John Osborne wrote 25 stage plays and collaborations, five screenplays, 11 works for television, two volumes of autobiography and sundry short pieces of social comment and criticism. He established a critical reputation for having single-handedly changed the course of post-war British drama. This reputation rests almost entirely on the reception accorded to Look Back in Anger (1956). His other most significant plays are The Entertainer (1957), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot for Me (1965), with Luther (1961) and The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) also critically regarded as important works. The two published volumes of his autobiography – A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography 1929–1956 and Almost a Gentleman, which covers the years 1955–1966 – are the most interesting part of his later output. They provide a worthwhile picture of the environment which gave rise to Look Back in Anger, in particular, and more generally of Osborne the man.

Osborne was born in 1929. A low income conflicting unhappily with middle-class aspirations were dominant features of his childhood. His father's ill health exacerbated the family's financial problems, and Osborne records as a significant influence, both on his immediate circumstances and on his later life, his father's last illness and death when Osborne was 11 or 12 years old. Osborne's portrayal of the rest of his family suggests dysfunctionality almost to the pitch of group and individual psychosis. Anxieties about not belonging to a particular social class, about the disempowerment of men and about sexuality are evident in the depictions of the protagonists of all his major plays. Following an unhappy period at a boarding school which, from Osborne's description, was irredeemably fourth-rate, Osborne worked for a time in his late teens as a journalist, before embarking on a stage career, becoming an assistant stage manager in 1948 and subsequently actor, actor/manager and playwright. With his arrest in 1961 for participating in a CND demonstration, Osborne acquired a reputation for radicalism, which he was subsequently at pains to rebut. Indeed, from the mid-1960s onwards, Osborne was often seen as a self-made reactionary figure, a view which the volumes of his autobiography do little to dispel and which is positively asserted by Déjàvu (1992), the last play he wrote before he died.

Look Back in Anger is widely credited with being the play above all others in which Osborne succeeded in capturing the contemporary zeitgeist. In it he expressed a sense of anger and frustration at the stifling complacency of post-war Britain (or certainly England) which many others shared. For men of Osborne's age and class a unique cocktail of factors was coming together to fuel a sense of rage and frustration: while they had been too young to acquire cachet by fighting in World War Two, they were expected to participate in the new domestication which was perceived as constituting the just deserts of returning heroes. At the same time a peculiarly masculinist culture was prevalent, a result of the combined effects of the extreme homosociality bred by National Service, a politically determined effort to devalue women in employment, and an hysterical national homophobia, fostered by the fall-out from the Burgess and MacLean affair and the adoption in Britain of many of the attitudes of American MacCarthyism. Meanwhile, Britain's international role was plainly in decline with the end of empire and the futile attempt to demonstrate national virility represented by the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. This can be seen as a symptom at national level of the same malaise that Jimmy Porter – the protagonist of Look Back in Anger – was suffering at the personal level.

In theatrical terms, Osborne has become the standard-bearer of a largely impotent and reactionary movement which raged against the disappearance of pre-war masculine certainties. However, he was by no means alone in literature: a similar misogyny is detectable in a number of novels and plays by other English authors around this time. More positively, the outspokenness of Look Back in Anger against surviving aspects of the British class system and against the Establishment, particularly the church, struck a chord with a new theatre-going public, especially after an extract from the play was broadcast on television in October 1956. This phenomenon not only generated a new awareness of the potential stimulus which theatre could provide, but also had a real impact on the political relevance of theatre, turning it into a focus for political thinking at a time when any spirit of radicalism or even inquiry had largely been lost from the conventional political system, smothered beneath the complacent government-sponsored mantra “You've never had it so good” and its analogues. The generation of authors and playwrights of which Osborne was so prominent and influential a member became known as the Angry Young Men, a term at various times applied to a discrete and shifting population of playwrights and novelists of the 1950s – not all of them men. The term came closest to a meaningful definition when applied to the contributors to Declaration (1957), a small collection of essays edited by Tom Maschler. These were, in addition to Osborne himself, Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins and John Wain. The expression “kitchen-sink drama” was coined to describe those new plays which shared with Look Back in Anger qualities of vivid, raw authenticity and acuity, presented in a more or less working-class setting. In this theatrical milieu people lived lives on stage which were recognisably analogous to the way that many members of their audience lived their lives at home. There was a perception that, prior to the premiere of Look Back in Anger in May 1956, the stage had been dominated by escapist drama in which half-witted young men would bound through French windows in search of tennis partners.

