Look Back In Anger - John Osborne
Also read :-
- Saint Joan - George Bernard Shaw
- The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Between 1945 and 1956 the British theater, caught in a post- Shavian old order, offered such fare as the drawing-room comedies of Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan’s subdued dramas of repressed middle- and upper-middle class emotions, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, and the heavily nostalgic musical The Boyfriend. The strength of postwar British theater lay in its actors—John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Peggy Ashcroft—whose performing genius, primarily in the classics, would become legendary. Although the revival of verse drama by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Fry seemed to herald a new “Elizabethan Age” of theater, these plays were not powerful enough to reflect a confused postwar culture that hinted at a breakdown of class distinctions and reflected the emergence of a welfare state and the crisis of confidence resulting from Britain’s loss of its empire. An influential and innovative theater of social and emotional realism had been present in American dramas by Clifford Odets in the 1930s and by such postwar playwrights as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Arthur Miller. On May 8, 1956, a British alternative to what one theater critic characterized as “England’s aspidistra dramas” exploded onto the stage of the Royal Court Theatre with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Osborne’s socially and emotionally provocative play, with its vitriolic, bitterly alienated but sensitive working-class antihero protagonist, revitalized theater in Britain and marked a revolutionary shift in dramatic energy from the old order of contemporary theater to an entirely new, more democratic style of English drama.
John Osborne belonged to a group of dissident British playwrights and novelists of the 1950s and early 1960s whom journalists dubbed the “Angry Young Men,” a phrase taken from the title of the 1951 autobiography of writer Leslie Allen Paul, The Angry Young Man. The “Angries,” who included writers such as Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe, produced works that expressed discontent and disillusionment with the staid, hypocritical, middle- and upper-middle-class institutions of the so-called British establishment, while at the same time articulating dissatisfaction with their own achievements. Look Back in Anger was the seminal work of this genre, and Osborne, perhaps the angriest and most forceful voice of this generation.
Osborne was born in 1929, in Fulham, in Southwest London, the son of a commercial artist, copywriter, and sometime publican; his mother was a barmaid who worked in pubs for most of her life. His family background was a study in contrast: His father came from a gentle, soft-spoken Welsh family, while his maternal grandparents were boisterous, reactive London publicans. The influence of his mother’s side of the family led Osborne to later declare, “to become angry is to care.” Osborne’s childhood was marked by near poverty, frequent illnesses, and the experience of living through the war. His father, similarly delicate in health, died of tuberculosis in 1941, another event that deeply affected his son. Osborne attended state schools and at 12 became a scholarship student at a minor private school, St. Michael’s in Devon, where he was expelled at 16 after the headmaster slapped his face and Osborne hit him back. He nevertheless received a general certificate of education, which ended his formal education. He went on to study at universities but was largely self-taught. He wrote for various trade journals and then accepted a job tutoring child actors in a provincial theatrical touring company, a position from which he was fi red after an education inspector discovered that he was not certified to teach. However, he was asked to stay with the company as an assistant stage manager and eventually made his debut as an actor, in 1948 in Sheffield.
During his time as a repertory actor Osborne wrote, in collaboration with other actors, plays that were produced in provincial venues. The Devil Inside Him (written with Stella Linden and produced in 1950) concerns a young Welsh poet mistreated by his family and his village community. Personal Enemy (written with Anthony Creighton and produced in 1955) depicts the McCarthy era in the United States and is notable for its incoherence after the authors deleted a large portion of the play concerning homosexuality at the insistence of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which had refused to grant a license otherwise. Epitaph for George Dillon (written with Creighton in 1954) portrays a young, unscrupulous actor-playwright who achieves a kind of fame when his play becomes a tawdry but artistically worthless success. The play was rejected by every theater in London but debuted in an undergraduate production at Oxford University in 1957. The following year, after the success of Look Back in Anger, the play was produced by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and received mixed reviews.
