Week 3

Outline for Essay

1. Your essay must have an introduction a body and a conclusion2. It
must be between 1000 and 1500 words long.3. Your essay must have
a bibliography at the end , in which you mention the books, magazines
or web pages that you have referred to.4. Plagiarism will not be
accepted.5. Use formal language when writing your essay unless you
are quoting someone.6. Make sure that you answer the question that
you are being asked, don´t just tell the story.

Look Back in Anger-Essay questions (choose ONE of

the following questions)

1. Comment on the relevance of the setting of Look Back in

Anger.
2. Look Back in Anger has been referred to, by the critic
Harold Hobson as, “an outright, unqualified condemnation
of an entire society”. Do you agree with him?
3. Jimmy´s relationship with Allison presents us with a
potent example of one of the most important recurring
images in the drama of this period: the love-hate
relationship men have with the mother figure, in which
emotional dependence, a resentment at such dependence
and a desire to destroy, are all combined……….Discuss
with reference to the play.

Look Back in Anger, May 1956

The premiere of Look Back in Anger in May 1956 shocks critics - with its
scenes of ironing
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Samantha Ellis
Wednesday 21 May 2003 12.11 BST

"I doubt," wrote Kenneth Tynan in the Observer, "if I could love anyone
who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger." With those words, Tynan
sealed the fate of John Osborne's play. With his portrayal of Jimmy
Porter, the archetypal Angry Young Man, "Osborne," wrote playwright
Alan Sillitoe, "didn't contribute to British theatre; he set off a landmine
and blew most of it up."

The audience at the Royal Court on May 8 1956 had no idea what was
about to hit them. The programme advertised RAF Wings Day, Bulldog
beer and Huntley & Palmers cake. Then Kenneth Haigh came on stage as
Porter and started pouring scorn on all this postwar cosiness. Old-school
impresario Binkie Beaumont walked out. Terence Rattigan, master of the
stodgy, well-wrought play, summed up Osborne's efforts as: "Look, Ma,
how unlike Terence Rattigan I'm being."

The reviews reveal how much has changed. On BBC radio's The Critics,
Ivor Brown began his tirade by describing the play's setting - a one-room
flat in the Midlands - as "unspeakably dirty and squalid. It is difficult to
believe that a colonel's daughter, brought up with some standards, would
have stayed in this sty for a day." He went on to fume: "I felt angry
because it wasted my time." Gerald Berry, talking on the same
programme, also suffered: "I nearly had a nervous breakdown watching
her take so long to iron one pyjama top."

Legend has it that audiences gasped at the sight of an ironing board on a

London stage. It seems that critics such as the Daily Mail's Cecil Wilson -
who felt that "Mary Ure's beauty [was] frittered away on the part of a wife
who, judging by the time she spends ironing, seems to have taken on the
nation's laundry" - weren't terribly experienced at ironing. After all,
Alison (played by Ure, who later became the second Mrs Osborne) ironed
only during act one. In act two, she made lunch.

Others accused Porter of wallowing. "We can only hope," wrote Anthony
Cookman languidly in Tatler, "that the chronic disease of nagging from
which he suffers will abate in course of time." In the Evening Standard,
Milton Shulman began his review by noting: "Nothing is so comforting to
the young as the opportunity to feel sorry for themselves." He thought the
play was nothing more than "a self-pitying snivel". For the Evening
News's critic, it was "putrid bosh". Most critics mentioned Osborne's age -
27 - as evidence that the play was callow. But John Barber in the Daily
Express concluded that, while the play was "intense, angry, feverish,
undisciplined ... even a little crazy", it was "young, young, young". For
Tynan, it presented "postwar youth as it really is", and Porter as "the
completest young pup in our literature since Hamlet, Prince of Denmark".

Tynan's review made Look Back in Anger the play to see. It toured to
Moscow, transferred to Broadway. In 1958, director Tony Richardson
made it into a film starring a smouldering Richard Burton; it was remade,
less memorably, by Kenneth Branagh in 1989. The play also changed
Osborne's life. He had written it in a deckchair on Morecambe pier where
he was performing in a creaky rep show called Seagulls Over Sorrento. He
had been living on a leaky houseboat, where he would stew up nettles
from the riverbank. Look Back in Anger made him the furious, glamorous
voice of his generation.

In 1993, a year before his death, Osborne wrote that the opening night
was "an occasion I only partly remember, but certainly with more
accuracy than those who subsequently claimed to have been present and,
if they are to be believed, would have filled the theatre several times over".

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/ma
r/31/theatre2

Fifty years of anger

Mark Lawson
On May 8 1956, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger premiered at the
Royal Court in London. It shocked the theatre world, some acclaiming it
 as the voice of a new generation, others damning it as a squalid rant. Mark
Lawson looks back to the night that changed British theatre

'Impressive and depressing' ... Kenneth Haigh expresses Jimmy Porter's

rage in the company of (left to right) Mary Ure, Alan Bates and Helena
Hughes, during the first night's performance of Look Back in Anger at the
Royal Court

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Friday 31 March 2006 09.37 BSTFirst published on Friday 31 March
2006 09.37 BST

In early May 1956, Britain was rehearsing for destruction. A civil defence
exercise took place in London and Birmingham, based on the hypothesis
that 10-megaton hydrogen bombs had exploded at dawn. The Times
reported volunteers with fake blood and burns lying on street corners,
waiting to give practice for ambulances and police cars.

Within four months, there would indeed be a war, although it involved

not a Russian nuclear attack on the UK but Egypt's seizure of a vital
shipping channel. But, between the Eden government's dry-run for atomic
apocalypse and its implosion over Suez, the capital's theatre district was
shaken by a metaphorical explosion of its own: on May 8, the Royal Court
theatre premiered a first play by a 26-year-old actor called John Osborne.

The other big London theatrical opening of the week was The House by
the Lake, a Christie-ish crime comedy by Hugh Mills about two people
trying to kill the same man. The major movie opening was Hitchock's The
Trouble With Harry. The literary pages were excited by Angus Wilson's
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. On what was still called the wireless, the BBC
Third Programme had just premiered a verse-drama by the poet Louis
Macniece, called The Dark Tower.

The legend is that Look Back in Anger changed British theatre for ever,
replacing stage-sets of Belgravia mansions with a drab Midlands flat, and
smart upper-class remarks with the angry anti-establishment rants of its
hero, Jimmy Porter.

It's a measure of how unexpected the setting was that, at the first
performances, the sight of Alison Porter's ironing-board on stage is said to
have drawn from the audience the sort of gasp of surprise otherwise
achieved only by the most innovative cinematic special effects. In an era
of feel-good theatre (although Rattigan's plays were darker or deeper than
their first productions allowed them to be), Look Back in Anger
deliberately provoked bad feelings about Britain, the war-time generation
and conventional drama.

Certainly, the ruling forces of the UK stage seem to have sensed a

revolution. The impresario "Binkie" Beaumont, camp baron of the
profitable comedy and well-made play and with 40 theatres at his
command, walked out of Look Back in Anger at the interval. Terence
Rattigan, Beaumont's house dramatist and the author of The Winslow Boy
and Separate Tables, tried to follow him but was dissuaded by TC
Worsley, theatre critic of the Financial Times. Even so, when Rattigan left
at the end and was asked by a reporter what he thought, he trembled: "I
think the writer is trying to say: 'Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I am,
Ma!'"

It's in the nature of the theatre that even its great events are momentary
and vanish. But this particular evening at the Court is even harder to
reconstruct than most, because of the melancholy fact that almost no one
connected with Look Back in Anger caused much trouble to the pension
industry.

Osborne was just 65 when he died in 1994. The director, Tony

Richardson, had gone three years earlier, aged 63. Mary Ure, who played
Alison Porter, though the youngest of the cast, had not even lived until the
20th anniversary, dying in 1975 at 42. George Devine, who accepted the
play for the Royal Court, died at 55 in 1966. Even Alan Bates, who played
Jimmy's emollient friend Cliff, can no longer give eye-witness testimony;
he died three years ago, aged 69. The first Jimmy Porter, Kenneth Haigh,
survives, though he is very unwell. For the most part, the gang was
variously lost to smoking, drinking, depression and terrible illnesses.

The result of this is to leave historians of the first night dependent on

memoirs, and to make the few remaining first-person memories precious.
William Gaskill, a young actor at the time, would become a director and
run the Royal Court. But in 1956, in his early 20s, he was a friend of
Richardson's. The director had shown him a copy before rehearsals and
he was "knocked over by it", finding a "passion and freshness, a rhetoric
that had gone from theatre: one person speaking directly to the audience".

He remembers his first meeting with the writer. Osborne was "raffish, I
suppose. An old-fashioned word! I remember him as very charming and
flirtatious. I never saw him angry in person; that only came out in the
plays." But Gaskill recalls no sense of history on the first night. Nine years
later, when Edward Bond's Saved opened at the Court with a scene of
stones being thrown at a child in a pram, there were boos and a feeling of
boundaries being crossed. Anger, though, had a much slower impact. The
stories of the play's revolutionary effect - such as Beaumont storming out
- became celebrated only later.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had been staged in August 1955,
introducing an unprecedented bleakness of dialogue and design; Bertolt
Brecht, a pioneer of political theatre, died in 1956. So, logically, Look Back
in Anger, following Beckett and Brecht, cannot have been quite the shock
to audiences and critics that the theatrical annals insist. But those
challenging dramatists had been Irish and German, and their stage
techniques abstract. Osborne wounded the traditionalists much more
because he was English and realist.

Osborne had more than theoretical experience of the kind of drama his
own play helped to replace. His memoir Almost a Gentleman (1991)
records his time as an actor in regional repertory theatres, often working,
as it happens, for Binkie Beaumont. Rapidly dissatisfied with acting, he
was prone to theatrical pranks. Appearing in an army melodrama, he
applied spirit-gum to both sides of his fake moustache so that, after a
romantic clinch, the leading actress was left with the facial-hair stuck on
her upper-lip. Stage-props were also at risk; a plate of sandwiches for a
meal scene would be sabotaged by the addition of what was then called a
rubber johnny.
Such stunts led to longer gaps between engagements and Osborne began
to write, initially verse dramas in the then fashionable style of Christopher
Fry. In 1955, already separated from his first wife Pamela Lane, he was
living in Hammersmith with a friend called Anthony Creighton. Gossips
insisted that the men were lovers, a claim supported by Creighton in an
interview before his death, but Osborne and his family have always denied
this. Gaskill, who saw them together many times, says now: "I just don't
know. Their relationship was anyone's guess."

Creighton's own ambitions as a dramatist were initially more advanced

than Osborne's. Together, they wrote Epitaph for George Dillon, revived
last year in London. But on May 4 1955, Osborne noted in his pocket diary
the start of a solo project: "Began Look Back in Anger."

The situation of the central character Jimmy Porter - trapped in a

combative marriage in cramped digs - recalled Osborne's own situation
with Lane; Porter's torrential monologues about the stasis and decay of
Britain were distillations of the playwright's own politics. In late May,
Osborne took a small part in a production at Morecambe of Seagulls Over
Sorrento, by Hugh Hastings. He finished writing his own play sitting in a
deckchair on the beach, looking out at sea.

