大象传媒

John Osborne meets Pamela Lane in 1951 and within three months the couple are married.

So begins an extraordinary love affair that lasts over 30 years.

Peter Whitebrook's completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UK鈥檚 greatest playwrights.

The letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actress Pamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre and life in post-war Britain.

As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osborne鈥檚 death. By the mid-1980s, they had become closer and more trusting than they had been since their earliest years together.

"You are for me what you always were," Pamela told him, "I am in love with you still."

It is, he declared, "my fortune to have loved someone for a lifetime."

Acerbic, witty, candid and heartbreaking, the letters reveal a unique relationship - troubled, tender and enduring.

Author, Peter Whitebrook, was born in London and has written and broadcast extensively on the theatre and literature. His co-adaptation of John Steinbeck鈥檚 The Grapes of Wrath won a Fringe First Award. His biography of John Osborne was nominated for both the Sheridan Morley Prize for biography and the Theatre Book Prize.

Omnibus of five parts abridged by Polly Coles.

Read by Simon Shepherd and Amanda Root.

Producer: Clive Brill

A Brill production for 大象传媒 Radio 4, first broadcast in April 2018.

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