John Osborne & Samuel Beckett;

John Osborne & Samuel Beckett;

two lifes, one feeling.

My work is going to be based on the plays that John Osborne and Samuel Beckett wrote, specially in the two first written by them, and how they are so similar and different at the same time, in the way they mould the worst years of the humanity. In their best known play writes, they show us the hate, the violence of the human being. After the fist and second World War, no one of them believef that humans could be able to make a better future. And their plays are inspired in those feelings that have grown in their cores during the most horrible and cruel ages, with their personal signature.

Beckett and Osborne

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin, Ireland, in April the 13th in 1906, in a protestant Anglo-Irish family, and studied there since he left Ireland and went to live to France.
John Osborne was born in London, in December the 12th of 1929. He spend all his life in England, and his plays reflect London's society. It’s said that his way of writing make some critics name his generation as “The angry young men”.

Although Osborne is younger than Beckett, both authors share the same view of the world: both have had to live a world war in their earlier ages of life, and both knew the horror, the hate that humans could have to others. They could not understand why one man kills another, and the psychological consequences of those acts they saw and lived characterize their plays.

One of the most well known plays of those two authors are Waiting for Godot, written by Beckett, and Look Back in Anger, by Osborne. By chance, these two plays were the first written by both authors. And they show perfectly well the anger of the post war generation, the sense of loneliness and alienation that people had as a result of the terrible world war experience.

Their play writes:

resemblances and differences

Both Osborne and Beckett mould in their plays their generation’s feelings, but not in a similar way; while Osborn let us know coldly and cruelly how society was, Beckett uses an abstract point of view to criticise what was happening, and how people felt. It is true that both plays were published nearly the same year – Look Back in Anger in 1957 and Waiting for Godot in 1955 - and by the same publisher – Faber & Faber – but, although they are like the salt and the sugar, I mean, there is not a possible comparison between them referred on the way of writing, they need each other to make sense. Let me explain: while Look Back in Anger shows people how the characters would be at the same moment they talk – how Alice is uncomplaining, submissive, Jimmy is flashy, bold and completely different to Cliff – in Waiting for Godot it is nearly impossible to know how the characters are, because as the play is being represented you only can think that they are all mad. Of course, as the time passes, you can give every character their personality, but you still will have doubts about their real motivations to be doing what they do. This is what was called “the drama of the absurdist” – “teatro de lo absurdo”-. If people only had one point of view about the drama of this years, most of them will not feel identified with this way to describe what happened. But if there is a surrealist and abstract way to know a feeling, an emotion, they can compare and see that things can be interpreted in a different way. It would be very sad a world that only can see things from one point of view; not every thing must be told in a dramatic way to be understood, but in a simple – and at the same time abstract - way.

Another interesting point to talk about how different and at the same time similar Beckett and Osborne plays are, is about the elements they use in their representations. As you read the plays – or watch them in the theatre – you must notify that Osborne use a common scene to represent his play – a flat in London’s centre – while Beckett uses three elements: a tree, a path, and a rope. Nothing else but a nude scene with these three thing plus the characters. Completely different ways to represent things, are not them? But then, how can they be so similar at the same time? Because both represent the same thing: Both in Look Back in Anger and Waiting for Godot use the same scene during all the play. That means an immobility in the human being: you cannot progress if you do not move from where you are chained – in this chase a room in a London old dirty flat, and a lost, strange place wherever it was.-

To end I would like to comment only one more thing about these plays: The ending. In Look back in Anger, the play ends with Jimmy’s psychological withdraw when he realizes he cannot live without Alison. That means that during the play the characters have been changing and adapting their temper as time passes. But in Waiting for Godot, the play starts and ends the same way: nobody changes or modifies their temper at having contact with the others. That means that Beckett would be possibly more negative looking at the future than Osborne was, because although Osborne ends the play with the worst of the ends, Beckett just not make any changes in any of the characters: for them is completely impossible to get out of their present.

Academic year 2004/2005

Universitat de València Press

paenfer@alumni.uv.es