Water would become strangely important to the fortunes of Look Back in

Anger. Osborne had persuaded Creighton to spend a legacy from his
mother on an old rhine barge, the M/Y Egret, which was moored near
Chiswick in west London. Friends always commented that it smelled of
cabbage: the barge-mates were experimenting with vegetarianism.

Reading on deck a copy of the theatrical paper the Stage, the aspiring
writer saw an ad for a new group called the English Stage Company whose
director, George Devine, was seeking new plays. He posted off a script
which, after the rejection of possible alternative titles including Man in a
Rage and My Blood is a Mile High, was again called Look Back in Anger.
On August 12 1955, a grey-haired, breathless man was to be seen
approaching the boat, having unwisely rowed out at high tide. This was
Devine, who offered Osborne £25 for an option on the Porter play.

It would be staged in a season at the Royal Court beginning with The

Mulberry Bush, a drama by the then modish novelist Angus Wilson.
Devine was nervous about the box-office prospects of the unknown
Osborne and so sought to protect his play by scheduling only a short run
before two verse dramas by Ronald Duncan, Don Juan and The Death of
Satan. The fact that these supposed bankers are now quite forgotten - and
that Anger had to be extended when Duncan's unspeakable historical
pieces were pulled off after catastrophic reviews - may stand as a warning
for theatre managers against making too many assumptions.

Hopes for Anger were very low. Dozens of actors turned it down, horrified
by its bolshieness. According to Osborne, one "revered theatre dame"
explained her refusal of a part with the view that "it should be thrown into
the river and washed out to sea so that it can never be seen again". It is
unclear if this was an instinctive insult or if she knew that the writer lived
on the Thames.

Richardson, hired to direct, recalled in his posthumously published

autobiography The Long-Distance Runner (1993) that "rehearsals were
terse and a bit glum". Osborne's own phrase was "subdued and
unspeculative". One day, Richardson gloomily observed that the third act
was sagging; the author wrote a quick song on the bus.

Publicity was also considered problematic. George Fearon, press officer

for the new season, read the script and summoned its author to a meeting
in a pub, where he informed Osborne that he was appalled by the drama
and saw no hope of interesting the papers, before offering a psychological
summary of the unfortunate author: "I suppose you're really ... an angry
young man?" Fearon was, as Osborne recalled, the first to say a phrase
that, against the publicist's predictions, was indeed taken up by the
papers.

Stage censorship would remain in force in Britain for another 12 years

and so LBIA, in common with all scripts at the time, was submitted to the
Lord Chamberlain, the royal official historically charged with keeping
theatres clean. The response of the Queen's blue pencil was, with
hindsight, slightly surprising. CD Heriot - a notably conservative assessor
who two years later would dismiss Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party as
"an insane and pointless play" - seems, uncharacterisitically, to have got
Osborne's point. In March 1956, he reported that "this impressive and
depressing new play breaks new psychological ground". He asked for nine
changes, including "page 41, cut the homosexual reference" and "page 16,
alter reference to 'excessive love-making'", but granted the play a licence
and concluded with a summary that would not have disgraced a theatre
critic: "The play's interest, in fact, lies in its careful observation of the
anteroom of hell."
In fact, as it turned out, none of the play's first professional reviewers
would be either as insightful or as kind. In his memoir, Osborne recalls
waking fully-clothed and totally hungover in his cold cabin and crossing
the river to Mortlake to buy the dailies. Even 35 years on, he omitted to
quote them, either because the memory or the research was too much for
him. But the overnight verdicts still stand as a warning to critics about
how much they can miss. The Times complained of the very detail that
would make Osborne celebrated: "The piece consists largely of angry
tirades." The Manchester Guardian knew what the play thought it was
doing, but didn't think it succeeded: "The author and actors do not
persuade us that they 'speak for' a new generation." The London Evening
Standard called it "a self-pitying snivel".

In his memoir Richardson recalls sitting with Osborne "in the little coffee
shop adjoining the theatre and opposite the Sloane Square tube station,
frozen in depression, with little belief in our futures". He does not include
the savage line that Osborne attributes to him in his own book: "But what
on earth did you expect? You didn't expect them to like it, did you?" But,
by the time both wrote their memoirs, Osborne and Richardson were
enemies, still festering over issues dating from the movie of Tom Jones
they made in 1963.

During the first weekend of Look Back in Anger's run, the play was
featured on the BBC Third Programme's The Critics, forerunner of
subsequent broadcast cultural bust-ups. The programme was presented
that week ("conducted", as Radio Times has it) by Sir Gerald Barry, with
critics Catherine de la Roche, Lionel Hale, Alan Pryce-Jones and Ivor
Brown.

Brown led the attack on Anger: "The play's setting - a one-room flat in the
Midlands - is unspeakably squalid. It is difficult to believe that a colonel's
daughter, brought up with some standards, which we are led to believe
Alison is, would have stayed in this sty for a day ..." The chairman cut in to
advise listeners that Alison Porter spent most of the play at an ironing
board: "I almost had a nervous breakdown waiting for her to iron one
pyjama top."

But though dismissed by The Critics, Osborne was saved by another

sabbath institution. Kenneth Tynan, a 39-year-old peacock who
championed new theatrical writing with a critical prose every bit as
original as Osborne's drama, published in the Observer words that have
become at least as quoted as any lines in the play: "All the qualities are
there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage ... I doubt if I
could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger."

Tynan did not generally go short of lovers but, in the summer of 1956, he
would have been somewhat lonely if he had operated the veto suggested in
his review. Even his write-up did not make the production a significant
success. The force that lifted the play into the history books would come
from an unexpected source.

This was a period when theatre feared the competition from television; a
second British channel, ITV, had been added the previous year. Somehow,
however, the BBC was persuaded to screen a 25-minute extract. These
days, such a gesture would be artistically unlikely and indeed legally
impossible, amounting to little more than free advertising. But the chunk,
introduced by the artistic grandee Lord Harewood and giving the play a
first stamp of establishment approval, did its commercial work, attracting
a new audience to Sloane Square.

Osborne became a celebrity, pictured in magazines in a Rolls-Royce at

London Airport with Mary Ure, whose Mrs Porter had led to her
becoming Mrs Osborne. The Royal Court became for 50 years the nursery
for British playwrights, incubating David Hare, Christopher Hampton,
Caryl Churchill, Roy Williams and many others. The title which Osborne
had finally decided upon on Morecambe Beach entered the English
language, encouraging, among other tributes, a famous headline about a
library strike: Book Lack in Ongar.

Oddly, the one thing not to prosper was the play. There have been few
major revivals, although Peter Hall plans one in Bath this year and Radio
4 broadcasts a cut-down version tomorrow afternoon. It is perhaps
revealing that the piece benefits from this severe trimming, as genuine
classics shouldn't.

The problem maybe is that the moment of Look Back in Anger's explosion
on to Britain's postwar theatrical scene is impossibly lost. Just as the
deaths of all the major participants make the details of the first night
hazy, so time has removed the context that made the play shocking. How
can we imagine what it was like, in a London caught between nuclear
fears and Suez, for an audience that had watched the previous night The
House by the Lake by Hugh Mills, to look up from their programmes and
find Jimmy Porter raging from the stage?
http://look-back.wikidot.com/criticism

Criticism

Kritike dr. Browne-a

Terry W. Browne

Browne holds a Ph.D. in theatre and is the author of the book Playwrights’ Theatre, which is a
study of the company that first produced Look Back in Anger. In this essay he discusses
elements that made Osborne’s play important when it was first produced and why it remains a
dynamic play today.

When Look Back in Anger opened in 1956 it brought a new force to the English theatre. It was
written in the prevailing form of a three-act well-made realistic play, a form that had existed for
at least eighty years. The fact that the play was somewhat clumsy in its construction and needed
editing was not lost on the critics, even those who championed the play as a major breakthrough
in English drama and a new hope for English theatre. Not only that, but Look Back in Anger has
received many revivals and has continued to speak to audiences, to hold their attention, and
even to shock them. Although the form was not innovative, this clearly is no ordinary play.

The subject matter of twentieth-century English theatre until 1956 had been polite, perhaps
witty, and even elegant and glittering in the use of language; however, it did not speak to the
concerns of the nation, either young or old. It was a theatre of diversion, a theatre careful not to
upset the illusions of its middle-class audience, a theatre that had lost all relevance to life as it
was in fact being lived in post-World War II England. John Osborne changed that. As Kenneth
Tynan said in the Observer on December 19, 1959: “Good taste, reticence and middle-class
understatement were convicted of hypocrisy and jettisoned on the spot.” They were not
jettisoned in polite, or even comedic, political or social analysis; they were jettisoned by an
articulate, educated, furious young man who pointed out what his contemporary world was
really like. It was not the world of egalitarianism and idealism that had been envisioned by the
socialist intellectuals. It was a dreary world in which, as Jimmy says, “There aren’t any good,
brave causes left.”

In spite of the broadening of opportunities for university education, the old power structure
based on “the old boy” network of school and family connections was still very much in place.
The old power structure was cynical and bent on its own perpetuation. The Church of England
was as much a part of the Establishment as the politicians and also seemed out of touch with the
everyday realities of the people. For Jimmy, and for Osborne, the answers provided by the
Church were a simple bromide that prevented people from looking at their lives and their society
honestly. The “Bishop of Bromley” who is quoted by Jimmy may be a fictional person, but his call
for Christians to help develop the H-Bomb was not fictional. John Osborne found a form that
captured the unformed mood and discontent of the audience in 1956 England and gave it voice.
Once the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) had shown a twenty-five minute segment of the
play, that broad audience responded with letters asking to see the whole play.

It is not enough simply to point out that people, especially young people, are discontent. The
theatre must bring that reality to life in a memorable way. Jimmy Porter is a magnificent
character, and the power of his invective is certainly memorable.

John Osborne said many times that his aim was not to analyze and write about social ills but
rather to make people feel. Jimmy Porter is not a political activist: he is a man living day-to-day
in a world in which feelings and imaginative response to others has been deadened by
convention. Jimmy’s attacks are not against abstract ideas. He realizes what this world of dead
ideas and moribund custom is doing to him and to those he loves. It is his desire to awaken
them to feelings, to being truly and vibrantly alive, that drives Jimmy Porter. Look Back in Anger
is a deeply felt drama of personal relationships, and it is because of that personal element that
the play remains not only valid but also vivid to audiences today.

Jimmy’s main conflict is with Alison. While the marriage is a misalliance, it is not just that of a
Colonel’s daughter marrying the rough-hewn commoner; it is the misalliance of someone who is
alive and suffering to one who shuts off all suffering and sensitivity to the suffering of others to
avoid the pain of life. They have been married for three years and their own routine has become
deadening.

Jimmy’s first direct attack on Alison comes barely a minute into the play when he says, “She
hasn’t had a thought in years! Have you?” Shortly after, he says, “All this time I have been
married to this woman, this monument of non-attachment,” and calls her “The Lady
Pusillanimous.” Alison’s cool remoteness extends even to their lovemaking. Jimmy says, “Do you
know I have never known the great pleasure of lovemaking when I didn’t desire it myself… . She
has the passion of a python.” He wants to awaken her to life, with all its pain. That his passion
and despair lead him to excess is undeniable: he wishes her to have a child and to have that
child die. He says, “If only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a
recognizable human being yourself.” He later says he wants to watch her grovel in the mud. “I
want to stand up in your tears, and splash about in them, and sing.”

