Look Back in Anger (1956) is a
John OsborneJohn James Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of The Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV...
play and
1958 movieLook Back in Anger is a 1958 British film starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Mary Ure and directed by Tony Richardson.It is based on John Osborne's play of the same name about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man , his upper-middle-class, impassive wife , and...
about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man (Jimmy Porter), his upper-middle-class, impassive wife (Alison), and her haughty best friend (Helena Charles). Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. The play was a success on the
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
stage, and spawned the term "
angry young men"Angry young men" is a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leaders included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's...
" to describe Osborne and those of his generation who employed harshness and realism in the theater in contrast to the more
escapistEscapism is mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an "escape" from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life....
fare previously seen.
Production
The play was premiered at
London's[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
Royal Court TheatreThe Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
, on 8 May 1956 by the English Stage Company under the direction of Tony Richardson. The press release called the author an
angry young man"Angry young men" is a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leaders included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's...
, a phrase which came to represent a new movement in 1950s
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
theatreTheatre is a branch of the performing arts. While any performance may be considered theatre, as a performing art, it focuses almost exclusively on live performers creating a self contained drama. A performance qualifies as dramatic by creating a representational illusion...
. Legend has it that audiences gasped at the sight of an ironing board on a London stage. The cast was as follows:
Kenneth HaighKenneth Haigh is a British actor. He played the central role of Jimmy Porter in the very first production of John Osborne's seminal play Look Back in Anger in 1956. His performance in a 1958 Broadway theatre production of that play so moved one young woman in the audience that she mounted the...
(Jimmy),
Alan BatesSir Alan Arthur Bates CBE was a British actor of stage, screen and television.-Early life:Bates was born in Allestree, Derby, England on 17 February 1934, the eldest of three sons of Florence Mary , a homemaker and a pianist, and Harold Arthur Bates, an insurance broker and a cellist...
(Cliff),
Mary UreEileen Mary Ure was a Scottish actress of stage and film.-Early life:Born in Glasgow where she studied at the School of Drama, Ure was the daughter of civil engineer Colin McGregor Ure and Edith Swinburne...
(Alison), Helena Hughes (Helena) and
John WelshJohn Welsh was an Irish actor.After an early stage career in Dublin, Welsh moved into British film and television in the 1950s...
(Colonel Redfearn).
The following year, the production moved to
BroadwayBroadway Theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, is the theatre associated with the 40 large professional theaters with 500 seats or more located in the Theatre District, New York in Manhattan, New York City...
under producer
David MerrickDavid Merrick was a prolific Tony Award-winning American theatrical producer.Born David Lee Margulois to Jewish parents in St. Louis, Missouri, Merrick graduated from Washington University, then studied law at the Jesuit-run Saint Louis University School of Law. In 1940 he left his legal career to...
and director
Tony RichardsonCecil Antonio "Tony" Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer.-Early life:Richardson was born in Shipley, Yorkshire in 1928, the son of Elsie Evans and Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist...
. Retaining the original cast but starring Vivienne Drummond as Helena, it would receive three
Tony AwardThe Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Awards, recognize achievement in live American theatre and are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are for Broadway productions and...
nominations including for
Best PlayThe Tony Award for Best Play is an annual award celebrating achievements in live American theatre, including musical theatre, honoring productions on Broadway in New York....
and "Best Dramatic Actress" for Ure.
Critical reception
Some critics accused Jimmy Porter of self-pity and the play of being callow and verbose. On
BBC RadioBBC Radio is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927...
's
The Critics,
Ivor BrownIvor John Carnegie Brown was a British journalist. He was born in Penang, Malaya, the younger of two sons of Scottish parents. He wrote and illustrated his first book at age five and wrote nearly eighty books during his life....
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'. The
Daily MailThe Daily Mail is a British daily tabloid newspaper. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper, The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the paper were launched in...
s Cecil Wilson wrote that "
Mary UreEileen Mary Ure was a Scottish actress of stage and film.-Early life:Born in Glasgow where she studied at the School of Drama, Ure was the daughter of civil engineer Colin McGregor Ure and Edith Swinburne...
'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." (Alison, played by Ure, irons during Act One; in Act Two she makes lunch; in Act Three she leaves the ironing to her rival.) On the other hand,
Kenneth TynanKenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial British theatre critic and writer well known for being the first person to say "fuck" on the BBC.-Early life:...
wrote, "I could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger."
'I've an idea,' says Jimmy at one point. 'Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say?' Such remarks, said Kenneth Tynan's review, make the play "a minor miracle": "All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes an effeminate male friend as 'a female Emily Brontë'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned."
Alan SillitoeAlan Sillitoe is an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s .- Biography :...
, author of
Saturday Night and Sunday MorningSaturday Night and Sunday Morning is a 1960 film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alan Sillitoe. Sillitoe wrote the screenplay adaptation and the film was directed by Karel Reisz.-Synopsis:...
and The Loneliness of the Long Distance RunnerThe Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , by Alan Sillitoe was cinematically adapted as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , about Colin, a poor Nottingham teenager from a dismal home, with few prospects in life, and few interests beyond petty crime...
, wrote that Osborne "didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up."