The failure of Personal Enemy sent Osborne back to acting. He moved to London, where he endured long stretches of unemployment and spent most of his time in the public library because it was warmer than the cramped flat he shared with the first of his five wives, Pamela Lane. Look Back in Anger, the play he was writing at the time, reflects aspects of his failing marriage to Lane. The play was rejected by every London theatrical agent, an experience of which Osborne would later write, “The speed with which it had been returned was not surprising, but its aggressive dispatch did give me a kind of relief. It was like being grasped at the upper arm by a testy policeman and told to move on.” Osborne finally submitted Look Back in Anger to the newly formed English Stage Company, which was advertising for new plays to offer at the reestablished Royal Court, a small theater that had been fashionable and famous earlier in the century (George Bernard Shaw had supervised productions of his plays at the Royal Court). The English Stage Company was founded by actor-manager and artistic director George Devine with the intention of promoting a writers’ theater as an affordable alternative to the commercialism of West End productions. Works by Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, and American playwrights would be produced at the Royal Court; Look Back in Anger was the first British play produced there. Devine later recorded that when he first read the play, “the text leapt to life off the page. . . . We put this play on because we thought it had to be put on.”
On the surface Look Back in Anger is a conventional, realistic, three-act play. It is set in a one-room attic flat somewhere in the English Midlands and is the home of Jimmy Porter and his wife, Alison. The primary voice of Look Back in Anger belongs to Jimmy, a working-class young man, whose lengthy speeches set the play’s polemical and emotional tone and drive the drama’s action. University educated, not in one of the prestigious “red brick” Oxbridge schools, but in a newer, so-called white tile university, Jimmy runs a candy stand in an open-air market with his friend, Cliff Lewis, a good-natured young man who lives in a separate bedroom across the hall from the Porters’ flat. The first act opens on a Sunday evening in April. Alison, dressed in a slip, is ironing, and Jimmy and Cliff are in easy chairs reading the Sunday papers. Jimmy, complaining that the book review he is reading in his “posh” paper is partly written in French, redirects his acid sarcasm toward Alison and Cliff, condemning his wife’s middle-class inertia and taunting Cliff for his lack of education and ignorance. He rails against the soulless English middle class, singling out Alison’s family, especially her brother, Nigel, “the chinless wonder from Sandhurst,” a Member of Parliament whom Jimmy resents for his easy success despite his insensitivity and stupidity. He calls his wife “the Lady Pusillanimous,” attacks women in general, and complains about the noise of Alison’s ironing and Cliff’s rustling of his newspaper as he tries to listen to a concert on the radio. During a playful wrestling match between Jimmy and Cliff, the ironing board is accidentally turned over and Alison burns her arm. She angrily tells Jimmy to get out, and while he is gone, Cliff tends to Alison’s burn and calms her. Alison reveals to Cliff that she is pregnant but is afraid to tell Jimmy, who, she fears, will think she planned it. She admits she is miserable and is thinking of leaving her husband. When Jimmy returns and Cliff leaves, Jimmy admits to Alison that he feels trapped by his love for her; he is angry that she cannot feel pain and cannot understand him, although he still wants her. The two embark on their own particular form of love play, which consists of an affectionate game of “bears and squirrels,” using stuffed animals. Such regressive behavior evokes the nursery of the Edwardian era, an idealized time of innocence for which Jimmy is nostalgic. Cliff calls Alison to the phone downstairs; she returns to tell them that her actress friend, Helena Charles, is coming to stay with them. This sparks a new diatribe from Jimmy, who directs his rage once again toward Alison: “If only something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep!” He tells Cliff, “She’ll go on sleeping and devouring until there’s nothing left of me.”
