Disenfranchised youth, a dangerously divided society and existential threats to humanity: Look Back in Anger seems ripe for a revival – with environmental catastrophe eclipsing the original’s cold war fears of the atomic bomb. Last performed in London 25 years ago, John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 play is now on at London’s Almeida theatre as part of a new season entitled Angry and Young. With his play of working‑class rage, Osborne “set off a landmine” under British theatre – as the novelist Alan Sillitoe put it – giving rise to kitchen-sink dramas and TV soaps. We have Osborne to thank for EastEnders. But the play’s legacy is more problematic.
Written in 17 days in a deckchair on Morecambe pier when Osborne was a 26-year-old struggling actor, Look Back in Anger was an autobiographical account of the breakdown of his marriage to the actor Pamela Lane (whom he left for Mary Ure, the star of Anger, a few years later). Now an anthem of class warfare (Oasis didn’t borrow the title for nothing), it should not be forgotten that the play’s battleground is an abusive marriage – it is British theatre’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
Back in 1956, the phrases “toxic masculinity” and “coercive control” didn’t exist, but now we have the language to describe what is happening as Jimmy Porter rails not just against the establishment but also his more genteel wife Alison, staying just shy of physical violence. Audiences reared on polite drawing-room dramas gasped to see an ironing board on stage. Today it is the casual denigration of women as “bitches” and “cows” that shocks. Rebel Jimmy now seems simply another self-pitying bully, his tirades recalling the misogynistic rants of online trolls and influencers.
Rupert Goold, the Almeida’s artistic director, has acknowledged the play’s “slightly challenging gender politics” – rather understating the point. But this is no doubt one of the reasons why Anger is so rarely revived. Do such “challenging” plays need a radical updating to work for modern audiences? Or should they be preserved as museum pieces whose value rests only in what they tell us about theatre history?
Director Atri Banerjee, who has pulled off adventurous productions of The Glass Menagerie and Julius Caesar, takes a middle ground, staying faithful to the original but driving home Jimmy’s intolerably abusive behaviour. This joins other revisionist productions of well-known plays in putting toxic masculinity centre stage. In a recent National Theatre production, Shakespeare’s Othello became a drama about domestic violence, and this year’s nearly all-female cast of Richard III at the Globe shows the king as a predatory tyrant.
New works featuring troubling representations of masculinity have included David Ireland’s The Fifth Step, Joe Penhall’s The Constituent and James Graham’s Punch. The first monologue in Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ state-of-the-nation trilogy Death of England, now running at @sohoplace in London, stars a character who might well be a modern-day Jimmy. And, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, there has been no shortage of angry young female voices. The hit one-woman show Prima Facie, starring Jodie Comer, powerfully dramatised the question of consent.
In not shying away from its corrosive sexual politics, the Almeida production shows that it is possible to make unpalatably dated plays part of a new cultural conversation. For all its ugliness, Look Back in Anger doesn’t deserve to be thrown out with the dishwater.
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