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Look Back in Anger (1956) is a realist play written by John Osborne. It focuses on the life and marital struggles of an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working-class origin, Jimmy Porter, and his equally competent yet impassive upper-middle-class wife Alison.
- John Osborne
- 1956
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Look Back in Anger, play in three acts by John Osborne, performed in 1956 and published in 1957. A published description of Osborne as an “angry young man” was extended to apply to an entire generation of disaffected young British writers who identified with the lower classes and viewed the upper.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 7, 2017 · John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger pretty quickly, in just 17 days, while sitting in a deckchair on Morecambe Pier. At this stage of his life, Osborne was living in a tiny flat in Derby with his wife, the actress Pamela Lane.
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
John James Osborne was born on December 12, 1929, in Fulham, South West London. His father, Thomas Godfry Osborne, was then a commercial artist and copywriter; his mother, Nellie Beatrice Grove Osborne, worked as a barmaid in pubs most of her life. Much of Osborne’s childhood was spent in near poverty, and he suffered from frequent extended illness...
Act I
The plot of Look Back in Angeris driven almost entirely by the tirades of Jimmy Porter rather than outside forces. The play is set in a one-room attic apartment in the Midlands of England. This large room is the home of Jimmy Porter, his wife Alison, and his partner and friend Cliff Lewis, who has a separate bedroom across the hall. The play opens with Alison at the ironing board and Jimmy and Cliff in easy chairs reading the Sunday papers. Jimmy complains that half the book review he is read...
Act II, scene 1
It is evening two weeks later. Helena and Alison are getting ready to go to church. Jimmy is in Cliff’s room practicing jazz on his trumpet. Jimmy’s friend Hugh and Hugh’s working-class mother, who provided the money needed to start the candy business, are discussed. Alison talks of being cut off from the kind of people she had always known. She still hasn’t told Jimmy she is pregnant. After Cliff and Jimmy enter, Jimmy launches into another attack on the Establishment in general and Alison’s...
Act II, scene 2
It is the following evening and Colonel Redfern, Alison’s father, is visiting. Redfern is bemused by the modern England; he spent his whole career, from 1913 to 1947, in the colonial service in India. He sees some right on Jimmy’s side and was horrified by his wife’s brutal attempts to prevent Alison from marrying Jimmy. He says he and Alison are much alike in that they both “like to sit on a fence. It is rather comfortable.” Alison tries to explainwhy she married Jimmy: “I’d lived a happy, u...
Helena Charles
Helena is Alison’s friend, a very proper middle-class woman. She is an actress who comes to stay with the Porters while she performs in a play at the local theatre. Jimmy has long despised her, as he considers her a member of the Establishment. When she contacts Alison’s father and asks him to take Alison home, Helena seems genuinely concerned about Alison. However, she seduces Jimmy and replaces Alison in the household. When Alison returns, Helena realizes that her affair with Jimmy is wrong...
Cliff Lewis
Cliff is Jimmy’s friend and partner in the candy stall business and shares the Porters’ flat, although he has his own bedroom across the hall. Cliff is a poorly educated, working class man of Welsh heritage. He is warm, loving, and humorous. He genuinely loves Alison but adjusts when she leaves and Helena moves in. Cliff’s first allegiance is to Jimmy. Nevertheless, ultimately he decides to go out on his own.
Alison Porter
Alison has been married to Jimmy for three years. She comes from the solid upper-middle-class Establishment. Her father was a colonel in the colonial Service and the family lived very comfortably in India until 1947. Her brother Nigel attended Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, and is a Member of Parliament. She married Jimmy partly as a rebellion against the proper, predictable, stultifying precepts of her class. However, she has been molded by her upbringing and it is her “fence
Alienation and Loneliness
Jimmy Porter spoke for a large segment of the British population in 1956 when he ranted about his alienation from a society in which he was denied any meaningful role. Although he was educated at a “white-tile” university, a reference to the newest and least prestigious universities in the United Kingdom, the real power and opportunities were reserved for the children of the Establishment, those born to privilege, family connections, and entree tothe “right” schools. Part of the “code” of the...