To be alive is to feel pain. Certainly, the notion that suffering validates human existence is an
idea that runs through world drama from the time of Sophocles. Moreover, Jimmy recognizes
that Alison’s lack of emotional commitment to anything is draining him of his own zest for life.
He tells of Alison’s mother doing all she could to prevent the marriage, “All so that I shouldn’t
carry off her daughter on that old charger of mine, all tricked out and caparisoned in discredited
passions and ideals! The old grey mare actually once led the charge against the old order —
well, she certainly ain’t what she used to be. It was all she could do to carry me, but your weight
was too much for her. She just dropped dead on the way.” Jimmy is fighting for his love and for
his own inner life. He needs to break down Alison’s neutrality.

It was Jimmy’s vibrant life that attracted Alison to him in the first place. In Act II, scene 1, she
describes to Helena the time she first met Jimmy: “Everything about him seemed to burn, his
face, the edges of his hair glistened and seemed to spring off his head, and his eyes were so
blue and filled with the sun.” In Act II, scene 2, she also shows insight when she tells her father
why she married Jimmy: “I’d lived a happy, uncomplicated life, and suddenly, this — this
spiritual barbarian — throws down the gauntlet at me. Perhaps only another woman could
understand what a challenge like that means… .”

Alison does suffer the loss of her unborn child and she does return to Jimmy richer in the
humility and pain of living. At the end of the play they have entered into their game of “bears
and squirrels,” which Alison explained earlier was a place where “[w]e could become little furry
creatures with little furry brains. Full of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other. A silly
symphony for people who couldn’t bear the pain of being human beings any longer.” It seems
doubtful that such a withdrawal from the world is likely to last, and it is likely that Osborne
recognized the irony of the ending of the play when he wrote it. Jimmy’s anger is deep and it is
not new or brought on by current circumstances, either in his domestic life or society at large.

At the age of ten, Jimmy watched his idealistic father dying for twelve months, and “I was the
only one who cared!” He says, “You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry —
angry and helpless. And I can never forget it.” Jimmy’s source of pain and anger seem to come
from the same source as that of John Osborne who, at an early age, watched his own father die
of tuberculosis.

“Good plays change their meaning with time,” said critic Michael Billington in the Guardian after
seeing the 1989 revival of Look Back in Anger. It is a measure of its worth that even forty-two
years after it premiered, the play still rings true and excites as the emphasis moves from the
social comment to the personal angst that was propelling it from the first.

page revision: 0, last edited: 11 Feb 2009, 04:22 (3161 days ago)
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/overview_brita
in_1918_1945_01.shtml

Overview: Britain, 1918 - 1945

By Rebecca Fraser
Last updated 2011-02-17

Just over two decades after the 'war to end all wars', Britain was embroiled in the most
devastating conflict in history. What were the events that led from one world war to
another?

On this page

 End of empire

 League of Nations

 Germany rearms

 Depression

 Appeasement

 World War Two

 Find out more

 Print this page

End of empire

The expense of World War One destroyed British global pre-eminence. Territorially the
British empire was larger than ever.

In the Middle East, Britain and France had divided most of the former Ottoman Empire
between them. But the underlying reality was that Britain could no longer afford to
build the bases or ships to defend its empire as it had before 1914.
It was the United States' overwhelming industrial might that had swung the balance
against Germany during the war, and it was the American president whose ideas
defined the peace.

By 1927 Britain had universal suffrage for the first time in history.

The years between the world wars were Britain's last hurrah as the great imperial
power it had been for the previous 200 years.

The country was £900 million in debt to the US for war loans, which were to be repaid
immediately. Britain's enviable worldwide investments were wiped out, its coal and
cotton export markets had collapsed.

This was a period of retraction abroad (by the late 1920s the white 'dominions'
determined their own foreign policies) and social reform at home.

A limited number of women were allowed to vote in 1918, but by 1927 all women over
the age of 21 could vote and Britain had universal suffrage for the first time in history.

The electorate trebled, bringing in the first government under the Labour party to
represent the views of the working class.

Top

League of Nations

The writer HG Wells had called the 1914 - 1918 war the 'war to end all wars', and the
peace conference which met at Versailles in 1919 was determined that such a
cataclysm should never happen again.

US President Woodrow Wilson intended for imperialism to wither away, for it had been
the source of many tensions before the war.

No peace conference began with more idealistic aims than the one of 1919.

Many countries like Canada and other dominions who were representing themselves
for the first time came to Paris enthusiastically. They were inspired by Wilson's vision
of the peace being based on a League of Nations that would outlaw war and protect
the rights of small nations.

The League was to be an international body to regulate the world. Every nation was
invited to join and send members to its international assembly.
Former German and Ottoman colonies were to be called 'mandates' and to be
governed in the interests of their inhabitants until they were ready to be admitted to
the League.

A worldwide reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety
- making the world 'safe for democracy' as Wilson put it - offered a chance to escape
the blind destruction of the past.

No peace conference began with more idealistic aims than the one of 1919. And yet 20
years later, another war would begin all over again, one that would kill 55 million
people.

Top

Germany rearms

Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Germany, is

welcomed at Nuremberg, 1933 ©
The impediment to a lasting peace was Germany's treatment at Versailles. France
insisted that vindictive and punitive terms be inflicted upon its neighbour to satisfy its
need for security.

The Versailles Treaty removed four million of Germany's inhabitants in territorial

transfers, most of its industrial wealth, and destabilised the entire structure of German
society.

Adolf Hitler came to power on a programme to reverse the Versailles Treaty.

Before 1914, Germany had been the dynamo of the European economy. Economic
misery and despair over her reduced status as a pariah nation paved the way in the
post-war period for a desperate people to seek desperate solutions.

Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, on a programme to reverse the

Versailles Treaty. He withdrew from the disarmament conference and left the League
of Nations.
The concepts of disarmament as a universal panacea and collective security to be
enforced by the League of Nations were dead.

They had already been exposed as hollow when the isolationist American congress
prevented the United States from joining the League, and after the League failed to
take action against Japan for seizing Manchuria in 1931.

Disappointed by her gains at the peace conference, Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935,
while Germany created the air force Versailles had forbidden, began rearming and
invaded the Rhineland up to the French border in 1936.

Britain escaped the extremist totalitarian movements that gained a stranglehold on

much of the continent in the 1920s and 1930s. Few Britons, for example, joined Sir
Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

Its members became notorious for their attempts to intimidate Jewish people, whom
Mosley was convinced were behind the 'communist threat' Bolshevik Russia was
strongly thought to pose in the inter-war years.

Britain's long traditions of consultation and belief in parliamentary democracy helped it

to weather the storms of post-war life, though it was dogged by slumps and strikes.

Top

Depression

Ramsay McDonald, prime minister of Britain's 'National Government' ©

Two of the questions that bedevilled British politics before 1914 - women's suffrage
and Irish home rule - were no longer at issue.

Women got the vote without difficulty in 1918 after four years of doing the civilian
work of three million men who had been away fighting in the army - in munitions
factories, on the land and as nurses on the Western Front.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Lloyd George had decided Britain could not win southern
Ireland's war of independence, begun in 1919 by the revolutionary Irish party Sinn
Fein. The period saw southern Ireland become a independent republic in all but name.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought worldwide economic collapse.

The real concern was the economy. The European economic system had still not
properly recovered 11 years after the war had ended. This problem had been masked
by America's generous willingness to bail Europe out.

But in 1929, a financial meltdown in New York, known as the Wall Street Crash, began
a worldwide economic depression. America had to withdraw her massive loans to
Europe.

Germany's tottering economy completely collapsed, which in turn brought Hitler to

power.

If the period before 1929 was in many ways a period of hope, in that the world seemed
to be recovering from the trauma of war, the Depression put paid to it.

In Britain in the 1930s, unemployment soared to levels the country had never
experienced before. In 1931, proposed benefit cuts saw most ministers resigning from
the Labour government.

Ramsay Macdonald was left as prime minister of what was known as the National
Government, for it was a cross-party coalition containing members of the Conservative
and Liberal parties.

Going off the 'gold standard' in September 1931 made the pound cheap and British
goods cheaper, and the export trade began to revive. But Macdonald was despised as
a 'class traitor' by many Labour voters.

In November 1935 he was replaced as prime minister by the Conservative leader

Stanley Baldwin, for the National Government now had a majority of Conservative MPs.

Top

Appeasement

Portrait of Edward VIII ©

The late 1930s saw crisis follow crisis for Britain. In 1936, the new king Edward VIII,
who wished to marry his American mistress Mrs Wallis Simpson, was persuaded to
abdicate in favour of his brother the duke of York, who took the throne as George VI.
In India, 100,000 people were imprisoned for taking part in the Indian leader
Mohandas Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns for Indian independence.
Nevertheless, Britain was reluctant to lose the centre of her imperial trade.

It took World War Two and the Japanese take-over of Burma to extract Britain's
assurance of post-war independence, failing which India threatened to welcome in
Japanese troops to 'liberate' them.

Britain found any excuse not to fight a war, though it had reluctantly begun to
re-arm.

A major problem was also brewing in the Mandate of Palestine, which Britain
administered as part of the post-World War One peace.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration that Palestine should become a Jewish homeland had to
be reconciled with the rights of the indigenous Arab peoples, for the country had
become a magnet for German Jews escaping Nazi persecution.

But the greatest cloud on the horizon was Nazi Germany, which in 1938 seized Austria
and Czechoslovakia. The late 1930s are often known as the 'age of appeasement', for
Britain found any excuse not to fight a war, though it had reluctantly begun to re-arm.

It was not until 3 September 1939 that Britain and France went to war with Germany
in response to its invasion of Poland two days earlier. The rest of Europe remained
neutral.

Top

World War Two

Spitfires on patrol during the Battle of

Britain, May 1941 ©
The horror of trench warfare 20 years earlier convinced British forces chiefs that the
war had to be won in the air. But the air battle did not take place until August 1940,
after Belgium, Holland and France had all fallen to a concerted Nazi invasion begun on
10 May.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill rejected a separate peace in Europe, and Britain stood
alone against 2,000 miles of hostile coastline.

The Battle of Britain, fought between Allied and German pilots in British skies during
the summer of 1940, was the first significant defeat Nazi Germany suffered since the
war had begun a year earlier.

The British Empire was a shadow of its former self.

But even if Britain was not to be invaded (and by early 1941 Hitler had instead set his
sights on the Soviet Union) it could still be greatly damaged. The bombing of London
and other cities, known as the Blitz, continued.

For Britain, with its empire, the war was always going to be worldwide, since British
troops were needed in the Middle East to defend interests there, as well as the route to
India.

But Germany's ally Japan had her eye on the French and British Far Eastern colonies.
On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked American ships at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and
what had basically been a European conflict became truly global.

The combination of Germany's war against Russia from June 1941, and the Americans'
entry into the war later that year, meant that the Axis powers' time was limited.

The Allies were victorious in North Africa in May 1943 and invaded Italy in July of the
same year. In June 1944 a massive Allied force landed on the Normandy coast in
France, and Paris was liberated in August 1944.

At the end of April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin as the city was besieged by
Soviet troops. The Japanese only surrendered in August 1945 after atom bombs were
dropped on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in preference to fighting a long land
war.

Meanwhile the British Empire was a shadow of its former self. Anti-colonial feeling and
independence was in the air among British possessions in Africa and Asia.