Play synopsis
Act 1 opens on a dismal Sunday afternoon in Jimmy and Alison's cramped attic in the English Midlands. Jimmy and Cliff are attempting to read the Sunday papers, plus the radical weekly, "price ninepence, obtainable at any bookstall" as Jimmy snaps, claiming it from Cliff. This is a reference to the
New StatesmanThe New Statesman is a British left-wing political magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
, and in the context of the period would have instantly signalled the pair's political preference to the audience. Alison is attempting to do the week's ironing and is only half listening as Jimmy and Cliff engage in the expository dialogue.
We learn that there's a huge social gulf between Jimmy and Alison. Her family is upper-middle class military, perhaps verging on upper, while Jimmy is decidedly working-class. He had to campaign hard against her family's disapproval to win her. "Alison's mummy and I took one look at each other, and from then on the age of chivalry was dead", he explains. We also learn that the sole family income is derived from a sweet stall in the local market — an enterprise that is surely well beneath Jimmy's education, let alone Alison's "station in life".
As Act 1 progresses, Jimmy becomes more and more vituperative, transferring his contempt for Alison's family onto her personally, calling her "pusillanimous" and generally belittling her to Cliff. It's possible to play this scene as though Jimmy thinks it's all a joke, but most actors opt for playing it as though he really is excoriating her. The tirade ends with some physical horseplay, resulting in the ironing board overturning and Alison's arm getting a burn. Jimmy exits to play his trumpet off stage.
Alison and Cliff play a tender scene, during which she confides that she's accidentally pregnant and can't quite bring herself to tell Jimmy. Cliff urges her to tell him. When Jimmy returns, Alison announces that her actress friend Helena Charles is coming to stay, and it's entirely obvious that Jimmy despises Helena even more than Alison. He flies into a total rage, and conflict is inevitable.
Act 2 opens on another Sunday afternoon, with Helena and Alison making lunch. In a two-handed scene, Alison gives a clue as to why she decided to take Jimmy on—her own minor rebellion against her upbringing plus her admiration of Jimmy's campaigns against the dereliction of English post-war, post-atom-bomb life. She describes Jimmy to Helena as a "knight in shining armour". Helena says, firmly, "You've got to fight him".
Jimmy enters, and the tirade continues. If his Act 1 material could be played as a joke, there's no doubt about the intentional viciousness of his attacks on Helena. When the women put on hats and declare that they're going to church, Jimmy's sense of betrayal peaks. When he leaves to take an urgent phone call, Helena announces that she's forced the issue. She's sent a telegram to Alison's parents asking them to come and "rescue" her. Alison is stunned but agrees that she will go.
After a scene break, we see Alison's father, Colonel Redfern, who has come to collect her to take her back to her family home. The playwright allows the Colonel to come across as quite a sympathetic character, albeit totally out of touch with the modern world (as he himself admits). "You're hurt because everything's changed", Alison tells him, "and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same".
Helena arrives to say goodbye, intending to leave very soon herself. Alison is surprised that Helena is staying on for another day, but she leaves, giving Cliff a note for Jimmy. Cliff in turn hands it to Helena and leaves, saying "I hope he rams it up your nostrils". Almost immediately, Jimmy bursts in. His contempt at finding a "goodbye" note makes him turn on Helena again, warning her to keep out of his way until she leaves. Helena tells him that Alison is expecting a baby, and Jimmy admits grudgingly that he's taken aback. However, his tirade continues. They first come to physical blows, and then as the Act 2 curtain falls, Jimmy and Helena are kissing passionately and falling on the bed.
The final act opens as a deliberate replay of Act 1, but this time with Helena at the ironing-board wearing Jimmy's Act 1 red shirt. Months have passed. Jimmy is notably more pleasant to Helena than he was to Alison in Act 1. She actually laughs at his jokes, and the three of them get into a
music hallMusic hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...
comedy routine that obviously isn't improvised. Cliff announces that he's decided to strike out on his own. As Jimmy leaves the room to get ready for a final night out for the three of them, he opens the door to find Alison, looking like death. Instead of caring for her he snaps over his shoulder "Friend of yours to see you" and abruptly leaves.
After a scene break, Alison explains to Helena that she lost the baby—one of Jimmy's cruellest speeches in Act 1 expressed the wish that Alison would conceive a child and lose it—the two women reconcile but Helena realises that what she's done is immoral and she in turn decides to leave. She summons Jimmy to hear her decision and he lets her go with a sarcastic farewell.
The play ends with a sentimental reconciliation between Jimmy and Alison. They revive an old game they used to play, pretending to be bears and squirrels, and seem to be in a state of truce.
Inspiration
Look Back in Anger was a strongly autobiographical piece based on Osborne's unhappy marriage to Pamela Lane and their life in cramped accommodation in
DerbyDerby is a city in the East Midlands region of England. It lies upon the banks of the River Derwent and is located in the south of the ceremonial county of Derbyshire. In the 2001 census, the population of the city was 233,700, whilst that of the Derby Urban Area was 229,407...
. While Osborne aspired towards a career in theatre, Lane was of a more practical and materialistic persuasion, not taking Osborne's ambitions seriously while cuckolding him with a local dentist. It also contains much of Osborne's earlier life, the wrenching speech of seeing a loved one die is a replay of the death of Thomas, Osborne's father. What it is best remembered for though, is Jimmy's tirades against the mediocrity of middle-class English life, personified by his hated mother Nellie Beatrice. Madeline, the lost love Jimmy pines for, is based on Stella Linden, an older rep-company actress who first encouraged Osborne to write. After the first production in London, Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, who played Alison, and divorced his wife to marry Ure in 1957.