Waugh | John Osborne | Martin Luther (1962)

(Waugh, ‘Luther: John Osborne’s New Play’, review of Luther by John Osborne, The Critic, 2/1963) “…. Mr Osborne, following his proletarian sympathies, makes much of Luther’s encouragement of the savage repression of the peasants by their overlords. It was an outrage typical of the age and place but it was to some extent provoked. It was quite consistent with Luther’s previous career that he should inflame and exculpate the acts of revenge. If the dramatist wished to show the corruption of his hero’s character he could have drawn on his exhortations to persecute Jews and Anabaptists because there he was denying the principles of private judgment in religious opinion for which he was originally so strong.

 Instead we are given the more commonplace spectacle of revolutionary turned conservative of which, of course, there are numerous historical examples. Luther was never a revolutionary in this way. He was an opportunist politically who saved his skin by supporting the anarchic princes against the homogeneous empire of Christendom. In his dislike of his leading character the dramatist even denies him the convivial, even generous, rumbustious qualities he undoubtedly possessed and makes him a whining, snarling hypochondriac. 

But Mr Osborne’s main weakness is what always enfeebles men without religion when they attempt religious subjects. Mr Osborne simply does not know whether prayer has an object. He sees monastic life as harmless and congenial to certain temperaments, as futile and irksome to others. He does not know if there is a God. A Catholic would agree that the Church needed reformation and point to the Council of Trent as the means God appointed for the process. A Lutheran, presumably, would say that God was displeased by the devotional habits and doctrinal refinements of his worshippers and inspired a group of Germans to start again on a new and better plan.

Mr Osborn does not know whether God is involved in his story. Were the young Luther’s prayers barren because he was following an unsatisfactory liturgy or because all prayer is barren except as auto-suggestion? That is the central problem which Mr Osborne shirks. But when all these defects have been noted it must still be asserted that Luther is a composition altogether more valuable than all the nonsense of the nouvelle vague. It is a piece of stage craft in a sound tradition with many highly exciting and amusing episodes.” (Gallagher D, The Essays Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Methuen, 1983 p579)