After 1945, the Pacific Rim countries made treaties with America to protect them, for it
was American troops who had saved Australia from invasion by the Japanese.

Top

Find out more

 Books

Hubris 1889-1936 and Nemesis 1936-45 a two volume biography of Hitler by Ian
Kershaw (Penguin 1998 and 2001)

Britain's Moment in the Middle East 1914-1956 by Elizabeth Monroe (John Hopkins
University Press, 1981)

Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War by
Margaret MacMillan (John Murray 2003)

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 by Roy Foster (Penguin Press 1988)

People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes (Penguin 1998)

Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990by Peter Clarke (Penguin 1996)

English History 1914-45 by AJP Taylor (Oxford University Press, 1965)

Churchill: A Lifeby Sir Martin Gilbert (Pimlico 2000)

The Second World Warby Winston S Churchill (Cassells, 1948)

The Spanish Civil Warby Hugh Thomas (Penguin, 1977)

Gandhi: Prisoner of Hopeby Judith M Brown (Yale, 1991)

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Back_in_Anger

Look Back in Anger

Look Back in Anger («Mirando hacia atrás con ira» o «Recordando con ira») es una obra de
teatro de John Osborne estrenada en el año 1956. Posteriormente se hizo una película con
ella, en 1958, protagonizada por Richard Burton. Trata sobre un triángulo amoroso que implica
a un inteligente pero desafecto joven (Jimmy Porter), su impasible esposa de clase media alta
(Alison), y la estirada mejor amiga de ella (Helena Charles). Cliff, un afable inquilino galés,
intenta mantener la paz. La obra fue un éxito en la escena londinense, y generó el término
«angry young men» (Jóvenes iracundos) para describir a Osborne y otros escritores de su
generación que usaron la dureza y el realismo, en contraste con lo que anteriormente era visto
como producción escapista.

Índice
[ocultar]

 1Producción
 2Acogida crítica
 3Sinopsis de la obra
o 3.1Acto I
o 3.2Acto II
o 3.3Final
 4Inspiración
 5Otros significados
 6Parodias
 7Referencias
 8Enlaces externos

Producción[editar]
La obra fue originalmente producida en el Royal Court Theatre de Londres, con la nota de
prensa llamando al autor un angry young man («joven iracundo»), una frase que vino a definir
un nuevo movimiento en el teatro británico de los años cincuenta. La obra se estrenó el 8 de
mayo de 1956 y según la leyenda el público dio un grito ahogado al ver una tabla de planchar
sobre un escenario londinense.
Osborne comenzó una relación con una de las estrellas de la obra, Mary Ure y se divorció de
su mujer para casarse con Ure en 1957. Al año siguiente, la producción se trasladó
a Broadway con el productor David Merrick y el director Tony Richardson. Protagonizada
por Alan Bates, Vivienne Drummond, y Ure, recibiría tres nominaciones a los premios
Tony incluyendo el de Mejor Obra y Mejor actriz dramática para Ure.

Acogida crítica[editar]
Algunos críticos acusaron a Jimmy Porter de autocompasión y de que la obra era inexperta y
verbosa. En el programa radiofónico de la BBC The Critics, Ivor Brown comenzó su diatriba
describiendo la ambientación de la obra - un piso de una sola habitación en las Midlands -
como «incalificablemente sucio y sórdido. Es difícil creer que la hija de un coronel, criada con
cierta calidad, fuera capaz de permanecer en esta pocilga un solo día». Siguió echando humo:
«Yo me sentí iracundo por haber perdido el tiempo». El crítico del Daily Mail, Cecil
Wilson escribió que «la belleza de Mary Ure se desperdició en este papel de esposa que,
considerando el tiempo que pasa planchando, parece haberse encargado de la colada de todo
el país». Alison, interpretada por Ure, plancha durante todo el primer acto; en el acto segundo
hace la comida. Sin embargo, el influyente crítico Kenneth Tynan escribió: «No podría querer a
nadie que no deseara ver Mirando hacia atrás con ira.»
«Tengo una idea», dice en un momento determinado Jimmy. «¿Por qué no jugamos a un
pequeño juego? Vamos a fingir que somos seres humanos y que realmente estamos vivos.
Sólo por un rato. ¿Qué dices?» Tales afirmaciones, dice la crítica de Kenneth Tynan, hacen de
la obra «un pequeño milagro»: «Todas las cualidades están ahí, cualidades que uno ya había
desistido de esperar ver sobre un escenario - la deriva hacia la anarquía, la "izquierdosidad"
instintiva, el rechazo automático de las actitudes "oficiales", el sentido del humor surrealista
(Jimmy describe a un amigo con pluma como "una Emily Brontë femenina"), la promiscuidad
despreocupada, el sentimiento de carecer de una cruzada en la que merezca la pena luchar y,
por debajo de todo esto, la determinación de que nadie que muere debe quedar sin que se
llore por él». Alan Sillitoe, autor de Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sábado por la noche
y domingo por la mañana) y The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (La soledad del
corredor de fondo), escribió que Osborne «no contribuyó al teatro británico, lanzó una mina
terrestre e hizo saltar por los aires a la mayor parte de él».

Sinopsis de la obra[editar]
Acto I[editar]
El Acto 1 empieza una deprimente tarde de domingo en el diminuto ático de Jimmy y Alison
en las Midlands inglesas. Jimmy y Cliff intentan leer los periódicos del domingo, más un
semanario radical, «nueve peniques de precio, se puede conseguir en cualquier puesto» como
dice Jimmy bruscamente, pidiéndoselo a Cliff. Es una referencia al New Statesman, y en el
contexto del período habría puesto en evidencia ante el público, de forma automática, las
preferencias políticas de la pareja. Alison intenta hacer la plancha de la semana y sólo
escucha a medias el diálogo que se traba entre Cliff y Jimmy.
Se nos cuenta que hay una enorme diferencia social entre Jimmy y Alison. La familia de ella
es militar, de clase media alta, quizá próxima a la clase alta, mientras que Jimmy es,
decididamente, de clase trabajadora. Tiene que luchar duro contra la desaprobación de la
familia de ella. «La madre de Alison y yo nos echamos una ojeada una vez, y desde entonces
la edad de la caballerosidad ha muerto», es una de las joyas lingüísticas de la obra. También
conocemos que los únicos ingresos de la familia provienen de un puesto de venta de
golosinas en el mercado local — un negocio que con seguridad queda muy por debajo de la
educación de Jimmy, por no decir de la «posición social» de Alison.
Conforme avanza el acto 1, Jimmy se vuelve más y más mordaz, trasladando su desdén por la
familia de Alison hacia ella misma, llamándola «pusilánime» y, en general, denigrándola ante
Cliff. Es posible interpretar esta escena como que Jimmy cree que es todo una broma, pero la
mayor parte de los actores prefieren interpretarla como si él realmente la estuviera
censurando. La diatriba acaba con algo de juego violento físico, que da como resultado que la
tabla de planchar se gira y Alison resulta quemada en el brazo. Jimmy sale para tocar la
trompeta fuera de escena.
Alison y Cliff interpretan una tierna escena, durante la cual ella le confiesa que se ha quedado
embaraza accidentalmente y no se atreve a decírselo a Jimmy. Cliff le insta a que se lo diga.
Cuando Jimmy vuelve, Alison le dice que su amiga actriz Helena Charles viene a quedarse, y
es totalmente evidente que Jimmy desprecia a Helena incluso más que a Alison. Se marcha
totalmente furioso, y el conflicto es inevitable.
Acto II[editar]
El Acto 2 comienza otra tarde de domingo, con Helena y Alison preparando la comida. En una
escena a dos, Alison da una pista de por qué decidió escoger a Jimmy, su propia pequeña
rebelión contra su crianza más su admiración por las campañas de Jimmy contra la ruina de la
vida posterior a la bomba atómica, la postguerra inglesa. Ella describe a Jimmy ante Helena
como un «caballero de brillante armadura». Helena dice, firmemente, «Tienes que luchar
contra él».
Jimmy entra, y la diatriba continúa. Si su material del acto 1 puede interpretarse como una
broma, no cabe duda de la brutalidad intencional de sus ataques a Helena. Cuando las
mujeres se ponen sus sombreros y declaran que se marchan a la iglesia, el sentimiento de
traición de Jimmy alcanza su momento álgido. Cuando él se marcha para responder a una
llamada de teléfono urgente, Helena anuncia que ella ha forzado el asunto. Ha enviado un
telegrama a los padres de Alison pidiéndoles que vengan a «rescatarla». Alison queda
asombrada pero está de acuerdo en irse.
Después de un corte de escena, vemos al padre de Alison, el coronel Redfern, que ha venido
a buscarla para devolverla a la casa familiar. La trama permite que el coronel resulte un
personaje bastante simpático, aunque totalmente ignorante del mundo moderno (como él
mismo admite). «Te sientes herido porque todo ha cambiado», le dice Alison, «y Jimmy se
siente herido porque todo permanece exactamente igual».
Helena llega para despedirse, pretendiendo irse muy pronto ella misma. Alison se sorprende
cuando Helena le dice que se quedará otro día, pero se marcha, dando a Cliff una nota para
Jimmy. Cliff a su vez se la entrega a Helena y se marcha, diciendo «espero que él te lo meta
por la nariz». Casi inmediatamente, entra Jimmy de sopetón. Su desprecio al encontrar una
nota de «despedida» le hace volverse contra Helena de nuevo, advirtiéndola que se mantenga
lejos de él hasta que se marche. Helena le dice que Alison espera un bebé, y Jimmy admite a
regañadientes que está sorprendido. Sin embargo, su diatriba continúa. Al principio empiezan
los golpes físicos, y luego, conforme cae el telón del acto 2, Jimmy y Helena están besándose
apasionadamente.
Final[editar]
El acto final empieza como una deliberada repetición del acto 1, pero esta vez con Helena en
la tabla de planchar luciendo la camisa roja que Jimmy llevaba en el primer acto. Han pasado
los meses. Jimmy es evidentemente más amable con Helena que lo que fue con Alison en el
primer acto. En realidad, ella se ríe de sus bromas, y los tres entran en una rutina de comedia
de music hall que obviamente no es improvisada. Cliff anuncia que ha decidido irse. Cuando
Jimmy deja la habitación para prepararse para la última noche afuera de los tres, abre la
puerta y se encuentra a Alison, con mal aspecto. En lugar de preocuparse por ella, Jimmy dice
bruscamente por encima de su hombro «Ha venido a verte una amiga» y se marcha
abruptamente.
Después de una pausa, Alison explica a Helena que ha perdido al bebé. Uno de los discursos
más crueles de Jimmy en el acto primero expresa el deseo de que Alison concibiera un niño y
lo perdiera. Las dos mujeres se reconcilian, pero Helena comprende que lo que ha hecho es
inmoral y decide, a su vez, irse. Ella llama a Jimmy para que escuche su decisión y él la deja
irse con un adiós sarcástico.
La obra acaba con un final sorprendente, una reconciliación muy sentimental entre Jimmy y
Alison. Reviven un antiguo juego que solían jugar, pretendiendo ser osos y ardillas, y se
asume que en adelante vivirán, si no felizmente, al menos en estado de tregua en la guerra de
clases, de ahí en adelante.

