Peter Egan: 'John Osborne was like a wounded animal, an exposed nerve'
I knew the Look Back in Anger sequel Déjà Vu wouldn't work, but I couldn't turn it down. I knew John deserved to be presented again – and that it would be his last play The very first play I saw was John Osborne 's Look Back in Anger in the 1960s. By then the play had opened the door to a less polite form of theatre and a generation of writers including John Arden and Harold Pinter . As a society we were moving away from repression and a certain social acceptance to a time of huge social change. Osborne's antihero, Jimmy Porter, spoke in such a powerful way. It led me to see all of Osborne's plays in the 1960s – Luther, A Patriot for Me and Inadmissible Evidence, which I saw Nicol Williamson do on six occasions. Osborne's career was powerful up until the early 1970s and then he went into a kind of decline. People loved or hated him – he was described as a "dandy with a machine gun". Many years later, a script arrived in my letterbox fro...