Hell's Isolation Ward

Inadmissible Evidence. Words perpetually fill the theater; only rarely does one hear a voice. John Osborne has a voice. Splenetic, stinging, scornful, grieving, whining, raging--he does not go gently into the sour day and sourer night. Evidence is almost all voice, a torrential dramatic typhoon in which one man is incessantly lashed by that despair that Kirkegaard called "the sickness unto death."

Osborne's anti-hero is Bill Maitland, a London solicitor hung up on booze, barbiturates and the bleak self-knowledge that he is "irredeemably mediocre." He is pushing 40, a tooth-shy, flea-bitten leopard, all spots and no strength, restlessly, frantically, pacing the cage of his life-in-death. "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost," wrote Dante; Inadmissible Evidence is, among other things, a threnody on the middle years, laced with caustic humor.

What has matured in Bill Maitland is not himself but his fears, guilts and anxieties. His skin has become thinner, not thicker, and he flares up with the irascible sensitivity of thwarted desires, blighted hopes. He must flog a body that is losing its resilience, and he smells death's bad breath at dawn. He envies the young for being young and for possessing the integrity that has eroded in him, the appetite for life that has cloyed on his palate, and the courage that has been drowned. Locked in hell's isolation ward of self, he claws at people he cannot reach and drives them farther away.

It is Maitland's tormented hallucination, and the play's device, that he is in a spectral dock on trial on a self-accusing charge--that his life has become an obscenity. The inner motion of this drama is the ritual of exorcism; Maitland wants to banish the voracious demons of his mind and conscience. But his witnesses are all mirror images of his decay, shadowy chroniclers of loss, rejection, betrayal and defeat. His upbraided, long-suffering clerks are walking legal briefs drawn up against Maitland's corrosive contempt for his work. His wife is Maitland's petition in domestic bankruptcy. His mistress and his casual office couchmates do not attest Maitland's sexual prowess but his inability to love. His daughter, listening to him with unresponding indifference, is an exact replica of his icy self-concern. The clients with interchangeable faces that blur before his desk are a dossier of sins he has committed, or, in the case of a homosexual, of a deviate impulse he may have suppressed. It is not surprising that his self-disgust and self-hatred prove contagious, and hat in the end everyone leaves him to stew in his own bile.

Some playgoers may feel the same way, but they will not have listened to the play very carefully. Osborne did not take this much trouble merely to impale a middle-aged shyster on his pen. Before the play is a minute old, Bill Maitland is reciting a kind of berserk catechism of modern progress, "the technological revolution, the pressing, growing, pressing, urgent need for more and more scientists, and more scientists--rapid change, change, rapid change--the inevitability of automation--forward-looking, outward-looking, program controlled machine tool line reassessment." This is contemporary man spurting terror at an uncontrollable universe the way a frightened octopus squirts ink. Another clue to Osborne's mind is the venom he drips on mass man, the "idiots," the "tentpegs," the "flatulent, purblind mating weasels." Bill Maitland is the effigy Osborne burns as his anathema on the modern world.

It has been lazily assumed from the time of Look Back in Anger that Osborne was simply anti-Establishment and pro-underdog, in which case his anger would have abated with his first Rolls-Royce. But Osborne's fury is born in grief. Maitland speaks of the technological world of tomorrow as "beyond the capacity for human grief." Osborne recoils at the world of the social contract symbolized by his lawyer-hero, the world of abstract concepts, impersonal institutions, dehumanized relationships, bonded in paper and ratified by the press. The sense of loss that permeates his plays is an unrequited yearning for the old blood ties of preindustrial man, the organic community of honor and duty where man was knitted to man without intellectual sophistication or corporate complexity.

The spectacle of a human worm turning on the office spit, the sapped vitality, the jangled nerves, the repetitive routines, all these are abrasively marshaled by Osborne to convey his vision of the modern world as a playing field of pain. The figure of the anti-hero poses the customary problem: Maitland is so passive that his degradation seems self-induced, and his engorged self-pity inhibits the playgoer's concern. But whenever the play loses traction, as it sometimes does, the moiling energy and phenomenal acting resources of Nicol Williamson, 28, grip and harrow the viewer. Williamson has colored the neurotic autointoxication of Bill Maitland with the flesh tones of a piteously buffeted humanity. In his mouth, Maitland's nightlong talking jag becomes an aria of lyric despondency.

Silence can be more terrible than speech. More than once, this strange, prickly creature who has been spared nothing by his playwright-creator stares straight out at the audience, and beyond, his brow creased in anguished perplexity, his eyes wide, wild and horror-stricken, a numbly inept Perseus who has looked bare on the Gorgon's head and found his heart and his life turned to stone.

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