He is consciously pointing out that not all gay men like Judy Garland

He is consciously pointing out that not all gay men like Judy Garland."Anthony Creighton has claimed more astringently, "I think people should be able to appreciate that A Patriot for Me, which stigmatises homosexuality, is a portrait of his own self-hatred." But while acknowledging that "the projection of self-loathing on Redl's part is almost unbearable", Gill refuses to make an easy identification of writer and character, citing "the number of people I've met in Sloane Square who are supposed to be characters and bear no resemblance to them at all".He emphasises the distinction between Osborne's personality and his plays. When I directed The Duchess of Malfi at the Court, I realised that the John Osborne person has been around for a very long time and they've never let him in." The most controversial aspect of the play, however, remains its sexual politics.. although the cause of controversy has changed. John throws in colour like a novelist, so that the characters often live in other people's scenes rather than their own."Despite being set during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire and showing a society propelling itself towards the First World War, the play is, in Gill's words, "very much about England, class and exclusion. What is attractive to me is that it's all about sensibility and has nothing to do with show. It's both elusive and allusive, working with so many characters and ideas.

"And there's lots of evidence to show that he wrote them in tandem." Returning to the play 30 years on, he finds it a much more fascinating and dense piece than its reputation as a cause celebre might allow "It is, in a genuine sense of the word, an adult play. People who were my people were Lindsay Anderson, for whom I was an understudy, John Dexter, for whom I played a small part in The Kitchen, and Bill Gaskill, who was a great friend."Although not involved in Anthony Page's original production of A Patriot for Me, he worked as his assistant on the premiere of Inadmissible Evidence. "lt seemed to me like a fully fledged theatre, but it had only been going for three years." He knew Osborne, "although I wasn't an intimate. John and Tony [Richardson] were the Stephen Daldrys of their day.. the jet-setters. Two years later, he joined the Court itself as an understudy on The Long and the Short and the Tall. His association with Osborne goes back to the Royal Court in the Sixties, where he received his theatrical training under George Devine.Gill's first theatre work as an assistant stage manager was on a tour of Look Back in Anger "I found it the most alarming play As a 17-year- old, it was all beyond me Everyone shouting and sophisticated," says Gill.

His career has encompassed new plays and revivals on the South Bank, at the Barbican and Stratford, and running both the Riverside and the National Theatre Studios. It has, however, adopted the best possible insurance policy by entrusting its production to Peter Gill. Along with Mike Alfreds and Trevor Nunn, Gill must be reckoned one of the country's finest directors, whose sensitivity and integrity issue a constant rebuke to the fashionable, flash tactics of so many of their younger colleagues. Recent revivals of Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer and Inadmissible Evidence have shown that his status as a pioneer is not matched by lasting merit. The RSC is therefore taking an enormous risk in reviving A Patriot for Me, his epic play about the blackmailing of a young homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian army.

Osborne's theatrical reputation has suffered equal setbacks. "Whatever else, I have been blessed with God's two greatest gifts: to be born English and heterosexual," John Osborne wrote in 1964. Three years earlier, his patriotism had been called into question after the publication of his notorious A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen, and earlier this year Osborne's former lover and collaborator, Anthony Creighton, revealed his bisexuality - God's blessings were clearly mixed. All these people are, in different ways and to different degrees, bores; what makes them interesting is the ingenuity and the attention to ideas with which their chatter has been packaged and structured In that sense, at least, it was music to the ears..