Look Back in Anger (Plays, Penguin)
by John Osborne
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Book Summary Information
Author: John OsborneEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1982-11-18
ISBN: 0140481753
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Look Back in Anger (Plays, Penguin)
Book Review: Angry Young Rebel
Summary: 5 Stars
"Look Back in Anger", first performed at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1956, is often cited as marking a theatrical revolution. The British theatre of the early fifties, dominated by playwrights like Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, was widely regarded as genteel, well-mannered and middle-class. John Osborne's play can be seen as a deliberate reaction against those values. Its plot is conventional enough. It centres around the stormy marriage of a young couple, Jimmy and Alison Porter, who separate after a series of quarrels. Unknown to Jimmy, Alison is pregnant at the time, and he starts a relationship with her best friend Helena, an actress. Six months later Alison, having lost her baby, returns, and Helena ends her affair with Jimmy so as to allow the couple to be reunited.
What was shocking about the play was its social setting and the attitudes displayed by the characters, especially Jimmy. He is from a working-class family and, although he has a university degree, has turned his back on the sort of well-paid white-collar job that such an educational background would normally have led to in the fifties, working as a trader in the local market, running a sweet stall with his friend Cliff. He and Alison, with Cliff as a lodger, live in a dingy bed-sit in a large Midlands town. Alison herself is from the wealthy upper middle classes (her father is a retired Indian Army officer) and her family resent her marriage to Jimmy.
It was in the late fifties that the term "Angry Young Man" was coined by the critics to describe not only writers such as Osborne, Kingsley Amis and John Braine, but also their characters such as Jimmy Porter and Amis's Lucky Jim, who were seen as the mouthpieces of their creators. Jimmy is, to borrow the title of a famous film of the period, a rebel without a cause.
In another Osborne play from around the same period, "An Epitaph for George Dillon", the hero, himself a playwright, is advised by his agent to cut out the long speeches from his latest play, which are seen as being "too Bernard Shaw". This is not advice which Osborne took himself, although the passionate, emotional "Look Back in Anger" is very different in style to Shaw's plays, which at times can read like extracts from the proceedings of a debating society. Jimmy gives vent to his feelings in a series of long, angry speeches. (As Osborne himself was to point out, there is something formal about these speeches, which he likened to operatic recitative).
In these speeches, Jimmy attacks the state of British society, and often takes the opportunity to have a go at Alison and her family (especially her mother) whom he sees as part of the traditional British ruling class. He is instinctively suspicious of any form of authority and of the establishment. He is hostile to religion and to the growing "never had it so good" conservatism of fifties Britain. He does not, however, himself really subscribe to any alternative system of values such as Communism or Socialism. A frequent theme of his complaints is that there are no longer any good causes to fight for; he envies his parents' generation who could fight the anti-fascist battles of the thirties and forties. (His father was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War).
Jimmy's relationship with Alison is a complex one, perhaps best expressed by the cliché that they can neither live with one another nor without one another. On the one hand, the differences in their personalities and their social backgrounds is the cause of constant friction between them. On the other, they have a deep emotional need for one another, shown by their game of "bears and squirrels". To an outsider such as Helena this is mere sentimental whimsy; to them, it is a way of expressing their mutual love.
One reviewer complains that Osborne had a "tin ear" for dialogue and quotes some of Helena's lines in support of this complaint. The problem lies not with the playwright's "tin ear" but rather with the fact that some people have tin voices. There are plenty of people in Britain, especially from Helena's upper-middle-class stratum of society who speak in precisely that stilted, formal tone of voice as a substitute for feeling. In the fifties there were probably even more.
Although it had enthusiastic supporters such as the critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, "Look Back" was highly controversial when it was first produced, being too shocking for many critics and theatregoers in the fifties. Today it has largely lost its power to shock, kitchen-sink realism, bad language and anti-establishment opinions having become commonplace in the theatre over the last fifty years. Nevertheless, when well produced its emotional power and sincerity mean that it can still be an impressively memorable experience in the theatre.
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