Look Back in Anger |
Written by |
John Osborne |
Date premiered |
May 8, 1956 |
Place premiered |
Royal Court Theatre
LondonDirector - Tony Richardson |
Original language |
English |
Genre |
Drama |
Setting |
The action throughout takes place in the Porters' one-room
flat in the Midlands. |
IBDB profile |
Look Back in Anger (1956) is a
John Osborne play—made into films in
1959,
1980, and
1989—about a
love triangle involving an intelligent and educated but disaffected
young man of
working class origin (Jimmy Porter), his
upper-middle-class, impassive wife (Alison), and her haughty best
friend (Helena Charles). Cliff, an amiable
Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. The play was a success on
the London stage, and spawned the term "angry
young men" to describe Osborne and those of his generation who
employed the harshness of
realism in the theatre in contrast to the more
escapist theatre that characterized the previous generation.
Background
Look Back in Anger was a strongly
autobiographical piece based on Osborne's unhappy marriage to
actress
Pamela Lane and their life in cramped accommodation in
Derby.[1]
While Osborne aspired towards a career in theatre, Lane was of a more
practical and
materialistic persuasion, not taking Osborne's ambitions seriously
while
cuckolding him with a local dentist. It also contains much of
Osborne's earlier life, the wrenching speech of seeing a loved one die
being, for example, a replay of the death of Thomas, Osborne's father.
What it is best remembered for, though, are Jimmy's tirades. Some of
these are directed against generalised British middle-class smugness in
the post-atomic world. Many are directed against the female characters,
and this is a very distinct echo of the playwright's profoundly uneasy
relations with women, starting with his mother Nellie Beatrice,
described by Osborne in his autobiography
A Better Class of Person as "hypocritical, self-absorbed,
calculating and indifferent".[2]
Madeline, the lost love Jimmy pines for, is based on
Stella Linden, an older rep-company actress who first encouraged
Osborne to write.[citation
needed] After the first production in London,
Osborne began a relationship with
Mary
Ure, who played Alison, and
divorced
his wife to marry Ure in 1957.
Production
The play was premiered at London's
Royal Court Theatre, on 8 May 1956 by the
English Stage Company under the direction of
Tony Richardson, setting by Alan Tagg, and music for songs by
Tom Eastwood. The press release called the author an
angry young man, a phrase that came to represent a new movement in
1950s British theatre. Legend has it that audiences gasped at the sight
of an ironing board on a London stage. The cast was as follows:
Kenneth Haigh (Jimmy),
Alan Bates (Cliff),
Mary
Ure (Alison), Helena Hughes (Helena) and
John Welsh (Colonel Redfern).
The following year, the production moved to
Broadway under producer
David Merrick and director
Tony Richardson. Retaining the original cast but starring
Vivienne Drummond as Helena, it would receive three
Tony Award nominations including for
Best Play and "Best Dramatic Actress" for Ure.
Setting
- Time- The present, The action throughout takes place in the
Porters' one-room flat in the
Midlands.
- Act I
- Scene 1 - Early evening, April
- Act II
- Scene 1 - Two weeks later
- Scene 2 - The following evening
- Act III
- Scene 1 - Several months later
- Scene 2 - A few minutes later
Play synopsis
Act 1
Act 1 opens on a dismal Sunday afternoon in Jimmy and Alison's
cramped attic in the
Midlands. Jimmy and Cliff are attempting to read the Sunday papers,
plus the radical weekly, "price
ninepence, obtainable at any bookstall" as Jimmy snaps, claiming it
from Cliff. This is a reference to the
New Statesman, and in the context of the period would have
instantly signalled the pair's political preference to the audience.
Alison is attempting to do the week's ironing and is only half listening
as Jimmy and Cliff engage in the expository dialogue.
It becomes apparent that there is a huge social gulf between Jimmy
and Alison. Her family is upper-middle-class military, perhaps verging
on upper class, while Jimmy is decidedly working class. He had to fight
hard against her family's disapproval to win her. "Alison's mummy and I
took one look at each other, and from then on the age of
chivalry was dead", he explains. We also learn that the sole family
income is derived from a sweet stall in the local market—an enterprise
that is surely well beneath Jimmy's education, let alone Alison's
"station in life".
As Act 1 progresses, Jimmy becomes more and more vituperative,
transferring his contempt for Alison's family onto her personally,
calling her "pusillanimous" and generally belittling her to Cliff. It is
possible to play this scene as though Jimmy thinks everything is just a
joke, but most actors opt for playing it as though he really is
excoriating her.[3]
The tirade ends with some physical horseplay, resulting in the ironing
board overturning and Alison's arm getting a burn. Jimmy exits to play
his trumpet off stage.
Alison and Cliff play a tender scene, during which she confides that
she's accidentally pregnant and can't quite bring herself to tell Jimmy.
Cliff urges her to tell him. When Jimmy returns, Alison announces that
her actress friend Helena Charles is coming to stay, and it is entirely
obvious that Jimmy despises Helena even more than Alison. He flies into
a total rage, and conflict is inevitable.
Act 2
Act 2 opens on another Sunday afternoon, with Helena and Alison
making lunch. In a two-handed scene, Alison gives a clue as to why she
decided to take Jimmy on—her own minor rebellion against her upbringing
plus her admiration of Jimmy's campaigns against the dereliction of
English post-war, post-atom-bomb life. She describes Jimmy to Helena as
a "knight
in shining armour". Helena says, firmly, "You've got to fight him".
