Look Back In Anger As An Extraordinary Play / John Osborne As A Dramatist / Social Issues In Look Back In Anger / Look Back In Anger As A Mouthpiece Of John Osborne

Look Back in Anger as an extraordinary play / John Osborne as a dramatist / Social issues in Look Back in Anger / Look Back in Anger as a mouthpiece of John Osborne

The first production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 provoked a major controversy. There were those, like the Observer newspaper's influential critic Kenneth Tynan, who saw it as the first totally original play of a new generation. There were others who hated both it and the world that Osborne was showing them. But even these critics acknowledged that the play, written in just one month, marked a new voice on the British stage. Howard Brenton, writing in the Independent newspaper at the time of Osborne's death in 1994, said, “When somebody breaks the mould so comprehensively it's difficult to describe what it feels like”. In the same paper, Arnold Wesker described Osborne as having “opened the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers”.

Look Back in Anger came to exemplify a reaction to the affected drawing-room comedies of Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan and others, which dominated the West End stage in the early 1950s. Coward et al wrote about an affluent bourgeoisie at play in the drawing rooms of their country homes, or sections of the upper middle class comfortable in suburbia. Osborne and the writers who followed him were looking at the working class or the lower middle class, struggling with their existence in bedsits or terraces. The "kitchen sink" dramatistsвЂ"as their style of domestic realism became to be knownвЂ"sought to convey the language of everyday speech, and to shock with its bluntness. Eric Keown, reviewing Look Back in Anger in Punch magazine at the time, wrote that Osborne “draws liberally on the vocabulary of the intestines and laces his tirades with the steamier epithets of the tripe butcher”.

The three-act play takes place in a one-bedroom flat in the Midlands. Jimmy Porter, lower middle-class, university-educated, lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in the British Army in India. His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them. Jimmy, intellectually restless and thwarted, reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his bile for Alison's friends and family. The situation is exacerbated by the arrival of Helena, an actress friend of Alison's from school. Appalled at what she finds, Helena calls Alison's father to take her away from the flat. He arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes Alison away. As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy's baby. Helena can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves. Finally Alison returns to Jimmy and his angry life.

The problem is with the melodramatic qualities of the narrative. Osborne's script became almost a template for the new school of writers, and it is difficult to present his work without being aware that there is a faint whiff of formula about it. But despite the plot's shortcomings, it still has the power to startle. There was an audible intake of breath from the audience when Jimmy fell into Helena's arms. The language, too, still has the power to shock, such as when Jimmy, unaware of Alison's pregnancy, says to her: “If only somethingвЂ"something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognizable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles. PleaseвЂ"if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognizable human being yourself. But I doubt it.” Some of the imagery and language doesn't travel too well historically and reflects only the preoccupations of the era. It is difficult, for example, to imagine jazz being quite as exotic as it is for Jimmy. Or to understand the intellectual courage of saying about a gay man, “He's like a man with a strawberry markвЂ"he keeps thrusting it in your face because he can't believe it doesn't interest or horrify you particularly. As if I give a damn which way he likes his meat served up”, for at that time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. The admiration of Colonel Redfern for Jimmy's principles and his amusement at Jimmy's description of Mrs. Redfern as “an overfed, overprivileged old bitch”, are set against his total lack of comprehension of what Jimmy's life actually means. Alison says to him “You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?” Or as it was put in a Daily Express article from December 1959: “Out of this decade has come the Illusion of Comfort, and we have lost the sense of life's difficulty”.

It is clear from Osborne's script that there was no lack of a sense of life's difficulties around at the time. But the emphasis had shifted from the martyred expressions of the British ruling class and their “white man's burden”, as represented in Colonel Redfern, to a more serious appraisal of life for those outside that ruling class. Perhaps the only truly sympathetic character in the play is Cliff with his role as Jimmy's foil in the early exchanges, to appearing as Alison's real friend, to the point when he decides that he does not want to stay in the flat, a magnificent portrayal of solidness. Whilst Alison

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