Inspiración[editar]
Mirando hacia atrás con ira fue una obra muy autobiográfica basada en el infeliz matrimonio
de Osborne con Pamela Lane y su vida en alojamientos hacinados en Derby. Mientras
Osborne aspiraba a hacer una carrera en el teatro, Lane era más práctica y realista, sin
tomarse en serio las ambiciones de Osborne mientras que lo engañaba con un dentista local.
Contiene también gran parte de los primeros años de Osborne, el desgarrador discurso de ver
morir a alguien que se ama es una repetición de la muerte de Thomas, padre de Osborne.
Pero lo que más se recuerda es, sin embargo, las diatribas de Jimmy contra la mediocridad de
la vida inglesa de clase media, personificada por su odiada madre Nelli Beatrice. Madeline, el
amor perdido por el que suspira Jimmy, está basado en Stella Linden, una actriz de la
compañía de repertorio mayor que animó por primera vez a Osborne a escribir.

Otros significados[editar]
Mirando hacia atrás con ira es también una canción interpretada por el roquero británico David
Bowie de su álbum Lodger. Es también una canción de la banda Television Personalities. La
banda Oasis se refirió a ella en su canción Don't Look Back in Anger. Es también una frase
frecuentemente usada por Craig Charles en el Humor Amarillo de Reino Unido cuando
anuncia el 'Furious Flashback' («y ahora vamos a mirar atrás con ira...»). Una de las pistas de
la banda sonora de Oldboy también recibe su nombre de la obra.
 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/201
6/mar/09/look-back-in-anger-jinny-
review-derby-theatre

Look Back in Anger/Jinny review –

scorching portraits of thwarted youth
4/5stars

Derby theatre
Osborne’s unflinching study of a failing marriage still grips – and is
intelligently paired with a mono-drama about Jimmy Porter’s modern
female counterpart

Thrashing around to find his place in the world … Patrick Knowles as

Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. Photograph: Robert Day

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Michael Billington

@billicritic

Wednesday 9 March 2016 12.45 GMTLast modified on Wednesday 9

March 2016 22.00 GMT

You may go expecting a museum-piece. What is startling is that John

Osborne’s play, intimately based on his experiences as a married actor at
Derby rep – and now celebrating its 60th anniversary – survives due to its
unremitting emotional intensity. Director Sarah Brigham has also had the
wit to precede it with an hour-long mono-drama by Jane Wainwright that
charts the reaction of a gutsy modern working-class woman to life’s
baffling disappointments.

Osborne’s play was initially hailed as a vital social document. It says a lot
about the class-ridden culture of mid-50s Britain and paints a still-
resonant picture of a younger generation educated but with nowhere to
go. However, what keeps the play alive is its scorching, Strindbergian
portrait of a failing marriage. Far from endorsing misogyny, it shows its
destructive personal consequences. Jimmy Porter, thrashing around to
find his place in the world and provoke his wife, uses words as his
weapon: his spouse, Alison, is in no way a pliant punchbag but counters
with an angry silence.
John Osborne: a natural dissenter who
changed the face of British theatre
Read more

It is all there in the text which Brigham’s production has exhaustively

mined. I’ve seen funnier Jimmy Porters but Patrick Knowles plays him
very well as a displaced romantic who believes, rather like Osborne
himself, that life is validated by pain.

Augustina Seymour’s Alison is a quietly strong woman who can neither

live with nor without Jimmy, and who sees right through him when she
piercingly claims “he’d be lost without his suffering”. There is strong
support from Jimmy Fairhurst as Cliff, Daisy Badger as Helena and Ivan
Stott as Alison’s father, who represents the Edwardian values that Jimmy
secretly admires. But I suspect that what kept a packed house in thrall was
Osborne’s unflinching study of a tormented marriage.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Buoyantly played … Joanna Simpkins in Jinny. Photograph: Robert Day

Wainwright’s Jinny has much in common with Osborne’s hero, while

being totally distinctive. Like Jimmy, she has a degree but no fulfilling
job. Where he plays the trumpet, she opts for the guitar. She also has a
way with words and, as we follow her through a Derby day in which she
auditions as a singer-songwriter, she offers sharply funny observations on
her pregnant flatmate, the city’s denizens and the pretensions of the
music industry’s middle-management, who seek to colonise feminism and
tell her “menstruation is fashionable”. As buoyantly played by Joanna
Simpkins, Jinny is oppressed but never downcast. “There’s no one voice of
a generation – there’s millions,” she declares, and where she crucially
differs from Osborne’s Jimmy is in her resilient refusal to give way to
enraged despair.

https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/one-of-the-critics-
regards-the-ending-of-look-back-in-anger-as-ambiguous-what-is-your-
opinion-in-the-matter/

One of the critics regards the ending

of Look Back in Anger as ambiguous.
What is your opinion in the matter?
Alison’s Return to Jimmy Not Approved by a Critic
 Some of the critics regard the ending of Look Back in Anger as most unsatisfactory.
According to one critic, for instance, the ending is not appropriate because the whole silly
cycle of torture and collapse will clearly begin again.

The very odd thing, according to this critic, is that the author expects us to
sympathize with Jimmy Porter as if this creature were a reasonable representative
of a betrayed and bewildered generation. The fact is that any one less deserving of
sympathy cannot be imagined, says this critic. Jimmy’s very self-pity hardens our
hearts. We feel sorry for his wretched wife, who is constantly subjected to his verbal
artillery; and we feel delighted when she leaves him. But we cannot forgive her for
her final grovelling return. If her return is intended as a splendid gesture on behalf
of the self-oppressed, it simply fails.

A Phoney Reconciliation, According to Another Critic

According to another critic, several questions arise in our minds when we go through
this play. We need lots of explanations, and we feel cheated because those explanations
have not been provided. The biggest cheat of all is the ending of the play. Having portrayed
the hero’s state of mind in the way the author has done, he cannot satisfy us with a phoney
reconciliation at the end. This critic evidently means that Jimmy could not have taken
Alison back after the way she had deserted him. Or, perhaps, this critic means that the
present ending does not follow logically from what has gone before.

Helena’s Desertion of Jimmy at the End Improbable

Let us take a look at the ending of the play in order to determine whether it is
appropriate or not, and whether it is logical and convincing or not. In the final scene of the
play (Act III, Scene II) Helena decides to leave Jimmy and, when she is gone, Jimmy and
Alison become reconciled to each other. Now the question that arises is, whether Helena’s
leaving Jimmy all of a sudden, especially after the tender and loving words, the two had
exchanged at the end of the preceding scene, appears to be implausible and improbable,
because sufficient motivation has not been provided for her decision. It would have been
better, for instance, if some kind of mental conflict in Helena had been depicted at some
point earlier in the play to prepare us for ‘his reversal in her attitude towards Jimmy.

The Improbability of Alison’s Abject Surrender to Jimmy

Another improbability is, Alison’s actually grovelling to Jimmy and almost entreating
him in a most abject manner to take her back. Alison’s behaviour seems to be all the more
improbable when we recall the reason for her having previously left Jimmy and gone away
with her father. Early in the play, when Jimmy and Cliff wrestle with each other and fall
down to the floor, Alison in desperation says: “Lookout, for heaven’s sake ! Oh, it’s more
like a zoo every day!” In other words, the behaviour of the two men has been annoying her
greatly. But that is nothing. Jimmy’s constant scolding her and his brutal treatment of her
has been depressing her a good deal and she says to Cliff at almost the same time: “I don’t
think I can take much more. I think I feel rather sick.” When Cliff advises her to tell Jimmy
about her pregnancy, she hesitates because she thinks that Jimmy will suspect her motives
at once. Thereafter we find Jimmy criticizing her for her passion which he compares to that
of a python, for her going to church with Helena, for her indifference to Mrs. Tanner, and
so on. His criticisms of her family have also been a constant torment to her. Subsequently,
her account to Helena of the kind of life she had to lead with Jimmy soon after the
marriage clearly shows that she had a most wretched and miserable time. Still later, we
find her telling her father that Jimmy married her most probably from motives of revenge.
She refers to Jimmy as a “spiritual barbarian” who had entered her life and thrown a
challenge to her. It was in this state of mind that she had left Jimmy. For her to return to
Jimmy and to fall at his feet therefore seems most illogical and unlikely. And, if her
grovelling to Jimmy and her abject surrender to him were not to occur, Jimmy would
certainly not offer any apology to her for the way he had been treating her in the past, and
there would then be no reconciliation.

The Basis for Helena’s Decision to Leave Jimmy

But a closer examination of the situation and of the minds of the various persons
involved will show that there is, after all, nothing either perverse or phoney about the
ending. The human mind is not a machine working in accordance with any set or
prescribed rules and procedures. The human mind often functions in unpredictable ways.
That is why even our friends sometimes surprise us by their behaviour. Helena’s decision
to leave Jimmy will not appear to be improbable if we attach due weight to what she says to
Alison in the final scene. Helena declares that, even though she has been living sinfully
with Jimmy, she has fully been conscious all along of the wrong that she had been
committing. We have no reason to doubt what Helena says. Evidently Helena has been
suppressing her conscience which kept rebuking her; but now that Alison is physically
present before her, she can no longer suppress the voice of her conscience. Helena realizes
the enormity of her guilt because Alison stands before her, looking tired and sick and
miserable. Helena also realizes that no one can be happy while committing a wrong and
hurting somebody else. Helena looks upon Alison’s loss of her baby as a divine judgment
on all of them. Helena’s decision to leave is, therefore, perfectly understandable unless we
think Helena to be a thorough hypocrite for which we have no grounds.

Alison’s “Deep, Loving Need” of Jimmy

Alison’s abject surrender is also something impossible or even improbable in the

circumstances of the case. In the first place, we must not ignore the fact, which has been
clearly intimated to us in the opening Act, that Alison and Jimmy had really been in love
with each other. Theirs had been, by all accounts, a love-marriage, and Alison had always
looked upon Jimmy as a knight in armour. We should also not ignore the wording of the
note she had left for him when going away with her father. In the note she had written: “I
shall always have a deep, loving need of you. There could be no hypocrisy or false
sentiment in these words. There is also Jimmy’s comment on her passion as a python’s
passion. The basic fact seems to be that a perfect sexual adjustment had existed between
the two even though an emotional harmony had not been achieved on account of Jimmy’s
prejudice against the middle class from which Alison came, and her continuing to
correspond with her mother.

Alison’s Forlorn Condition after Miscarriage

But there is much more that explains and justifies Alison’s surrender at the end. Alison
has suffered the greatest misfortune that can befall a woman. She has had a miscarriage
and has lost her baby. What misfortune can be greater for a woman than the death of her
child, whether after birth or before birth? When a woman has been deserted by her
husband or has herself deserted him, the gap in her life can be filled only by her child (who
may yet be unborn), not by the parents at any rate. Having lost her baby, therefore, Alison
has been feeling distraught and forlorn. And that is why she pays a visit to Jimmy,
subconsciously thinking that she might reach an understanding with him. She is not lying
when she says that it was hysteria or just a morbid curiosity that brought her here, and
further when she says that she does not have any intention to cause a breach between
Helena and Jimmy. But without her being fully conscious of her desire for a reconciliation
with Jimmy, the desire is certainly there. The wording of the note, to which we have
already referred, clearly shows that Alison had not burnt her boats while leaving Jimmy at
that time.

