Almeida Theatre, London, until 23rd November
Kenneth Tynan said he could not love anyone who did not want to see Look Back in Anger. I would find it very hard to love someone who wanted me to watch this infuriating play again.
My loathing for Look Back in Anger dates back only to last night, when I saw it performed on stage for the first time in 40 years. This new-found hatred came as a complete surprise to me – before I watched this adept revival, I had fond memories of John Osborne’s most famous play.
What’s changed? Well, partly, I have. Osborne’s fierce domestic drama seemed daring and thrilling when I first saw it in my teens. Seeing it again in my fifties, I found it trite and gratuitously cruel.
The biggest thing that’s changed, I’ve realised, is the world we live in. Forty years ago, I hardly noticed the play’s inherent violent misogyny. Today, it’s unmissable, and it left me feeling wretched, as if I’d somehow been complicit in an incident of matrimonial abuse.
Osborne was a struggling young actor when he wrote this savage diatribe. His first marriage was disintegrating, and his first fully formed play, which he wrote in just a few weeks, feels intensely autobiographical – a nightmare vision of the life that awaited him when the acting jobs dried up.
Jimmy Porter is a lower-middle-class graduate from a provincial university, selling sweets on a market stall in a humdrum Midlands town.
He lives in a shabby bedsit with his working-class flatmate, Cliff, and his posh wife, Alison, whom he treats appallingly – mocking her, tormenting her, never letting her get a word in edgeways, shouting at her, screaming at her, reducing her to tears. When she finally finds the courage to leave, he shacks up with her friend Helena – and treats her much the same.
None of Osborne’s characters is remotely sympathetic. Jimmy is a selfish bully. Cliff, Alison and Helena are all doormats, incapable of standing up to Jimmy or doing anything to help themselves. In a more nuanced drama this might not matter, but here there’s no development.
From start to finish, everyone remains utterly unchanged. I ended up suspecting that Osborne actually sympathises most of all with Jimmy. In his endless narcissistic monologues, you can hear the playwright talking.
So why did Look Back in Anger cause such a sensation when it premièred at London’s Royal Court Theatre back in 1956? Because it seemed so different from anything that had come before. Here was a play about contemporary Britain, played out in a realistic setting – a world away from the polite, well-made plays of Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan.
Yet now, when one looks back, those differences seem rather superficial. Despite the kitchen-sink setting, this is really a very conventional play. People stand around talking. They tell one another what they’re thinking. Compared with Beckett or Pinter, it seems positively old-fashioned.
The thing that’s aged worst of all is the play’s central character, Jimmy Porter. He moans about everything, and his gripes are banal and humourless. The original angry young man now seems like a saloon-bar bore.
Billy Howle does his best as Jimmy (shades of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay) but there’s nothing he can do to make him likeable, and the other parts are even worse – chiefly merely foils for Jimmy’s immature invective.
Director Atri Banerjee strives valiantly to mitigate these fundamental flaws. His powerful symbolic staging tries to frame the play as a bold indictment of misogyny – but to my mind it’s not just Jimmy who’s misogynistic; it’s the play itself.
Osborne went on to write some great plays – most notably The Entertainer – but Look Back in Anger isn’t one of them. Why did I find it so inspiring all those years ago? I must have been mad.
When such a famous play leaves you feeling so bereft, it’s tempting to blame the actors, but this time I know that’s not where the fault lies, because this cast are performing another play alongside this one in the same theatre and it’s absolutely brilliant.
Like Look Back in Anger, Arnold Wesker’s Roots is a passionate critique of the sterility of fifties Britain, but unlike Look Back in Anger, it’s profound, subtle and full of meaning. Morfydd Clark gives a wonderful performance as the play’s autodidactic heroine, Beatie Bryant.
Forget about Look Back in Anger. Go and see Roots instead.
Almeida Theatre, London, until 23rd November
The Oldie November 2024
