Viennese Drag

John Osborne's obsession, his master theme and his greatest gift to the theater are one and the same--himself. When his nerves begin humming like high-tension wires, when he takes his emotional temperature every other minute, when he steps into the spotlight and throws a nightlong temper tantrum, the dramatic results are explosively and corrosively alive. Whether it be Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger), or Archie Rice (The Entertainer), or Bill Maitland (Inadmissible Evidence), Osborne's personal mouthpiece always screams out his rage, scorn, self-pity and impotence so that an audience is held in a vise of attention. What Osborne has been able to find in himself is an astonishingly concrete symbol of the times. As Mary McCarthy once noted, "Although Osborne is no thinker, he understands the present very well, which is why he is sick of it."

When he gets sufficiently sick of himself and the present, he goes rummaging through history for one of his casebook period pieces like Luther, and now A Patriot for Me. The plays are seriously defective--partly because Osborne's own voice is badly muffled, and partly because he cannot work up the passion to breathe an inner life into these works. A further drawback is that he has a high-school-pageant idea of history. Everything moves episodically, in jerky vignettes, with time as a cardboard backdrop. The characters are not immersed in history, they merely wear it like a costume.

A Patriot for Me spans the years 1890 to 1913 in the officer corps of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lieutenant Alfred Redl (Maximilian Schell) is a kind of self-made upstart in the imperial army, with such class handicaps as a railway-clerk father. By dint of hard work and undemonstrated brilliance, Redl rises to high military and social rank and becomes deputy chief of the army's espionage service. Sexually, he undergoes a kind of moral regress. A disinclination to make love to women awakens him to his own homosexuality. As an ever more active queer, he is blackmailed by Russian intelligence into turning traitor. At play's end, he is exposed, presented with a pistol, and shoots himself.

Niagara from a Faucet. Unless Osborne means to suggest that homosexuals are poor security risks (pace Joe McCarthy), the play is baffling. An entirely incredible epilogue links Redl to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to World War I and everything that followed--which is rather like getting Niagara Falls out of a leaky faucet.

While Osborne attempts to be scrupulously fair on the subject of homosexuality, he also exhibits a certain squeamish distaste for the subject. The evening's coup de theatre is the drag ball that opens Act II. Lavishly costumed for a kind of inverts' Mardi Gras, the imperial army's top officers cavort in the home of the Baron von Epp. Dennis King plays the role in tiara and gown, and flutters an imperious fan with the regal disdain of a queen of players. At no other point does the play rise to this level of theatricality. Salome Jens adorns the evening physically as a Russian Mata Hari, but she delivers her lines like a fishwife. As for Maximilian Schell, he is frostily remote. Director Peter Glenville doubtless tried to coax some emotion out of Schell, but he might as well have pleaded with a two-by-four.

Osborne's constant concerns are present--male camaraderie, an outcast's attempt to crash a caste system, scorn for a decadent elite--but in A Patriot for Me, they appear like footnotes on a blank page. History may be his favorite reading, but drama is no pastime art. Osborne's dramatic destiny is clear, demanding and inescapable. He alone can and must be the life of his plays.

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