Personal Enemy

At the White Bear, there’s an enterprising production of Personal Enemy a play written by John Osborne (with Anthony Creighton) shortly before Look Back in Anger. The play was published by Oberon last year and this is, I think, its first performance since 1955. (Both publication and production tout this as a rediscovery of the play though I might point out I wrote about the play in my book 1956 and All That, so it’s not a complete rediscovery.)

It’s 1953 and the Constants are an all-American thermonuclear family in the fictional Langley Springs, USA. Their son, Don, is missing, presumed dead, in the Korean War. Their son, Arnie, is a gentle young man who, like his brother, has struck up a friendship with the atheist and communist, Ward Perry, a local librarian. It is at the height of the HUAC hearings, the red scares, and as the war ends, the American public is scandalised by the POWs who refuse to return home. Arnie and Don’s friendship with Ward is particularly repellant to Caryl, their sister, who suspects that there is a taint of homosexuality in their relationships. A succession of shocks tear the family apart; first, they discover that Don is alive and being held as a POW; then a sinister agent of the state informs them that he is refusing to come home and wants to find the source of the contamination; the family subject Ward to an innuendo-laced cross-examination, and rumours spread through the town. Mrs Constant confronts her son and accuses him of being a pervert, and accusation that he both accepts and denies. Arnie kills himself and it is discovered that he has made a young ‘coloured’ woman pregnant. The family are ostracised; Mr Constant loses his job; but the men unite against the women, determined to stand up against this calumny.

It’s clearly written in emulation of the wave of American playwrights that emerged in the 40s and 50s - Williams, Miller, with hints of Tea and Sympathy too. The structure is a kind of ever-deepening family mystery coming to some anagnorisis where all becomes clear. It’s all set in the family home, though a sense of the whole town is given. The main action of the play covers a couple of days, though the last scene is some weeks later.

It’s not very good. The revelations are very crass: a letter arrives revealing that Don is alive just Caryl has been denouncing him to their mother. (It reminds me both of the curtain moment where Jimmy kisses Helena in Look Back in Anger and of course the opposite revelation at the end of Act Two of The Entertainer when we discover - during the party to celebrate his homecoming - that Mick has died in the Suez invasion.) The revelation that Arnie’s fathered the young black woman’s child is dreadful too, because both revelations (there’s a black woman with a child and that it’s Arnie’s) happen simultaneously so it just feels like an info dump. The sinister agent is a caricature; so are the family to some extent, but he seems out of the reality of the play (though not creatively so, in the way that McCann and Goldberg would be three years later in Pinter’s The Birthday Party.) Because there’s a strong element of pastiche, you’re never quite sure if you’re watching absurdist satire (think Albee’s The American Dream) or domestic realism (think of those scenes in Death of a Salesman). There are some lurches of character: it’s unclear why Caryl decides to tell her mother she thinks her beloved Don was a pervert on her birthday and Mr Constant goes from shambling drunk to voice of Justice in a spookily short period of time. The play shows its age, too, particularly in its comic char lady. (At one point she is told point blank to leave and she says ‘Okay I can take a hint’ - I got home and saw exactly the same joke on Yes Minister [1980], so it’s a joke that took a while to die).

Strangely, part of what it interesting about the play is what makes the play so bad. There are moment when it crackles into life - Arnie’s resistance to his mother (‘And to think I’d heard about this sort of thing, I didn’t know it would touch me - I didn’t know - Jeez, I didn’t know. I thought everything about Ward and me was good and fine and right. I didn’t know. Aren’t you proud of me, your son, the pervert?’) and when Sam turns on Caryl (‘When I see women ganging up and vicious, that really frightens me. That really turns me up!  It’s no good, Caryl - I just can’t forget it. You see, you are the real leaders in these things. There’s nothing that we don’t do or say that you women don’t have to approve before it becomes the law of the land. And when you get started properly, tearing everything apart you suspect or don’t or can’t understand - I don’t see much hope for me or my children’) where you hear Osborne’s voice ringing out. These moments are often entirely out of character - quite often, it’s not wholly clear what they mean - but they really blaze. What they also mean is that the play doesn’t resolve in any particularly satisfying way; the wounds opened are too bloody and messy. So the very ending which seems too clichéd for Osborne - though does dimly resemble to shattered reconciliation of Jimmy and Alison at the end of Anger - has Mr Constant tell his wife, quite out of the blue I’d say, ‘you know another thing? We haven’t been so close together in years, as we are now’ (what??), which a tricksier production might have turned into a false, bitter, ironic ending. This didn’t, fortunately, because I doubt it would have worked and would only have added to the confusions of style and tone that drag the play down.

The sexual politics - as ever with Osborne - are filled with confusion and visceral fear and hatred. The communist charge has very little dramatic traction; it’s the accusation of homosexuality that clearly interests them - it’s all set up with the apparatus of the well-made play, the discovered message, the misplaced book, the duplicate book (Ward gives both brothers the same book in the same edition with the same inscription, which IS quite weird), the misunderstandings, the insinuations. The communism stuff is said very plainly, as is the imputations of atheism. Of course, this is the stuff the Lord Chamberlain had the worst problems with. It’s absolutely a play of its time, about the ‘glass closet’ structures that I’ve written about. Separate Tables in the same year, has a similar problem (though it’s a much better play): PE nests its homosexual theme in communism; ST nests its homosexual theme in a heterosexual one. For a contemporary audience, I suspect that communism and groping women in a cinema, respectively, would be slightly more shocking that homosexuality. It’s a sign of just how high feelings were running about the subject in the mid-fifties.

What is a bit grim, but very Osborne, is the way that the play builds towards the peripateia of a general repudiation of women. They are the clear villains, but villains that we care about. Mrs Constant and Caryl are characterised roundly - and were both very well played in the White Bear production - while the male villains (Reverend Merrick and the Investigator) are cardboard cut-outs. To move forward (though the play doesn’t seem to know what that might possible mean) the men have to shrug off the insistent vengeful conservatism of the women. It’s a curious motif for a play that revolves around fear of homosociality that it takes on homosociality as its own structure. (In my book, I argue something of this structure also runs through Look Back in Anger.)

Dramaturgically, then, it’s both filled with the junkyard of its time but pointing forward to the plays that Osborne would write later. I suspect I’ll never have a chance to see it again, so I’m pleased I did. The other recently-rediscovered pre-Anger play, The Devil Inside Him, has just been revived by the new National Theatre of Wales. I don’t know if that’s going to come to London.