The vital memorabilia and personal effects of our greatest playwrights should be secured in a reinvigorated national theatre collection, according to David Hare, who said too many were going into private hands.
Hundreds of pieces from the playwright John Osborne’s collection are going up for auction on Wednesday evening, with the proceeds used to support the Arvon Foundation, which bought his house after his death in 1994. His former home, the Hurst, is used today as a location for writing retreats and courses in Shropshire.
Fellow playwright Hare, who knew Osborne and has argued that plays such as Look Back in Anger “[reconnected] the British theatre to its audience”, said the V&A collection, which does have some Osborne memorabilia, should have secured many of the pieces in the sale.
“[Arvon] ensured the last years of his life – which were pretty much financial chaos – were saved,” said Hare. “But we’re back to the usual situation where the V&A supposedly has a theatrical collection, but doesn’t have anyone who is interested in buying the important memorial stuff of major writers.”
Hare added that the issue has persisted since the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden was closed in 2007, with its collection moving to the V&A.
He said: “There was a theatrical museum for stuff like this in the centre of London, but the V&A, presumably for financial reasons, made the decision to retreat.
“John did do something that no one else did in the theatre in the 20th century, as Arthur Miller said, to reconnect it to real life. The thought that all this stuff is going to be auctioned off into private collections, I think, is very sad.”
A spokesperson for the V&A said: “The V&A’s focus is on collecting materials that record the creative process of theatre and performance, rather than personal items.”
Items in the sale include posters, walking sticks, scarves, photographs of Osborne taken by Cecil Beaton and a painting by Leonard Rosoman depicting Redl, the protagonist in his 1965 play A Patriot for Me.
The Hurst’s director, Jo King, described the collection as “a treasury of theatrical and cultural life centred around one of its most enduring figures”, with estimates ranging from £50 to as high as £6,000.
Osborne’s work has been under the spotlight recently after the Almeida included a revival of Look Back in Anger as part of its Young and Angry season.
The revival has had mixed reviews. The Guardian gave it two stars and said Jimmy Porter (played by Billy Howle) had not aged well since the play was first staged in 1956, calling the performance “a curiously cold anthropological experience”.
It said Porter’s description of women as “cows” and “bitches” helped to create a “brand of toxic masculinity [that] entwines class anger with misogyny so thoroughly that it is hard to see him as anything other than odious”.
Hare said that although Osborne’s work has fallen out of fashion, his cultural impact means he shouldn’t be forgotten or minimised. “Osborne has had a bad period, mainly because he was accused of misogyny and becoming a rightwing Garrick Club member in later life,” he said.
“But it really is a question of whether you judge people by the greatest things they did or the worst thing they did? If you judge him by his best qualities there are very few people who can touch him.”
• This article was amended on 10 October 2024 to correct the spelling of the Arvon Foundation.