Another Psychological Basis for Alison’s Surrender

There is yet another psychological explanation for Alison’s abject surrender. After
Helena’s departure, Alison also gets ready to leave, and she would certainly have left if
Jimmy had not started speaking to her. The speech that Jimmy now makes is almost in the
nature of a pathetic appeal to her. He begins this speech by finding fault with her for not
having sent any flowers to Mrs. Tanner’s funeral. He then speaks of his loneliness,
comparing himself to an old bear which follows his own breath in the dark forest, with no
warm pack, no herd, to comfort him. Then he becomes reminiscent and speaks of the first
time he had seen her and had watched her all the evening. Next, he points out that she
does not have enough strength to achieve what he calls a “relaxation of spirit”. Then comes
from his lips a statement which could not have failed to melt the heart of any woman in
Alison’s position. “I may be a lost cause,” he says, “but I thought if you loved me, it needn’t
matter.” To this appeal for love, Alison, who is already in a chastened frame of mind, can
hardly fail to respond. She now recalls the misfortune of her miscarriage, and this
recollection leads her to say: “Don’t you see! I am in the mud at last! I am grovelling! I am
crawling!”, and she collapses at his feet.

The Psychological Basis for

Jimmy’s Softening Towards Alison

Then we come to the psychological explanation for Jimmy’s state of mind in this
scene. Jimmy has suffered too. Having lost Alison (at the end of Act II) he had found
himself in Helena’s arms and had thereafter been happy enough for several months. In the
final scene, however, he loses Helena and he finds himself all alone in the world. His friend
Cliff has decided to leaves him, and Mrs. Tanner is no more in the world. Both Cliff and
Mrs. Tanner had undoubtedly been emotional props for Jimmy. Thus, Jimmy is now facing
the greatest crisis of his life. His life would be a shambles if he were to lose Alison also. He
does not, of course, argue about his present state as we are doing. For him, it is an
emotional moment when he feels a complete emptiness in his life and when he at the same
time finds Alison at his feet. His reaction in bending down and taking her in his embrace is
therefore perfectly spontaneous and natural.

The Relevance of the Bears-and-Squirrels Game at the End

There is one more important fact to make the reconciliation perfectly convincing. In
the past Jimmy and Alison had played the bears-and-squirrels game. There is, therefore,
absolutely nothing artificial or arbitrary in the author’s making Jimmy at this point speak
of his and Alison’s living together in the bear’s cave and the squirrel’s drey. We can say that
perhaps they are now playing this game ironically this time and playing it for the last time,
because they can now face the reality with greater maturity and therefore with greater faith
in each other.

The Ending, Credible and Appropriate

 Thus the ending of the play, the reconciliation between Jimmy and Alison, becomes
perfectly credible and appropriate. It is not true that the pattern of the play is a circle, that
we are back where we started, and that Jimmy will resume his fulminations and
denunciations. We must not overlook the effect of suffering on Alison, and the lesson that
Jimmy must have learnt from his experiences. After all, experience is a great teacher, and
moreso in the case of intellectuals like Jimmy. To the fantasy world of animals (bears-and-
squirrels) has been added a realization of the need for mutual adjustment in the context of
the realities of life, and this realization will lend a new zest of life for both of them. Without
the reconciliation, the play would have ended on a note of despair, and we would have got a
nihilistic picture of life. Now we have something positive and cheering. That does not mean
that all endings should be cheering, but any ending that restores our faith in human nature
is preferable to one that leaves us in a state of desolation and hopelessness. At the same
time we should note the tone of the ending. There is no exuberance, no jubilation, no
euphoria. It is a solemn ending with just a ray of hope for the future and a feeling of relief
in the present, and such an ending does not offer any glaring or jarring contrast with what
has happened in the course of the play.

An Ambiguous Ending

According to a critic, the ending of this play is ambiguous in the sense that it offers two
possibilities to us: one that Jimmy and Alison will now manage to achieve a harmonious
relationship with each other, and the other, that the same cat-and-dog life with occasional
excursions into their fantasy world will be resumed by them. It is true that Osborne has not
made it specific as to what his own view in the matter is, but, as we have already seen
above, the evidence points to the brighter of the two alternatives.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n14/david-edgar/stalking-out

talking Out
David Edgar
 John Osborne: A Patriot for Us by John Heilpern
Chatto, 528 pp, £25.00, May 2006, ISBN 0 7011 6780 7
From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching
both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have
had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene
dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house
whodunnits. At the time, the play and its message were anatomised in
leading articles, discussed by school debating societies, and worried at in the
pulpit. In retrospect, its first production at the Royal Court has become, in
the words of Mark Ravenhill, the creation myth of the contemporary British
theatre.
Over recent years that reading has been challenged by academics, critics and some theatre
practitioners keen to question the play’s impact and legacy. They have argued for the rehabilitation
of the supposedly moribund theatrical culture that preceded Look Back in Anger, proposed
alternative agents for the great changes in the British theatre which undoubtedly occurred in the late
1950s, and questioned the centrality of Osborne’s influence on the generations that followed.
Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s
defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the
stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John
Heilpern has taken up the cudgels in an energetic and enjoyable biography.
Drawing heavily on Osborne’s two-volume memoir (the glory of his later writing years), Heilpern
tells of a childhood dominated by loss (his sister dying in infancy, his father when he was ten) and a
continued relationship of bitterness and anguish with his mother, whom he blamed for his father’s
death (his mother’s statement that ‘he’s never been ashamed of me’ has to be the greatest parental
misjudgment since King Lear banished Cordelia). After a short career in provincial rep (in an era
when rep ads stipulated ‘no fancy salaries and no queer folk’), Osborne drew on his equally short
first marriage in writing Look Back in Anger; when she saw the set, Pamela Lane’s first reaction
was: ‘Oh no, not the ironing-board.’ He went on to write The Entertainer (in which Laurence Olivier
played the lead), Luther (played by Albert Finney), Inadmissible Evidence (with Nicol Williamson)
and A Patriot for Me (which, along with Edward Bond’s later Saved, can be credited with having
brought about the end of theatre censorship). Moving through two further marriages in quick
succession (to Mary Ure, who played his first wife in Look Back in Anger, then to Penelope Gilliatt,
the film critic), Osborne developed a lifestyle to go with his riches, with Savile Row suits, town and
country residences, stables, swimming-pools, solaria and plenty of vintage champagne (he once
asked his tailor to make him a smoking jacket, aged to look as if he’d inherited it from his father).
As his fourth marriage (to Jill Bennett) fell apart, so did his writing career: from A Sense of
Detachment (1972) on, his plays were neither critically nor commercially successful. Plagued by
illness, and known increasingly for his blimpish opinions rather than his plays, Osborne’s later
career provides, as Hare puts it, ‘all too convenient a parable of squandered promise’.
Heilpern charts Osborne’s transformation from the Angry Young Man of the late 1950s via ‘the
faux Coward sophisticate and surly teddy boy’ of the 1960s to the English country squire of the
1980s and 1990s. People who knew Osborne personally (which I didn’t) speak warmly of the
quality of his company; however, most also acknowledge that his refusal to edit his life or his
behaviour had its down side. The angry stalking out of rehearsals and previews (in later years), the
vituperative correspondence, the jibes against lefties, gays and Jews (in the name of truth-telling
and integrity) are all described, as is Osborne’s bitterness towards former collaborators and
intimates alike. Given access to notebooks which reveal ‘a staggering self-loathing and guilt’,
Heilpern acknowledges that he is dealing with a man who threw his 16-year-old daughter out of his
house, fired his secretary for being pregnant, wrote letters to Jill Bennett addressed to ‘Mrs Adolf
Hitler, Pouffs’ Palace, 30 Chelsea Square’, and, following her suicide, wrote of his desire to look
down on her open coffin and ‘drop a good, large mess into her eye’.

Despite all this, Heilpern’s deeper purpose is not only to reaffirm Osborne as ‘the unyielding
advocate of individualism in conformist times’, but also ‘to reclaim the place of Look Back in
Anger in British history from recent revisionists who would have us believe that its impact was
somehow minor or even negligible’. Among the revisionists, the most considerable advocate of pre-
Osborne British theatre is Dan Rebellato, whose 1999 study is dismissed by Heilpern in a single
sentence: ‘1956 and All Thatdeconstructs the Look Back phenomenon along the lines of Michel
Foucault.’ For Rebellato, ‘the theatre of the 1940s and early 1950s was quite unlike the theatre we
have been told it was’ and the 1956 theatrical revolution was ‘motivated by different concerns from
those conventionally proposed’.
The conventionally proposed concerns were with a theatre dominated by a certain sort of play. At
least two artistic directors of the Royal Court (Lindsay Anderson and Ian Rickson, the present
incumbent) have marked Look Back in Anger commemorations by reading out the West End listings
of May 1956, which include a version of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but largely
consist of forgotten country-house comedies, French classics, light farces, anodyne musical
comedies and the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan (though, unlike today, there were no
musical revivals, popstar tributes or shows based on films). In an era when the point of plays was to
provide vehicles for star actors to show off their wares, the Royal Court revolution was an assertion
of the lower middle class, the unfashionable, the provincial and the direct, against the feyness,
falsity and snobbery of a sclerotically self-regarding West End.
However, as Rebellato points out, there was another fault-line dividing the West End from the
Royal Court revolutionaries at their remote and unfashionable base in Sloane Square. Coward and
Rattigan were gay writers whose subjects and meanings were (under the strictures of stage
censorship) necessarily encoded. By contrast, Osborne’s patron at the Royal Court, George Devine,
saw his enemy as, in part, a ‘blight of buggery’ in the English theatre, to be countered, as Osborne
put it, by ‘a direct appeal to seriousness and good intentions from his own crack corps of
heterosexual writers, directors and actors’. In an argument expressed in more forceful terms
elsewhere by Mark Ravenhill, Rebellato concludes that what appeared to be an assault on upper-
class triviality was in fact an attack on the theatricality of writers whose need to write in code made
their work, whatever their intention, subversive of dominant national values. The urge towards
‘something strong, something simple, something English’ expressed by Look Back in Anger’s
protagonist, Jimmy Porter, is, for Rebellato, a call for the reassertion of imperial virility after the
emasculation of large tracts of the empire in the Attlee years. ‘The whole revolution in British
theatre,’ Rebellato argues, ‘can be seen as responding to the linguistic perversity of a homosexuality
which seemed on the point of constituting itself as an oppositional subculture, destabilising the vital
unities which seemed the foundation of a strong national identity’. Or, as Ravenhill puts it, 1956
was the moment when the ‘straight boys arrived to sort everything out’. For Ravenhill and
Rebellato, it was this sense of heterosexual mission that had unjustly consigned the postwar
repertoire to the status of ‘before’ photographs in the advertisement of the 1956 revolution.
Heilpern’s counter to this argument is contradictory. He asserts the feebleness of early 1950s
theatrical culture, ‘still dressed in dinner jackets and cocktail dresses’, but is keen to prove that
Osborne rather admired Rattigan and Coward (and, increasingly, got on with them personally), as if
this helped the revolutionary case. He pays hardly any attention to the second revisionist argument,
which is that mid-century British theatre was indeed narrow, dull and backward, and that something
important happened to change it, but that its epicentre wasn’t the Royal Court.

