New Theatre, Cardiff
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One of the most rewarding aspects of watching the script for The Devil Inside Him finally come to life on stage is that it was only luck – and a good deal or rummaging – that made it possible.

Discovered moldering in the deepest recesses of The British Library vaults sometime last summer, John Osborne’s long lost work bares all the hallmarks of the progenitor of the “angry young man” stylings that transformed British theatre forever.

Osborne’s unmistakable touchstones of gritty realism and writhing prose are all here in jagged and uncompromising detail. The Devil Inside Him is full of imperfections, but they’re of the type that only add fascination to a mesmerizing piece of theatre.

Predating the author’s most famous work, Look Back In Anger, by some eight years, this Elen Bowman-directed play has a remarkable level of maturity. Osborne was only 18 when he penned it.

The social upheaval of post war Britain casts a long shadow over  The Devil Inside Him. Written during 1948-49, when Osborne spent time in west Wales, the play is set in a nameless windswept village some 40 miles west of Swansea. The attention focuses on the well kept but dowdy interior of the Prosser household.

The chief targets of Osborne’s scorn are revealed early on – Mrs. Prosser (Helen Griffin) is the cowering, god-fearing wife to her oppressively domineering preacher husband, Mr. Prosser (Derek Hutchinson). They have an only son, Huw (Iwan Rheon) who’s a creative but transparently damaged soul that seems to carry a weight of personal guilt and torment with him wherever he goes.

Despite the Prosser’s intensely private nature, their house is rarely their own. The sticky beak, village gossip and cleaner Mrs. Evans (played with a scene-stealing comedy panache from Rachel Lumberg), Mr. Burn, a medical student lodger, and the Prosser’s strikingly beautiful and self-aware servant girl, Dilys (Catrin Stewart), are daily visitors.

Rheon plays Huw with a painstaking level of empathy; his character’s deep troubles stem from sexual and rebellious emotions that dare not be expressed in a community that wears religion like a smothering black cloak.

Huw scribbles his sexually-charged adolescent poetry into a tatty exercise book – it’s the only outlet for the callow thoughts that rarely pass his lips. He shuffles evasively away from his father’s twin fixations of moral filth and contamination –a middle aged man who believes Dilys has “sin inside her” and that existence is merely a cause “to resist impulse”.

When Mr. Prosser finally manages to wrestle Huw’s exercise book from his hands, his son’s words become a miasma of transgression and corruption that fill the air. Convinced that Huw’s mind is ravaged with demons, his father tells him he “should be struck down…no decent man could ever write those words.”  It’s the job of the local minister (John Cording) and his whites of the eyes fire and brimstone sermonising to send the play into an intoxicating spin of superstition.

When Huw utters to his only confidant, the rational atheist Burn, that his words are “about love and beauty…a little beauty in an ugly world,” the full force of Osborne’s intent becomes clear.  But by now, Huw is not the only one carrying an unwanted burden.

The Prosser’s servant girl Dilys is pregnant and the father has fled. In blind panic she considers her options, expertly manipulating the nakedly obvious desire that Huw’s long held for her, despite her repeatedly branding him the awkward and inconsequential “village dafty”. Backed into a corner, the young but hopelessly tormented duo seal each other’s sorry fate.

As Osborne’s story progresses, the rain continues to fall. Burn, Dilys and Huw represent the younger generation desperate to break free of the bleak world their parents inhabit. The play’s tragedy is in part fused with the knowledge that an enlightened world won’t arrive soon enough to help them escape.

“They hate you because they don’t understand you,” Burn tells Huw near to the play’s conclusion. The words are arguably the biggest pointer here to the maelstrom of vitriol that later made Osborne a household name with Look Back In Anger.

Subtlety is not a strong point of the play. The primary targets of Osborne’s acerbic words – religion and generational divide - are too obvious and well worn to truly break new ground. But as an insight into the creative development of one of the finest British playwrights of the last century, The Devil Inside Him is rarely less than highly enthralling entertainment from a highly accomplished cast.

Alex Donohue