Cast: Left to Right Top: Terence Frisby, Ralph Michael, Hugh Hastings, David Hill. Underneath: Jeni Barnett, Nigel Hawthorne, Rachel Kempton, Denise Coffey, John Standing, and Peter Jolley.
A Sense of Detachment
Punch, December 13th, 1972
You would never guess from some of the reviews that anything in Osborne's A Sense of Detachment is funny. Critics sometimes seem to shut their ears.
It is the sort of play that many people cannot bear. "A bit of your old Pirandello, like." says one character, though the boundaries between actors and characters are looser than anything in Pirandello. The cast tell, in the face of prepared interruptions, pieces of a love story. When action slackens or words become coarse, Terence Frisby turns up and protests from the stalls or Derek Hill makes yob comments from a box. Snatches of Mahler and Vaughan Williams and films indicating the peaks of man's creative mind contrast with the nastier art of pornographic films. There are (towards the end too many) quotes from Burns, Betjeman, Yeats, Old Uncle Sam Beckett and all. One objection to quotes is that trying to guess the author takes attention from the content.
The play celebrates love, rages against its degeneration and draws a (daffy) parallel between man and woman, England and the Common Market. It will be the last play the court puts on before we "go into Europe" and in that sense is Osborne's elegy for the end of an old England.
Denise Coffey comments tartly, John Standing parodies every theatrical style in sight. At the corner of the play is the character of "Dad" who died in 1940, before the rot set in. Hugh Hastings plays him wearing a 1930s suit (the only "costumed" actor) and a puzzled frown. This corner, like the point of an arch, is the keystone of the play.
