Synopsis
Before Anger - Two Early Plays - The Devil Inside Him & Personal Enemy
John Osborne - Foreword Peter Nichols
Published by Oberon
The Devil Inside Him - written in 1950 and first produced at Huddersfield is a melodrama with a poetic edge about a Welsh boarding house, lorded over by a self-righteous, religious bigot of a father
The lead character is his son, an imaginative teenager widely regarded as "daft" by the neighbours and as immoral by his father
These perceptions lead inexorably to tragedy
Personal Enemy - written with Anthony Creighton and performed at Harrogate in 1955 - is set in America at the height of the McCarthy communist witch-hunts
A family whose eldest son was killed in the Korean war finds itself under intense pressure in the light of some devastating political and personal revelations