Auction: Looking Back at John Osborne: Pictures and Possessions from his Estate The Hurst, Shropshire (Timed), ending 20th Oct, 2024

The online auction from 10th - 20th October, includes paintings by Leonard Rosoman and set designer Jocelyn Herbert, theatre posters, photographs by Lord Snowdon and Cecil Beaton and drama awards.  Accumulated over a lifetime, there are also programmes and books relating to all his major works including Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, The World of Paul Slickey, Luther, A Patriot for Me, Inadmissible Evidence, Hotel in Amsterdam, and Dejavu. Other personal possessions such as hats, scarves, walking sticks and teddies are amongst the lots, giving an enthralling insight into the life and character of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated playwrights.

Auction Introduction by Peter Whitebrook - author of 'John Osborne, Anger is not about...'

‘It’s amazing up here’ announced John Osborne, in the deep winter of 1987, gazing from the windows of The Hurst, his new home, a grey stone house of twenty rooms built in 1812, near the village of Craven Arms in Shropshire. ‘I can’t believe my good fortune.’

He was 58 and he and Helen, his fifth and last wife, had sold their house in Kent, complaining the south-east was more congested every day. At The Hurst, they were embraced by a meditative twenty-six acres of lawns, bluebell woods, an orchard, a kitchen garden and a pond, and beyond, the ‘blue, remembered’ hills of Housman’s imagination and the Welsh Marches. ‘A chunk of ancient England,’ Osborne noted proudly, a freshly recharged glass of champagne fizzing in his hand, ‘and the Welsh at good arm’s length. This is the final resting place.’

Indeed, he would remain at The Hurst until his death, a few days shy of his sixty-fifth birthday, at the end of 1994. Newspaper tributes applauded an astonishing career that had begun at the age of 25 with Look Back in Anger, his third play, inspired largely by his first marriage to the actress Pamela Lane. The date of its first performance—8 May 1956—at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, is synonymous with a tectonic shift in British cultural history, heralding a new, vigorous and invigorating kind of drama, raw but superbly crafted, giving lava flow voice to the postwar ‘angry young man’, a tag that pursued Osborne his entire life, the ‘young’ eventually being replaced by ‘old.’

Over the following decade, he wrote The Entertainer, Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, A Patriot for Me and The Hotel in Amsterdam, extraordinary plays of compassion and fomenting discontent all premiered at the Royal Court and starring great actors: Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney, Nicol Williamson and Paul Scofield. He brought to the theatre a combative intensity of feeling and a flamboyant sense of language in which, he said, ‘it is possible only to tell the truth.’ The power is volcanic, the voice unmistakably his. Subsequently, many of those who knew him through his plays were surprised when they met him by his mellifluous courtesy.

The playwright doubled as a director of Woodfall Productions that made a string of outstanding films in the 1960s, including Tom Jones, the screenplay of which won Osborne an Oscar. He became a millionaire on the profits. He lived lavishly—too lavishly. Although Osborne’s reputation rests on that remarkable ten-year run at the Court, the best of his later plays also demand attention, yet too often, in the words of David Hare, a fervent admirer, ‘passion passed into prejudice.’

A natural romantic, an uneasy patriot, a dissenter who disliked change, Osborne became disenchanted with England, although England, and Englishness, remained one of his over-riding themes. By now, his health was battered by alcohol, tobacco and diabetes. In his workroom at The Hurst, surrounded by framed posters of his plays, his books and scrap albums, fortified by the opera blasting from his loudspeakers, champagne and Sobranie Special Reserve pipe tobacco, he flung himself into writing the second volume of his memoirs and occasional journalism.

He celebrated a rural, lost-Eden England, denounced the ‘European diktats’ of Brussels and the ‘glib populists’ among the Church of England who, to make the liturgy ‘more accessible’, produced the Alternative Service Book, which ‘blasphemes against language itself in its banality and fawning to please.’ Out he would go on bracing walks, clad in his greatcoat with its complicated layers and flaps, swinging his stick, the dogs lolloping alongside him, headphones clamped over his cap and ears. ‘The Dragoon Guards get me up the lower slopes. Handel may lift me to the peak.’

Ill and besieged by spiralling debt, he swept the bills from clamouring creditors to one side and ‘struggled’ to finish Déjàvu, a sequel of sorts to Look Back in Anger. It turned out to be his last play, and a financial catastrophe. Reassurance, though, was found by looking out of the window. ‘I might be the poorest playwright in England,’ he reflected, ‘but I have the best views.’

Full details of the abbreviated references in the text are: 

John Heilpern, John Osborne, A Patriot for Us, London, 2007

Peter Whitebrook, Author of John Osborne, Anger is not about... London, 2015

Viewing Times:

13th Oct 2024 12:00 - 16:00 

14th Oct 2024 10:00 - 20:00 

15th &16th Oct 2024 10:00 - 17:00

17th & 18th Oct 2024 10:00 - 17.00 (By Appointment)

Contact Adrian Biddell for further information about this auction | adrian.biddell@olympiaauctions.com | + 44 (0) 20 7806 5541

Viewing

13th Oct 2024 12:00 - 16:00 

14th Oct 2024 10:00 - 20:00 

15th &16th Oct 2024 10:00 - 17:00

17th & 18th Oct 2024 10:00 - 17.00 (By Appointment)

View all lots in this sale