Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on literature, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In the following essay, he discusses Osborne's use of the metaphor of marriage to represent the breakdown of civility and reason in the world of the play.

The opening stage directions to John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence establish this play as “A site of helplessness, of oppression and polemic.” It is a site that Osborne mines with virtuosity, as he had in the groundbreaking, autobiographical Look Back in Anger (1956), a play that explores the emotions of the prototypical angry young man. In both plays, angry men are forced to confront the failings of their marriages and their respective will to live a life guided by intellect and honesty, what Bill Maitland calls “an ethic of frankness.” Over his career, Osborne...