Roots/Look Back in Anger at the Almeida review: the ferocious roar of angry young men and women resonate down the decades

Before the late 1950s, theatre was just posh people chatting in drawing rooms: sexless, staid, stale. Then a group of disaffected playwrights became angry at the state of the country, and at the state of theatre, and wrote plays in which working class people shouted in kitchens instead.

Dubbed the Angry Young Men, this disparate bunch of writers brought domesticity, realism and working class concerns to the stage. Chief among the new generation of dramatists were Arnold Wesker and John Osborne, and chief among the angry young plays by these angry young men were John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 and Arnold Wesker’s Roots three years later.