Look Back In Anger centres on the venomously angry Jimmy Porter, his long-suffering wife Alison and loveable best friend Cliff. Amongst this strange trio comes Helena, Alison's long time friend and one of Jimmy's natural enemies. Sparks fly, secrets are uncovered and the very fabric of this group threatens to crumble.
I first read Look Back In Anger about five weeks ago and was immediately struck by how much it resonated with my life. Here was a character that articulated my deepest frustrations with life, women, work, religion, class and death. I wouldn't say that I was Jimmy Porter, the lead protagonist in the play, but much as Larry David's character in Curb Your Enthusiasm is 'his version of Superman', Jimmy Porter is my Superman. I promptly set about producing the play, which is showing here.
What appears on the surface to be a melodramatic kitchen sink drama (indeed one of the first KSD's), is merely an entertaining platform for Osborne to articulate (through Jimmy's searing, often very funny, monologues) his bitter attacks on the middle classes.
Post-War British theatre at the time was dominated by the likes of Terence Rattigan which concerned itself with the mild mannered dramas of the tight lipped, curtain twitching upper classes. So when Look Back In Anger gave an intelligent and angry voice to the, mostly neglected, working classes, it's easy to see its immediate impact. Although the play received mixed reviews at the time, Kenneth Tynan hit the nail square on the head when he wrote:
"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, 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."
We're currently in the aftermath of a spate of domino effect riots that seemed to be perpetrated by a collection of opportunists sparked by the impotency shown by police after an out of hand march in memory of Mark Duggan. These riots were carried out by a generation of angry young men and women who haven't got a cause to believe in, to fight for and lashed out at the first sign of provocation. OR, they were carried out by a selection of demonised hoodies wanting the latest goods from Foot Locker. It all depends on which paper/blog/twitter account you read.
Whatever the answers, Look Back In Anger is a timely reminder, shining a light and venomously attacking the areas behind the questions. Class, Family, Religion, breakdown of community, the rise of the individual, the apathy of the middle classes and the dangerously volatile anger of the working classes.
At the moment we're living with a coalition government who is constantly distancing itself from the working class, from the men and women who feel the effects of recession the most. A double dip recession, a leader allied with the evils of the News International, MP's lining their own pockets, harsher sentencing for those 'individual, opportunists' and demonisation of the social networks, acts as merely a false scape goat which masks the lack of investment in the poorer areas where the riots took place, the polemic nature of the news fuels the economy of fear that governs the UK, just because it sells more papers or garners more viewers.
Look Back In Anger is a timely reminder that although we may feel overwhelmed by a surge of constant information and that a natural apathy seems to dominate the Noughties generation, now is a righteous time to feel angry and that Jimmy Porters' attacks still feel as fresh and relevant today as they did in 1956.