Luther (play) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The Times thought the play only a partial success, giving a vivid portrait of Luther the man but not illuminating "the inner compulsions or the external events that turned him into a historical personage." The paper also criticised the proportions of the play: "Time spent on the makings of the monk is rather badly needed when the chronicle comes to the momentous events of his life." The Guardian's critic, W J Weatherby, objected to the play's harping on Luther's constipation at the expense of his spiritual battles: "we get precious little hint of Luther's real struggle".

Kenneth Tynan in The Observer pointed out, in Osborne's defence, that Luther's obsession with his bowels was not the invention of the playwright, but was documented in Erik H Erikson's psychiatric study, Young Man Luther. Of the play as a whole, Tynan wrote:

"We are left with a powerful impression of a man who invented the idea of the individual conscience, responsible to no earthly authority, and was racked by his own invention. … The language is urgent and sinewy, packed with images that derive from bone, blood and marrow; the prose, especially in Luther's sermons, throbs with a rhetorical zeal not often heard in English historical drama since the seventeenth century, mingling gutter candour with cadences that might have come from the pulpit oratory of Donne.

Tynan also noted that reviewing the Paris production, L'Express had lamented Osborne's failure to rival "the dialectic vigour of Sartre, or the poetic vigour of Eliot", a judgment that Tynan considered missed "the quick, stark, lively, lyrical, button-holing virtuosity of Mr. Osborne's language."

Writing of the New York production Howard Taubman said in the New York Times that the play had "size and distinction". The New York Herald Tribune described the play as "an anguished, vigorous and stammering study … not a masterpiece, not even fully coherent, it is an exploration and it wants looking at and thinking about." The New York Daily News called it "a work of power and integrity".