The second act takes place two weeks later. Alison has not told Jimmy of her pregnancy. Helena’s fi rm emplacement in the household has caused tension. Jimmy resents her influence over Alison, telling Helena, “You’re determined to win her, aren’t you? So it’s come to this now!” He describes how he “rescued” Alison from her mother:
Mummy and I took one quick look at each other, and, from then on, the age of chivalry was dead. . . . But even I under-estimated her strength. Mummy may look over-fed and a bit flabby on the outside, but don’t let that well-bred guzzler fool you. Underneath all that, she’s armor- plated—She’s as rough as a night in a Bombay brothel, and as tough as a matelot’s arm.
Jimmy then tells of how he sat with his father as he lay dying for months and says he “learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless.” He is called to the phone, and while he is gone Helena tells Alison that she has telegraphed Alison’s father to bring her home. Jimmy returns to report that the mother of his friend Hugh has had a stroke and that he will go to London to be with her. (She is a working-class woman who advanced the money to start the candy business.) He needs Alison to go with him, but she leaves with Helena to go to church. In the next scene it is the following evening, and Colonel Redfern, Alison’s father, has arrived to collect his daughter. He was in colonial service in India for 30 years and now voices his perplexity over modern England. He is sympathetic toward Jimmy and expresses his regret at his passivity during the time his wife viciously attempted to block Alison’s marriage. Alison explains that she married Jimmy because he was a challenge to her “happy, uncomplicated life,” a “spiritual barbarian.” After Alison and her father leave Jimmy comes in and reads the letter his wife has left for him. Helena tells him that Alison is pregnant, but Jimmy does not care; he has no pity for her after watching Hugh’s mother die. He calls Helena an “evil-minded little virgin,” and she slaps his face. A despairing Jimmy begins to cry, and Helena kisses him passionately.
The opening scene of act 3 reflects the setup of act 1: It is a Sunday evening; Jimmy and Cliff are reading the newspapers, and Helena is ironing. Jimmy makes fun of the stories he is reading, but the tone is light. He and Cliff go into a vaudeville routine, and Helena joins them. Jimmy and Cliff playfully wrestle, and Cliff’s shirt gets dirty. When Helena goes off to wash it, Cliff tells Jimmy that he plans to give up the candy stall, move out, and perhaps find a woman of his own. Helena returns and tells Jimmy that she loves him. Alison enters, looking thin and ill; Jimmy leaves the two women alone together. Alison reveals that she has suffered a miscarriage. She does not want to come between Helena and Jimmy, but Helena realizes that the affair was wrong and is over, and she leaves. Jimmy returns to rebuke Alison for not sending flowers to the funeral. Then he softens, as he describes himself as a lonely “old bear, following his own breath in the dark forest.” He remembers when they first met and tells her, “I thought I was a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn’t matter.” Alison collapses on the floor and, groveling before him, cries out that by failing to protect her baby, she has at last experienced the pain of living and can understand him. Jimmy tenderly comforts her, and they play “bears and squirrels” in reconciliation and in yearning for lost childhood.
Look Back in Anger, with its liberating, rhetorical power, lack of “polite” discourse (the Lord Chamberlain, in particular, took issue with Jimmy Porter’s “Mummy” speech, singling out the use of the word brothel), and its indictment of middle-class stoicism (in a country which had just displayed that quality to the maximum in a world war), was not an immediate success, although it generated intense critical excitement. Reviewers variously characterized the play as vulgar, feverish, savage, barbaric, and even boring (one critic felt it should be called “Look Back in Whining”), while at the same time acknowledging Osborne as a playwright of great promise. Then Kenneth Tynan, the most influential theater critic of the age, weighed in on the play’s merits. As he wrote in the Observer,
I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of twenty and thirty. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups who are curious to know precisely what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling. . . . I could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.
After a rough start, financially and critically, Look Back in Anger won its audience and became a staple of British theater. It was made into a well-received film with Richard Burton in the role of Jimmy Porter and continues to be performed. Its influence would be felt in the works of such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Robert Bolt, John Arden, and Peter Shaffer and novelists such as Sillitoe, the author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. This innovative group of young writers would cut across class lines to provide British literature and drama with a newly experimental and challenging voice.