Next month the YSCP playreading will be on Monday 10 November, again upstairs at The Royal Oak.
Before his big breakthrough in 1956, John Osborne (see photo above) wrote two plays with his friend Anthony Creighton. Creighton had a houseboat moored at Cubitts Yacht Basin at Chiswick that John Osborne lived on for a while. Creighton later claimed they were lovers. Together they wrote two plays. We are going to read the second of these, Epitaph for George Dillon. Though written earlier, it was not produced until after the huge success of Look Back in Anger. Robert Stephens played the title role and the play was sufficiently well received to earn a transfer to Broadway where it was nominated for 3 Tonys but then closed after just 23 performances. Harold Hobson (Sunday Times) said of it:
“that rarest of theatrical phenomena, a realistic modern drama which is not bourgeois in its underlying assumptions. It is like a familiar building caught at an angle which suddenly makes it look like something never seen before.”
Charles Spencer (Telegraph), writing of a 2005 revival with Joseph Fiennes, said “this neglected play might just be Osborne’s greatest.”
Percy and Kate Elliot live in suburban post-war London. On the sideboard is a photo of their dead son, killed in the war. They have two daughters and Kate’s divorced sister in the household. Into this world – at Kate’s insistence – a young actor and playwright arrives as a lodger and completely unsettles the whole family dynamic (9 characters).
If you’d like to come along next month, email: maurice.crichton@ntlworld.com