Word: patriots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
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...
Arlo's father, needless to say, was Woody Guthrie. Guthrie, now dead, was one of the giant figures of the Bonnie and Clyde era of American history. As a depression folksinger-songwriter, he was both social critic and super-patriot. During the last fifteen years of his life, a congenital nerve disease paralyzed, silenced and slowly killed him. (The same disease could hit Arlo in his thirties...
Among the serious plays, Arthur Kopit's Indians traces the indignities, betrayals and expropriation of the red man by the white man, with Stacey Keach playing a not quite credible liberal Buffalo Bill. John Osborne has delved into spy lore of the early 20th century for his A Patriot for Me; his hero, played by Maximilian Schell, is a homosexual secret-service officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army who is blackmailed into spying for the Russians. The "drag ball" scene that opens the second act has been a titillating conversation piece ever since the play premiered in London...