EVENING STANDARD DRAMA AWARD FOR 'A PATRIOT FOR ME'
signed F. Dobson; with brass dedication plaque EVENING STANDARD / DRAMA AWARD 1965 / JOHN OSBORNE / A PATRIOT FOR ME
bronze on marble base
height: 35cm (including base)

Provenance
John Osborne, London (Osborne, 1929-1994, was the leading playwright of his generation, leader of the so-called 'Angry Young Men', after his first play, Look Back in Anger, was performed at the Royal Court in 1958.)

Literature
Neville Jason and Lisa Thompson-Pharoah, The Sculpture of Frank Dobson, London, 1994, p. 162, no. 230, illustration of another cast

Conceived in 1955, Dobson designed the present personification of Drama holding the masks of Comedy and Tragedy for the annual Evening Standard Drama Awards. The present bronze was awarded to John Osborne at the paper's 1965 award ceremony for his play A Patriot for Me which shared top honours with The Killing of Sister George by Frank Marcus.

A Patriot for Me premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square in 1965, and was Osborne's most ambitious, lavish and controversial play to date. It demanded a notably large cast of close to forty actors, opulent costumes, and elaborate sets, while the plot involved a sumptuous drag ball, homosexuality, blackmail and betrayal that ran foul of the censors, obliging the Royal Court Theatre to become a private members club for the duration of the production.

Osborne described how he had been ‘brooding on the idea of writing a play about homosexuality, using it as a metaphor for human isolation’. But the play only took form when Osborne happened upon the story of Alfred Redl a high ranking soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. He recalled: ‘I was reading a large volume of the Hapsburg Monarchy and I came upon what seemed to be a footnote to history. It was the case of Alfred Redl, a distinguished officer in the Imperial Army and the head of counter espionage. It was a critical and tragic period in history, just before the First World War. …Redl’s own story was like an exciting spy thriller, and the scandal when it was revealed in 1912 was tremendous. Briefly, from his unique position of authority Redl was not only selling secrets to the Russians but betraying his own agents. None of his distinguished fellow officers was aware that he was a secret practising homosexual. It was this that led him to submit to blackmail, betray the officer elite to which he was so proud to belong, his allegiance to the Emperor and endanger the security of his own country. It was from this material that I wrote the play.’ (quoted in Tanya Harrod, Leonard Rosoman, London, 2017, p. 238).