In plays like Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey or Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, and shows
like the chirpy East End musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be or the antiwar polemic O What a
Lovely War, the Theatre Royal Stratford East came at the cocktail shakers and the cigarette holders
from a very different direction. The Royal Court articulated the anguish and exclusion of, in
Kenneth Tynan’s words, ‘the non-U intelligentsia who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday
papers into two groups, “posh” and “wet”’; Stratford East celebrated the festive energy of the put-
upon and the oppressed, for whom the Sunday papers meant something quite different. Under the
maverick genius of its director, Joan Littlewood, Stratford East was the secondary modern to Sloane
Square’s grammar school. The Royal Court put writers at the centre; Littlewood put directors and
actors at the forefront (textual integrity not being a primary Littlewood value). And, crucially, while
the Royal Court mistrusted the audience (Devine described the audience for The Entertainer as ‘the
same old pack of cunts, fashionable arseholes’), the Theatre Royal loved it and sought it out, in the
working-class communities that surrounded it and in frequent successful sorties into the West End.
Formally much more distinct from the traditional West End than the Royal Court’s social realism,
Littlewood’s productions popularised a high-energy, rough and ready, anglicised version of
Brecht’s suddenly influential political theatre. Littlewood herself played in and directed Mother
Courage in 1955; the Berliner Ensemble visited London a year later. Heilpern notes that Littlewood
thought the Royal Court ‘very middle-class and proper, like their leader’, and argues, correctly,
that O What a Lovely War followed The Entertainer into metatheatrical metaphor. But of the
argument that her ultimate influence was greater he says nothing.
Equally challenging – and equally underplayed in Heilpern’s biography – was an invasion from the
Continent. Despite formal experimentation in unexpected places (J.B. Priestley’s time-plays
anticipate Caryl Churchill; Noel Coward’s 1930 antiwar play Postmortem takes place in the closing
seconds of a man’s life), mid-20th-century British theatre was as resistant to the high avant-garde as
it was disdainful of the lower orders. Yet, nearly a year before Look Back in Anger, Peter Hall
directed another play with one set and five characters, who perform music-hall turns, make long
speeches and take off their trousers; in which nothing much happens, key elements of the first half
are echoed in the second, there is a crucial off-stage character, and the two protagonists spend the
play trying to leave and end up agreeing to stay. There, however, the resemblance between Look
Back in Anger and Waiting for Godot ends. For – as the revisionists point out in their third major
argument – Samuel Beckett’s plays changed the vocabulary of theatre, while Osborne’s play is,
formally, surprisingly conservative.
Look Back in Anger is a three-act drama, in a single domestic setting, in linear time. The play’s mode
is essentially naturalistic: there are no soliloquies, asides, ghosts, alter egos, split or simultaneous
scenes, or surreal effects. The plot is essentially about a marriage in crisis: Jimmy mistreats his
pregnant wife, Alison, who is encouraged by her friend, Helena, to leave him; once Alison is gone,
Helena and Jimmy have an affair, until Alison returns (having lost her baby) and the couple are
reconciled. Jimmy’s friend, Cliff, and Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, make up the five-strong
cast.
Structurally, Look Back in Anger is gracefully put together, using repeated and varied elements in a
way that would be familiar to Rattigan. In the first act, the meandering, circular nature of Sunday-
afternoon conversations is elegantly dramatised, as subjects like J.B. Priestley, Alison’s friend
Webster and Jimmy’s former girlfriend Madeline are introduced, abandoned, and then pop up again
later (there is also a reiterated series of demands by Jimmy for Cliff to make him tea). For most of
its length, the only action in this first trialogue is reading newspapers, switching the radio on and
off, and Cliff taking off his trousers to be ironed by Alison. It culminates in a silly dance by Cliff
and Jimmy, which gets out of hand, upsetting the ironing-board and burning Alison’s arm. Then, in
a short scene in Jimmy’s absence, Alison reveals that she’s pregnant. The act ends where it began,
with the three on stage, and a speech from Jimmy, full of dramatic irony, in which he wishes that
Alison would have a child and that it would die.
Another – Chekhovian – device is Osborne’s use of heavily encoded sound effects. Act 1 has one
major offstage noise, the church bells which drive Jimmy to distraction; Act 2 begins with another,
which is Jimmy playing his jazz trumpet. Along with the play’s repertoire of visual images – men
sitting reading newspapers, women ironing, the toy bear and squirrel which define Alison and
Jimmy’s emotional life, and the subtle and less subtle rhyming of later scenes with earlier – the
sound effects worked in a way that would have been familiar to Osborne’s audience from the plays
that this play was intended to supplant. These elements and usages are not just a means of telling
any old story; they contain a meaning: they imply that life is cyclical, that try as we might we
cannot break free of the patterns of our past, that one woman at an ironing-board is very much like
another, that escape attempts will fail, that for better or worse we will end up with the devil we
know. The form of Look Back in Anger is conservative in two senses: it is old-fashioned, and it
invites us to a conservative view of the world.
The counter to this argument is that the plot is not the point of Look Back in Anger. It is possible to
describe the plot, in detail, with hardly a mention of what everyone remembers about the play:
Jimmy Porter’s aggressive, wild and passionate personality, expressed in a series of set-piece
speeches, many of them railing against the smug self-satisfaction of the British postwar
establishment. Whether by design or accident, Osborne may have chosen a conservative frame for
his central character, but it is no more than a frame. What matters is what’s inside, and that is
blazingly radical.
Well, once again, you could argue that myth has overtaken reality. As Alan Plater points out, Jimmy
Porter is far from being a working-class hero. By trade, he is a very small shopkeeper (he runs a
sweet stall). When he isn’t enjoying himself slumming around with Cliff, he’s berating the workers
for being noisy at the flicks. Envious of the revolutionary fire he senses in what he calls ‘the Greek
chorus boys’ and ‘the Michelangelo brigade’ (at least they have a cause, if ‘not a particularly good
one, it’s true’), he confesses he cannot share it. ‘If the revolution ever comes,’ he says, ‘I’ll be the
first to be put up against the wall, with all the other poor old liberals.’ In short, when Osborne writes
of Jimmy’s ‘rabble-rousing instincts’, it poses a question. Rousing he may be, but one suspects that
if faced with an actual rabble, all he’d do would be to tell it to shut its face, or sell it a Crunchie.

Furthermore, it’s clear that Porter’s idea of the good society is drawn from the past. His attack on
Alison’s colonial family is tempered by envy: ‘The Edwardian brigade do make their brief little
world look pretty tempting. All home-made cakes and croquet, bright ideas, bright uniforms … if
you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.’ There is
also the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War (in which Jimmy’s father was mortally wounded), the
time he harks back to when he speaks of there being ‘no good, brave causes left’. And although still
in his twenties, Jimmy seems to have passed his own golden age, symbolised by his offstage
trumpet: ‘He had his own jazz band once,’ Alison says. ‘That was when he was still a student,
before I knew him.’ Later, Helena states even more specifically that Jimmy Porter’s problem is that
he was born not before his time but after it. ‘There’s no place for people like that any longer – in
sex, or politics, or anything. That’s why he’s so futile.’

Even the arias burn out before our eyes. There are 13 big set-piece speeches in Look Back in Anger.
Almost all of them end with a puncturing effect: a non sequitur, or an inconsequential line by
another character, or the realisation that the character to whom they’re directed hasn’t been listening
(the ‘no good, brave causes’ speech is interrupted by Helena handing Cliff a clean shirt).
In other words, far from contradicting the plotting arc of the play, all but a couple of Jimmy Porter’s
great flights of rhetoric actually echo it. In his words as well as his deeds, Jimmy makes a series of
attempts to break out of the drab stasis of his life, but that life breaks back in at the end, whether he
wants it or not, returning him to the point from which he started. The conservative form does not
contradict the actions and attitude of the central character: they reflect each other.

And this is no surprise. There is a view that Osborne started out on the left and moved to the right;
another that he was always a rebel, just moving his fire round to each new tempting target as it
came in range. Certainly, the young Osborne described himself as a socialist, echoing his
grandfather’s cheerful definition of a socialist as ‘a man who never raises his cap to anyone’. But
his writings suggest that the Angry Young Man was father of the old one. So although Osborne
supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (and was arrested at the Committee of 100 sit-
down in Trafalgar Square in 1961), he was never comfortable with protest politics, and (according
to his second volume of autobiography) quickly came to see the Ban the Bomb movement as a
sinister anti-British plot. As Heilpern points out, Osborne was still voting Labour in 1974 (‘a jolt to
the Osborne myth of Angry Young Man turned brawling Tory blimp’), but only because he was not
on the electoral roll in Down, South, where he would have voted for Enoch Powell. And when, in
the same decade, Osborne turns his guns on, in Heilpern’s words,

the gay-lib movement, the lesbian activists, ‘those longshore bullies with bale hooks in bras’, the militant feminists,
the anti-smoking police, the do-gooding welfare workers – ‘God rot the carers’ – the cheery senior citizens groups,
the self-improvers and New Agers, the types, the herds, the prigs, the puritans and banner wavers everywhere
whose formula for living would reduce life to a political slogan at the joyless cost of individualism and eccentric
Englishness,
you feel he’s come home.

So if the play reflects the conservatism of the playwright, what was radical about it? Once again,
John Heilpern doesn’t quite answer this question, but David Hare does. The argument is threefold.

