Look Back in Anger

Home > Literature and the Arts > Performing Arts > Theater

Look Back in Anger, a play by J. Osborne, first produced by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956, published 1957. It proved a landmark in the history of the theatre, a focus for reaction against a previous generation (see kitchen sink drama), and a decisive contribution to the corporate image of the Angry Young Man.

The action takes place in a midlands town, in the one-room flat of Jimmy and Alison Porter, and centres on their marital conflicts, which appear to arise largely from Jimmy's sense of their social incompatibility: he is a jazz-playing ex-student from a ‘white tile’ university, she is a colonel's daughter. He is by turns violent, sentimental, maudlin, self-pitying, and sadistic, and has a fine line in rhetoric. The first act opens as Alison stands ironing the clothes of Jimmy and their lodger Cliff. In the second act Alison's friend Helena attempts to rescue her from her disastrous marriage; Alison departs with her father, and Helena falls into Jimmy's arms. The third act opens with Helena at the ironing board; Alison returns, having lost the baby she was expecting, and she and Jimmy find a manner of reconciliation through humiliation and games-playing fantasy.

Look Back in Anger (1957). The John Osborne play served as America's introduction to the new postwar school of British playwrights known as “the angry young men.” The drama focuses on the raging discontent of Jimmy Porter, a working class Brit, and on his tortured relations with his wife and his best friend. The play was first produced in New York by David Merrick at the Lyceum Theatre in 1957, and ran for 407 performances. Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure, and Alan Bates were the original leads. Many critics pointed out that America long had had drama of strident social protest, so that the new English school did not seem so really new. However, it soon became evident that these English playwrights did bring about a subtle change in protest plays in that the expression of the anger and not its actual causes frequently became central to the play. A popular revival at the Roundabout Theatre in 1980 featured Malcolm McDowell, Lisa Banes, and Raymond Hardie.