The 1990s saw the emergence of a revised critical opinion of Osborne, in which the overt misogyny and homophobia of his major plays were called to account. A major reason for Osborne's success in capturing the imagination of a broad section of contemporary England, however, may lie in an ambivalence which neither the mainly adulatory critical response of the 1950s and 1960s nor the more hostile revisionism of the 1990s has succeeded in pinpointing. For example, an extraordinary degree of anxiety about homosexuality is evident in Osborne's autobiography, with relentless references, on page after page, to queers, queens and so on. On the other hand, it is in very relaxed tones that Osborne describes his relationship with Anthony Creighton, who, he said, had “declared his hopeless love for me”. Indeed, after Osborne's death, Creighton publicly asserted that there had been a sexual relationship between himself and Osborne. Thus Osborne's anxieties about homosexuality may very well have stemmed from doubts which he had about his own sexuality, especially since he describes himself variously as “about twenty per cent” and “about thirty per cent” homosexual. This putative insecurity about his own sexuality can be seen as a probable influence upon Osborne's output. In A Patriot for Me (1965), for example, the protagonist, Colonel Redl, is a marginalized Jewish homosexual. Osborne's habit of providing sympathetic portrayals of partially autobiographical central figures in his plays resulted, in this case, in a distinctly positive image of a homosexual man. In this respect, Osborne was far ahead of the sensibilities of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, who refused to license the play unless substantial cuts were made, largely to scenes involving depictions of homosexuality. Osborne refused to make these cuts and the play could only be shown to “club” audiences, a situation which prevailed until the demise of the Lord Chamberlain's role as theatre censor. Notwithstanding the progressive radicalism of his stance in this matter, however, Osborne's ambivalence reasserted itself in the shape of the play's denouement, in which Redl's treachery and suicide are depicted.

Similarly, evidence that Osborne's attitudes towards women were not straightforwardly misogynistic, but the product of an uneasy sense of hybridity within himself, can be gleaned from his autobiography and from the plays. Osborne is ungenerous in his writings about his various wives – in remarkable contrast to his writings about George Devine and Tony Richardson, the presiding genii of the Royal Court from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s – but this is no more marked in Osborne's case than in that of other heterosexual male autobiographers with scores to settle. However, Osborne also goes out of his way to be extraordinarily and unnecessarily unpleasant about some women with whom he has no particularly close relationship, and hence, presumably, no score to settle, while appearing extremely generous towards others. By the time of writing his autobiography, of course, the gains made by the women's movement were undeniable: in 1956 his misogynistic rancour seems more to have been based on various failed emotional attachments than on any prophetic awareness of a feminist movement that was yet to sweep the British national consciousness. But what makes Osborne a more interesting and more dangerous figure than the mere misogynist blimp which he does his best to portray himself as, is the fact that he cannot wholly escape various underlying, more feminine aspects of his being. He is capable of recognising what is fair and what is not, even when he is assessing his particular heroes: “I have never seen such a venomous, uncoordinated assault, such a crowing repudiation of the female species and distortion of its physicality” says Osborne of Tony Richardson's film version of Waugh's The Loved One . Coming from the author of Look Back in Anger this is an astonishing assertion. However, it demonstrates an ambivalence in Osborne's attitudes towards women, which is also occasionally discernible in some of the minor plays. The character of Regine in The End of Me Old Cigar (1975) is a case in point since Regine echoes the character of Osborne himself in a number of respects.

Osborne's major plays all feature a dominant male character from whom all the other characters serve to strike sparks. The egoism and intimate depiction of all these protagonists suggest a measure of autobiographical portraiture. While Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger rages uncomprehendingly against a world which fails to respond constructively to his febrile intelligence, Archie Rice in The Entertainer knows all too well that he is a man out of his time, whose failure to find any empathy with the spirit of his age has bred in him a corrosive cynicism. Each of these characters is conjured up by a series of clever, mordant, revelatory speeches, and the sympathetic portrayal of each is bolstered by Osborne by means of a series of impossibly detailed stage directions. Each is a wonderfully vivid portrait of some aspects of a man, presumably Osborne himself, but the selectivity of the facets portrayed cannot provide the depth that a third dimension might have contributed. Osborne's creative radicalism asserted itself once more in The Entertainer, this time in his use of Brechtian short scenes with which he brought the atmosphere of the music hall to the theatre stage. The symbolism of a seedy nude Britannia, too, was a startling evocation of Britain's post-imperial loss of identity. In another of Osborne's great self-portraits – that of Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence – the whole play is suffused with the miasma of nightmare, a misty aura which stands between the audience and any overly revelatory account of the protagonist. Sadly, Osborne's creativity was to flourish only for a period of about ten years. After The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), his most notable writings were his volumes of autobiography, which provide a fascinating, if rancorous, account of Osborne's life in the theatre of the 1950s and 1960s. His last produced play, Déjàvu (1992), provided testimony to a Jimmy Porter whose life force and relevance had been sapped by too many years, too much alcohol, and too much misogynistic acrimony. To the extent that the play is autobiographical – albeit partially so – it is clear that Osborne himself had succumbed to these influences, along with the fatal impact of believing in his own fictionalized, reactionary and misogynistic persona.

In light of the nature of his later work, an effort of retrospection is needed in order to perceive how it came to be that so many commentators believed that Osborne was the principal agent of revitalizing the post-war theatre in Britain. The answer lies partly in the vigour, however unfairly deployed, of the characters in the earlier plays. However, it also seems to be the case that Osborne's strenuously denied ambivalence in matters of gender and sexuality filtered into his central characters. Paradoxically, this meant that aspects of these characters provided some facet with which diverse sections of his audiences were able to identify, reinforcing Osborne's ability to capture the spirit of his times.