Harold Pinter consigned his early Hothouse to a drawer after the failure of The Birthday Party in 1958. But when that play, which involves crazed and violent doings in a government-run asylum, was finally staged in 1980 it was remarkably well received and eventually was produced at the National.

Can one hope for similar recognition for the plays that were obscurely staged when Pinter’s contemporary, John Osborne, was still a jobbing actor touring the provinces, writing on the quiet, making love to his leading ladies — and, malicious maverick that he was, playing such pranks as slipping used contraceptives into sandwiches and giving them to his foes?

A cursory look at The Devil Inside Him, which the 19-year-old Osborne wrote backstage at the Empire Theatre, Sunderland, in 1948, suggests not. He was having an affair with an actress called Stella Linden, and the play was produced in the Huddersfield of 1950 by her forgiving husband, Patrick Desmond, and then forgotten. The young hero, Huw, is a misunderstood genius unlucky enough to have been born into a mediocre Welsh family. He has “a look that can perhaps only be described as a trapped animal”.

Of whom does that remind you? Well, obviously Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of Look Back in Anger; and the embittered, contemptuous title character of Epitaph to George Dillon, the still-remembered and occasionally revived play that Osborne wrote with his friend and (possibly) lover Anthony Creighton just before Anger made him famous. Huw’s writings are denounced as “vile filth” by his father, he’s warned by the local minister that he’s en route to Hell, yet he’s told by a student that he has “a very rare and precious gift”.

Times Archive, 1968: The world of John Osborne

I can think of no other playwright who has earned the privileges that Osborne now enjoys

• Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court, 1956

• Leading article: Wrath at The Helm?

Related Links

• John Osborne: extracts from two plays

• Detective work unearths two pre-Anger plays

Again, of whom does that remind you? Osborne himself. Indeed, the play seems as autobiographical as so much of his subsequent work was, from Anger in 1956 to Déjàvu in 1991, a piece that showed and celebrated Porter in cantankerous old age. That’s what makes it more interesting than the other recently rediscovered play, Personal Enemy, which involves McCarthyism — and, in the self-pity that were to mark and mar so many of Osborne’s plays, it is also its ominous limitation.

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