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MARSHALL COHE 'N
less prelude to Pizarro's private search for meaning. The absence of
Robert Stephens from the generally inferior American production
is
particularly regrettable. His lithe, radiant performance as Atahuallpa
confirmed the impression that he is the most accomplished English actor
of his generation. Bernard Levin, the English critic, called
The Royal
Hunt of the Sun
"the greatest play of its generation." At best, it
leaves open the question whether Peter Shaffer can be expected to
take a leading place in that exceptional generation of English play–
wrights whose emergence is generally dated from the opening of
Osborne's
Look Back in Anger.
Inadmissible Evidence
is a splendid recovery from Osborne's tedious,
pseudo-Brechtian dramatization of Erikson's
Young Man Luther.
Jimmy
Porter is now in early middle age, and the bearing of his homo–
sexuality on his frustrations is still unexamined. One would not have
it otherwise. These frustrations give rise to the most dazzling
tirades
now
being written for the theater. In
Inadmissible Evidence
they are de–
livered with supreme effectiveness by Nicol Williamson, an actor of un–
limited promise. But it is distressing that Osborne has come no closer
to establishing his inevitable personal surrogate in a viable play than
he had when he wrote
Look Back in Anger
over a decade ago. In
Inadmissible Evidence
he attempts to disguise the fact that he cannot
dramatize a world by pretending that his hero is losing his grip' on
reality. The first scene is a dream in which Bill Maitland puts himself
on trial in the courtroom of his own mind and submits inadmissible
evidence to a
Kafka~sque
court. After the first scene, however, Osborne
reverts to his characteristic
verismo
manner, and society, not Maitland,
is on trial. Every so often Osborne remembers that these characters are
meant to be part-dream, part-real. In fact, they are neither. The female
clients are all trying to divorce a man who fits Bill's description. But
we do not take them to be dreams just because they are incredible; still
less because they are played by the same actress. Conversely, we do
not take Maitland's colleagues for real simply because they confirm
his prejudices. They are mere shadows cast by his rhetoric, and to
disguise this fact by pretending that they are apparitions is no alterna–
tive to lending them substance. Osborne is a superb journalist, but he
has yet to write a genuinely satisfactory play.
John Whiting, whose play,
The Devils,
was produced in New
York this year, considered John Arden and Harold Pinter the most gifted
of his younger contemporaries. As this view wins general acceptance,
Whiting's first play,
Saint's Day,
rather than Osborne's '
Look Back in
Anger,
will come to be regarded as the seminal event in the develop–
ment of postwar English drama. The private soldiers who invade Paul
