathy". What accounted for this? The literary director of the RSC said it was too close to the original. Another factor was cost. Tom Littler, founder of Primavera Productions, which is presenting the play, will have 12 actors, most taking several roles, but Osborne had specified four times as many.

The main factor, however, was that Osborne had developed a bad smell – the word "rancid" appeared often in criticism of his work – and he knew it was flop sweat. He was violently at odds with feminism, populism, Marxism, all the politicisation of art and emotion that characterised the period. Even his sympathetic critics felt that he was so angry he had become incoherent. In Coriolanus, Littler feels, Osborne found someone with whom he could identify, a character who was even angrier than he.

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