Jimmy enters, and the tirade continues. If his Act 1 material could
be played as a joke, there's no doubt about the intentional viciousness
of his attacks on Helena. When the women put on hats and declare that
they are going to church, Jimmy's sense of betrayal peaks. When he
leaves to take an urgent phone call, Helena announces that she has
forced the issue. She has sent a
telegram to Alison's parents asking them to come and "rescue" her.
Alison is stunned but agrees that she will go.
After a scene break, we see Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, who has
come to collect her to take her back to her family home. The playwright
allows the Colonel to come across as quite a sympathetic character,
albeit totally out of touch with the modern world (as he himself
admits). "You're hurt because everything's changed", Alison tells him,
"and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same".
Helena arrives to say goodbye, intending to leave very soon herself.
Alison is surprised that Helena is staying on for another day, but she
leaves, giving Cliff a note for Jimmy. Cliff in turn hands it to Helena
and leaves, saying "I hope he rams it up your nostrils". Almost
immediately, Jimmy bursts in. His contempt at finding a "goodbye" note
makes him turn on Helena again, warning her to keep out of his way until
she leaves. Helena tells him that Alison is expecting a baby, and Jimmy
admits grudgingly that he's taken aback. However, his tirade continues.
They first come to physical blows, and then as the Act 2 curtain falls,
Jimmy and Helena are kissing passionately and falling on the bed.
Act 3
Act 3 opens as a deliberate replay of Act 1, but this time with
Helena at the ironing-board wearing Jimmy's Act 1 red shirt. Months have
passed. Jimmy is notably more pleasant to Helena than he was to Alison
in Act 1. She actually laughs at his jokes, and the three of them
(Jimmy, Cliff, and Helena) get into a
music hall comedy routine that obviously is not improvised. Cliff
announces that he's decided to strike out on his own. As Jimmy leaves
the room to get ready for a final night out for the three of them, he
opens the door to find Alison, looking like death. Instead of caring for
her he snaps over his shoulder "Friend of yours to see you" and abruptly
leaves.
After a scene break, Alison explains to Helena that she lost the
baby—one of Jimmy's cruellest speeches in Act 1 expressed the wish that
Alison would conceive a child and lose it—the two women reconcile but
Helena realises that what she's done is immoral and she in turn decides
to leave. She summons Jimmy to hear her decision and he lets her go with
a sarcastic farewell.
The play ends with a sentimental reconciliation between Jimmy and
Alison. They revive an old game they used to play, pretending to be
bears and squirrels, and seem to be in a state of truce.
Critical reception
At the time of production reviews of Look Back in Anger were
deeply negative.
Kenneth Tynan and
Harold Hobson were among the few critics to praise it, and are now
regarded among the most influential critics of the time.
For example, on
BBC
Radio's The Critics,
Ivor Brown began his review by describing the play's setting—a
one-room flat in the Midlands—as "unspeakably dirty and squalid" such
that it was difficult for him to "believe that a colonel's daughter,
brought up with some standards", would have lived in it. He expressed
anger at having watched a something that "wasted [his] time". The
Daily Mail's
Cecil Wilson wrote that the beauty of Mary Ure was "frittered away"
on a pathetic wife, who, "judging by the time she spends ironing, seems
to have taken on the nation's laundry". Indeed, Alison, Ure's character,
irons during Act One, makes lunch in Act Two, and leaves the ironing to
her rival in Act Three.
On the other hand,
Kenneth Tynan wrote that he "could not love anyone who did not wish
to see Look Back in Anger", describing the play as a "minor
miracle" containing "all the qualities...one had despaired of ever
seeing on the stage—the drift towards
anarchy,
the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of "official"
attitudes, the
surrealist sense of humour (e.g., Jimmy describes an effeminate male
friend as a 'female
Emily Brontë'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a
crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination
that no one who dies shall go unmourned."
Harold Hobson was also quick to recognize the importance of the play
"as a landmark of British theatre". He praised Osborne for the play,
despite the fact that the "blinkers
still obscure his vision".
Alan Sillitoe, author of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (both of which are
also part of the "angry young men" movement), wrote that Osborne "didn't
contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it
up".
References in Popular Culture
- An episode of the
BBC radio
sitcom
Hancock's Half Hour paid tribute to Osborne's play in "The
East Cheam Drama Festival" (1958). The episode features the regular
cast
spoofing a number of theatrical
genres,
with Look Back in Anger recast as "Look Back in Hunger—a new
play by the
Hungry Young Man, Mr. John Eastbourne".
Scriptwriters
Alan Simpson and
Ray Galton mimic several elements of Osborne's play, from
Jimmy's railing against the iniquities of modern life to the values
of middle-class bourgeois life.
In Media
- "Look Back in Anger" is a song by British singer
David Bowie from his 1979 album
Lodger.
In performance
Sources
- Osborne, John (1982). A Better
Class of Person: An Autobiography, 1929-56 (paperback edition).
Penguin Books Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-14-006288-5.
- Osborne, John (1991). Almost a
Gentleman: An Autobiography, 1955-66 (paperback edition). Faber
& Faber.
ISBN 0-571-16635-0.
References
-
^ Osborne 1991, pp
1-4
-
^ Osborne 1982
-
^ See not only the
original portrayal by Kenneth Haig but also the screen
performances by
Richard Burton and
Kenneth Branagh