John Osborne and Arnold Wesker had a lot in common. Both enjoyed early success rarely matched later on. Both were nurtured by London’s Royal Court theatre (although it was the Belgrade, Coventry, that premiered what became known as the Wesker Trilogy). Both had a combative attitude to critics. But they were also very different writers. I see Osborne as a Byronic outsider with an instinctive talent for dissent, Wesker as an impassioned, and ultimately disillusioned, socialist.
Seeing Look Back in Anger and Roots revived at the Almeida, I also couldn’t help reflecting on how these two plays were among the reasons I wanted to become a critic. As a 16-year-old Midlands schoolboy, I was obsessed with Look Back in Anger. I gave a sixth-form lecture on the phenomenon of the Angry Young Man and I made a pilgrimage to the Royal Court to see Osborne’s play when, as I’ve often recorded, I naively stood outside the theatre watching people’s faces as they came out of the Saturday matinee performance to see how their lives had been changed by the experience. I came to Roots much later but I was deeply moved by its study of female empowerment and its vision of the pupil who, as in Shaw’s Pygmalion, acquires an emotional and verbal vibrancy that outstrips that of her teacher.
