LEONARD ROSOMAN (BRITISH 1915-2012)

NIGHT SCENE - MAXIMILIAN SCHELL AS REDL
signed Leonard Rosoman lower left
acrylic on canvas
182 x 182cm
184 x 184cm (framed)

Exhibited
New York, The Lincoln Center, Amsterdam Gallery, Paintings by Leonard Rosoman Based on the Play 'A Patriot for Me', 1968
London, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Leonard Rosoman: Paintings based on the Play 'A Patriot for Me', 1969, no. 14

Literature
Tanya Harrod, Leonard Rosoman, London, 2017, p. 126, illustrated

Painted in 1967-68, the present canvas depicts the actor Maximilian Schell in the lead role of Alfred Redl in Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me, that premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1965. The play was Osborne’s most ambitious, lavish and controversial to date. It demanded a notably large cast of close to forty actors, opulent costumes, and elaborate sets, while the plot involved a sumptuous drag ball, homosexuality, blackmail and betrayal that ran foul of the censors of the day. Rosoman attended the first night and was transfixed. He recalled: I was bowled over by the Drag Ball scene and asked John [Osborne] if I could go and make drawings of it; so he gave me one of the house seats for a week & I went every night.’ (Harrod, p. 114). Received also to great critical acclaim, the play won the Evening Standard prize for the best play of 1965 (see lot 29).

Rosoman's exhibition of some forty finished paintings and gouaches inspired by A Patriot for Me took place in New York in 1968 in the Amsterdam Gallery at the Lincoln Center. The painter's oversized canvases, including the present work, were inspired by the vast scale of the venue. In the lead up to the New York exhibition Rosoman noted how he worked hard and fast on the series: ‘I’ve painted 40 pictures in about 10 months: is it a good thing? Decide its not necessarily bad that I had pressure … I can go on with a painting indefinitely and not necessarily improve it.’ (Harrod, p. 120). As well as the present depiction of Redl, The Beating Up (lot 26) and Lieutenant Colonel von Mohl at his desk (lot 27), the series featured George Devine (co-founder and manager of the English Stage Company, and producer, director and actor at the Royal Court Theatre), playing Baron von Epp in drag, and at least five paintings of Jill Bennett (the only female part in the play) as Countess Sophia. Rosoman's two largest canvases celebrated the notorious Drag Ball that opens Act 2 of the play and which together with a scene of Redl in bed with another man had so incensed the Lord Chamberlain's office, and obliged the Royal Court to open as a private members for the play's run, thus circumventing the requested alterations and re-writes, a demand that Osborne and Devine flatly refused to do.

Osborne described the play's genesis in an essay intended for the New York exhibition catalogue but actually only used in the catalogue of the Roland Browse and Delbanco exhibition. He wrote how he had been ‘brooding on the idea of writing a play about homosexuality, using it as a metaphor for human isolation’, and that when in the South of France in 1961 he had told Christopher Isherwood and George Devine about this ‘germ’ of an idea. The play only took form when Osborne happened upon the story of Redl: ‘I was reading a large volume of the Hapsburg Monarchy and I came upon what seemed to be a footnote to history. It was the case of Alfred Redl, a distinguished officer in the Imperial Army and the head of counter espionage. It was a critical a tragic period in history, just before the First World War. …Redl’s own story was like an exciting spy thriller, and the scandal when it was revealed in 1912 was tremendous. Briefly, from his unique position of authority Redl was not only selling secrets to the Russians but betraying his own agents. None of his distinguished fellow officers was aware that he was a secret practising homosexual. It was this that led him to submit to blackmail, betray the officer elite to which he was so proud to belong, his allegiance to the Emperor and endanger the security of his own country. It was from this material that I wrote the play.’ (quoted in Harrod, p. 238).

As well as the controversy of the play being banned for general public admission in London, the homosexual content also created casting difficulties. The role of Redl, the leading man, proved especially difficult to fill. As Peter Whitebrook recounts, 'Even in 1965, playing a homosexual, especially under the furtive conditions of a private membership club, risked jeopardising a hard-earned professional reputation.' (Whitebrook, p. 240). Failing to find a British actor for the part, Anthony Page the director eventually secured the services of the very well-suited thirty-five year old Viennese actor Maximilian Schell (1930-2014).

But one actor only too delighted to play a role was George Devine. It had been Devine who had first visited the unknown Osborne in his houseboat in Chiswick to get the measure of the man who had written Look back in Anger before agreeing to its premier at the Royal Court in 1956. Over the next decade Devine kept a watchful eye on Osborne's stella trajectory, which included an Oscar and a Bafta award for his screenplay of the film Tom Jones and a succession of plays which all opened to considerable acclaim at the Royal Court. These included The Entertainer starring Laurence Olivier in 1957, Luther with Albert Finney in 1961 that won a Tony award on Broadway, and Inadmissable Evidence with Nicol Williamson in 1964.

Devine had admitted to Osborne when they were together with Isherwood in France how he had longed to appear on stage in drag. Osborne duly wrote the role of Baron Von Epp for him, a man who had become so much more than just a colleague: a true friend, confidante and mentor. But in the last week of the production’s run on 9th August 1965 Devine suffered a heart attack on stage. He died in January the following year. It was a huge personal and emotional blow for Osborne, and the loss of Devine marked the beginning of the end of his long running and very close association with the Royal Court Theatre.