First, Osborne brought emotional intensity back to the English stage. He was a huge admirer and
defender of the man who performed the same service for the American theatre, Tennessee Williams.
‘In Osborne’s values,’ Hare said in his memorial lecture, ‘you find a love of emotion, of high, true,
uncensored feeling.’ For Hare, ‘resentment of Look Back in Anger, and recent attempts to rewrite its
place in history, are, finally, resentment of vitality. One way or another, the bald can’t wait for
Samson to get a trim.’ In this sense – and only in this sense – Osborne was in tune with an emerging
British New Left for whom (as Rebellato points out) the words ‘live, living, alive, the
antonyms dead, death, the synonyms vital and vitality, and the related term feeling’ were crucial
components of a project to regenerate socialism after Stalin. For Osborne, feeling was a blowtorch
to be blasted in the face of ‘the coming homogenisation of everything’.
Second, for all George Devine’s fears about fashionable arseholes, Osborne found a new audience.
Each of the great ages of British theatre writing – from the Elizabethan-Jacobean period through the
Restoration to the turn of the 20th century – has spoken to and for a newly significant and confident
social group. For Osborne, it was the generation too young to have fought in the Second World War
but old enough to have benefited from the 1944 Education Act, who had escaped from the lower
middle and working classes but had not been accepted by the class they had joined. Jimmy Porter is
the most vivid representative of the children for whom the welfare state had proved an invalid
passport; it got them out of a background they despised, but appeared not to allow them entry into a
new world in which they felt comfortable. They were left in no man’s land, scornful of the states
between whose frontier posts they found themselves stranded. Having missed out on the
revolutionary certainties of the 1930s, this generation was contemptuous both of what Porter calls
Dame Alison’s mob, the residue of the old gang who ruled England between the wars, and of the
working-class yobs in the cinema; contemptuous, too, of their parents’ limited cultural horizons and
of the new pop culture – particularly pop music – being imported from America. Indeed, the big
speech that Cliff doesn’t listen to in Look Back in Anger ends with Jimmy’s insistence that ‘it’s
pretty dreary living in the American age – unless you’re an American of course.’
In those respects, it was a pioneer. Almost all of the plays that have lasted from the late 1950s and
early 1960s – especially those by Osborne and his leading contemporaries, Arnold Wesker, John
Arden and later Edward Bond – address the alarm that newly empowered but alienated young
intellectuals feel at the cultural impoverishment of the class they left behind, the subject of
Arden’s Live like Pigs and Wesker’s Chips with Everything. (As Rebellato points out, the hostility to
‘the slop singers and the pop writers and the film-makers and women’s magazines’ expressed at the
end of Wesker’s Roots could have come straight out of an editorial in Universities and Left Review).
Many of the plays of this period deal with unsuccessful acts of revolt or failed attempts to build a
new society, from Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight to
Wesker’s I’m Talking about Jerusalem and Their Very Own and Golden City (and indeed Chips with
Everything). And the embittered outsider as hero – like the rant as form – marks the rest of
Osborne’s work from Inadmissible Evidence to The Hotel in Amsterdam.
Osborne and Wesker’s alarm about popular culture was swept away by the generation who grew up
in the 1960s, but the cycle of youthful idealism mugged by dashed hopes remained the basic arc of
the plays by the political dramatists of the 1970s, including Trevor Griffiths’s Occupations, Howard
Brenton’s Magnificence, David Hare’s Plentyand much of my own work. Nearly twenty years on
from those plays, the climax of Hare’s The Absence of War (1993) consists of the leader of the
Labour Party, facing defeat in a general election, trying to recapture the rhetorical fire of his past,
and finding he can’t cut it any more. Great rhetoric punctured by a failure of nerve, bang followed
by whimper: you can draw a direct line back from Hare’s George Jones to Jimmy Porter.
And onwards to today. The third anti-revisionist argument is that – by putting the playwright back
at the centre of the theatre – Osborne opened the door to wave upon wave of socially engaged new
theatre writing, from 1957 all the way to the present. Certainly, and unlike Joan Littlewood at
Stratford East, the Devine regime at the Royal Court brought about a fundamental shift in power
from the director and the actor to the playwright, artistically, critically and contractually. (It’s not
true, as Heilpern asserts, that only ‘dramatists of stature’ are consulted about casting; since 1981, all
British playwrights have had the right to approve casting, attend rehearsals, and to prevent
unwanted changes in their work.) Indeed, in Hare’s view, one of the covert motivations of the
revisionists is to drag some of that power back to the directors.

The result of this has been that while there have been periods when the energy of new writing
appeared to shift elsewhere (to television in the mid-1960s, to the novel and film in the mid to late
1980s), the theatre has been the most consistent site for exploration of the state of Britain; and
whenever one generation appeared to run out of steam, a new one appeared to renew the project, in
conversation with new audiences. This happened in the 1970s with playwrights who emerged from
the student revolt of the late 1960s (such as Hare and Brenton), in the 1980s with a generation of
women playwrights for whom the Royal Court provided the first major platform, and again in the
1990s when the ‘in-yer-face theatre’ of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill spoke for the generation
who grew up in the era of Thatcherism, Ecstasy and Aids. Beside these waves of new energy,
Littlewood’s proletarian populism burned only fitfully. And while both Harold Pinter and
(arguably) Tom Stoppard started out as British absurdists, the influence of Beckett across the whole
range has been less than in any other European country.

John Heilpern says none of this, because he neither knows very much about Osborne’s successors
(he thinks David Hare co-wrote Howard Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness) nor likes the little he
does know. In particular, he cannot bring himself to accept that Ravenhill’s seminal Shopping and
Fucking (1996) has anything in common with Look Back in Anger (except for being presented at the
Royal Court). In fact, if proof were needed that Look Back in Anger fired an arrow that flew pretty
unerringly from the late 1950s via the revolutionary playwrights of the 1970s and the women
playwrights of the 1980s to the mid-1990s bratpack and beyond, it is the plays of Mark Ravenhill.
Accused of being about ‘the death of all feeling’, both the milieu and the dramatic geometry
of Shopping and Fucking are a surprisingly direct echo of Look Back in Anger. Its central trio of
characters are two anguished, prolix, self-destructive and emotionally incontinent young men, and a
woman trying desperately to stop them self-immolating. And, far from being a celebration of a
generation which can’t see beyond next Tuesday or back past last weekend, the play is a kind of
elegy for lost political certainties. In Ravenhill’s later play Some Explicit Polaroids, an Aids victim
who is refusing to take the medication which will save his life admits: ‘I want Communism and
apartheid. I want the finger on the nuclear trigger. I want the gay plague. I want to know where I
am.’ This is perilously close to a paraphrase of Jimmy Porter’s ‘no good, brave causes’ speech, 43
years on.
The final page of illustrations in Heilpern’s biography is captioned ‘the legacy’, and consists of
stills from recent revivals of two relatively minor Osborne plays. David Hare is right to point out
that Osborne’s first five plays at the Royal Court looked great then and still look pretty good today.
But Osborne’s real legacy is not the continued life of his own plays, but those of generation after
generation of writers of whom he would doubtless disapprove (and who might well disapprove of
him), which would not have been written for the theatre, or for any medium at all, without Look
Back in Anger.

https://interestingliterature.com/
2017/02/07/a-short-analysis-of-
john-osbornes-look-back-in-
anger/
A Short Analysis of John
Osborne’s Look Back in Anger
FEB 7
Posted by interestingliterature
An introduction to a seminal play
Looking back at Look Back in Anger, we are likely to gauge and analyse John
Osborne’s approach to masculinity and relationships differently from the way
original theatregoers and critics did (such as Kenneth Tynan, who enthusiastically
promoted the play). The play was the inspiration for not one but two important new
phrases in the English language to describe British post-war theatre: the phrase
‘angry young men’ was coined to refer to a group of British writers of the 1950s
who shared Osborne’s desire to rail against the Establishment, while the term
‘kitchen-sink drama’ also has its roots in Look Back in Anger. The play also
inspired the title of an Oasis single ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. The play’s
influence, it would seem, has spread all over the place. But why is it worth
reviving, studying, analysing, discussing, and revisiting?
The circumstances surrounding the writing and staging of the play are as
dramatic and interesting as the plot of the play itself. John Osborne wrote Look
Back in Anger pretty quickly, in just 17 days, while sitting in a deckchair on
Morecambe Pier. At this stage of his life, Osborne was living in a tiny flat in
Derby with his wife, the actress Pamela Lane. The marriage was not especially
happy by this point, and the home life of Jimmy and Alison Porter in Look Back
in Anger sprang from Osborne’s own wedded misery. (Pamela was also having
an affair with a dentist, getting more than her teeth seen to, one suspects.
Ironically, Osborne, who was an actor as well as a playwright, had recently
played a dentist in a production of a George Bernard Shaw play.) Osborne and Lane
would later divorce, with Osborne starting a relationship with the actress who
played Alison Porter in the original production of Look Back in Anger.
But what does actually happen in the play? A brief plot summary may help
before proceeding any further. We are presented with an everyday domestic
scene: Jimmy Porter is at home on Sunday in his tiny one-bedroom flat, reading
newspapers and chatting with his friend Cliff. Jimmy’s wife Alison is doing the
ironing. Jimmy is from a working-class background (he owns a stall selling
sweets), while Alison is from an upper-class family – and Jimmy hates her for
this. Jimmy and Cliff play-fight and knock over the ironing board, leading
Alison’s arm to get burnt by the iron. Jimmy goes out and Cliff stays to comfort
Alison. Alison confides that she is pregnant but is scared to tell the mercurial
Jimmy. Jimmy comes home and he and Alison make up, playing a game they call
‘bears and squirrels’. A friend of Alison’s named Helena rings, and Alison
invites Helena to come and stay with them, which angers

Jimmy so much that he says he longs for something to

wrench his wife out of her ‘beauty sleep’ – even the death of her own child
(remember that he’s unaware at this stage that she is actually pregnant). When
Helena comes to stay, Jimmy is rude to both her and to his wife (again). Jimmy
receives news that his friend’s mother is dying, he asks Alison to go with him to
London to visit her. Alison says no. Jimmy goes to London on his own, and when
he gets back his wife is away. Helena is still there, and the two of them have a
row, before Helena seduces Jimmy. Helena hands Jimmy a note from Alison
informing him that she is pregnant with his child.

We then move forward several months. Once more, it’s a Sunday. The scene is
much the same as it was at the beginning of the play, except this time it’s Helena
doing the ironing. Alison turns up, and while Jimmy is out of the room, she
reveals that she lost the baby. Helena breaks up with Jimmy, and Jimmy and
Alison are reconciled once more. The play ends with them playing another round
of ‘bears and squirrels’.

A troubling play, this. As Michael Patterson remarks in The Oxford Guide to Plays
(Oxford Quick Reference) , Jimmy Porter no longer strikes us as the bold anti-
Establishment figure telling it like it is and standing up for the working class. He
comes across as boorish, self-centred, misogynistic in his treatment of both
Alison and Helena, and in desperate need of some anger-management therapy.
It’s difficult to feel much sympathy towards him or see him as the spokesman for
a generation. Look Back in Anger is as likely to remind us of the other side to the
1950s, if anything – reminding us that post-war life was pretty wretched for
many women in the years before the arrival of the permissive society in the late
1960s, and that the ‘kitchen sink’ and the ironing board were seen as their
rightful place by many men (and many women, too, we daresay). Thankfully
times have changed since then, but where does that leave us when analysing the
significance of Look Back in Anger? Was it a play merely ‘of its time’ and is now
more valuable as a historical curiosity than as a timeless masterpiece of the
theatre?
Perhaps it’s not entirely either. For one, Osborne’s opening stage directions
acknowledge that to some people, Jimmy Porter is simply ‘a loudmouth’. And as
Stephen Unwin and Carole Woddis note in their fascinating resource A Pocket
Guide to Twentieth-Century Drama , there is a sense of shared despair between
Jimmy and Alison at the end of the play. Men and women, bears and squirrels,
were both doomed.
Or perhaps the key to understanding Look Back in Anger is not in the ‘angry’ or
‘man’ part, but the ‘young’. In a telling remark, Alison chides Jimmy for being
like a child. Her and Jimmy’s fondness for playing ‘bears and squirrels’ with
their cuddly toys suggests a desire to retreat into a world of child’s play, to
insulate one in a safe, innocent world that is free from the gritty realities of post-
war Britain, but also from the adult pressures (and adult knowledge) of the class
system, the need to earn a living, the sense of time slipping by unused (to borrow
a Larkinesque turn of phrase) as the characters drift ever more quickly and
inexorably towards middle age. It might also be analysed as significant, in this
connection, that Jimmy Porter runs a sweet stall – more child’s play.
It seems that Look Back in Anger arrived like a hand grenade in British theatres,
blowing apart old attitudes: as Kenneth Tynan observed upon seeing the play, it was
‘a minor miracle’ to see ‘qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage’.
Tynan’s praise of the play transformed its fortunes. Many of the initial reviews of
Osborne’s play were negative, but after Tynan announced his love for what
Osborne was doing, people’s interest was piqued. Whatever its ultimate
value, Look Back in Angerdeserves continued critical attention for bringing about
a miniature revolution in British theatre, precisely at the point when it most
needed it. Osborne was the angry man of the hour: his was the right play at the
right time.