Anger and Hatred
Jimmy Porter operates out of a deep well of anger. His anger is directed at those he loves because they refuse to have strong feelings, at a society that did not fulfill promises of opportunity, and at those who smugly assume their places in the social and power structure and who do not care for others. He lashes out in anger because of his deeply felt helplessness. When he was ten years old he watched his idealist father dying for a year from wounds received fighting for democracy in the Spa...
Apathy and Passivity
Although Alison is the direct target of Jimmy’s invective, her apathy and passivity are merely the immediate representation of the attitudes that Jimmy sees as undermining the whole of society. It is the complacent blandness of society that infuriates Jimmy. When speaking of Alison’s brother Nigel, he says, “You’ve never heard so many well-bred commonplaces coming from beneath the same bowler hat.” The Church, too, comes under attack in part because it has lost relevance to contemporary life....
Setting
The play takes place in the Porters’ one-room flat, a fairly large attic room. The furniture is simple and rather old: a double bed, dressing table, book shelves, chest of drawers, dining table, and three chairs, two shabby leather arm chairs. The drab setting of the play emphasizes the contrast between the idealistic Jimmy and the dull reality of the world surrounding him.
Plot
The construction of Look Back in Anger is that of an old-fashioned well-made play in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, or most of Osborne’s contemporary commercial playwrights. There is one plot developed over three acts (the expected number in 1956), and the basic plot device is ancient: misalliance in marriage compounded by a love triangle. There is some exposition that has been characterized as clumsy, such as when Jimmy tells Alison, to whom he has been...
Imagery
Two sound images from off-stage are used very effectively in Look Back in Anger:the church bells and Jimmy’s jazz trumpet. The church bells invade the small living space and serve as a reminder of the power of the established church, and also that it doesn’t care at all for their domestic peace. The jazz trumpet allows Jimmy’s presence to dominate the stage even when he is not there, and it also serves as his anti-Establishment “raspberry.”
By 1956 the British Empire had been shrinking for decades. With the granting of independence to India in 1947 after Gandhi’s thirty years of struggle and the loss of African colonies and the near independence of the Commonwealth nations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the British Empire was all but gone. The Suez crises in 1956, in whic...
Look Back in Anger has been recognized as a bombshell that blew up the old British theatre. However, when Look Back in Anger opened as the third play in the repertory of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre (a company that had been founded the year before precisely to stimulate new writing that would have contemporary relevance), it...
Terry W. Browne
Browne holds a Ph.D. in theatre and is the author of the book Playwrights’ Theatre, which is a study of the company that first produced Look Back in Anger. In this essay he discusses elements that made Osborne’s play important when it was first produced and why it remains a dynamic play today. When Look Back in Anger opened in 1956 it brought a new force to the English theatre. It was written in the prevailing form of a three-act well-made realistic play, a form that had existed for at least...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. The Entertainer is Osborne’s second play, produced by The English Stage Company in 1957. Osborne offers the outdated and dying English music halland the main character, second-rate performer Archie Rice, as a metaphor for England. 2. Luther is Osborne’s psychological study of Martin Lutheras a private man, rather than as a public religious figure and instigator of the Protestant Reformation. 3. Inadmissible Evidence is the product of a more mature artistic mind and evidenced that Osborne c...
Brooks Atkinson
In this review that was originally published on October 2, 1957, Atkinson cheers Osborne ‘splay as “the most vivid British play of the decade.” The critic lauds Look Back in Anger for its courage to challenge complacency and the common perceptions regarding everyday life. [Text Not Available] [Text Not Available] Source: Brooks Atkinson, review of Look Back in Anger (1957) in On Stage: Selected Reviews from the New York Times, 1920-1970, edited by Bernard Beckerman and Howard Siegman, Arno Pr...
Athanason, Arthur Nicholas. “John Osborne,” in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 7: Writers After World War 11, 1945-1960, Gale, 1992, pp. 231-54. “IMMANENT REALITY PLUS A GIFT FOR STINGING AND WITTY RHETORIC ARE WHAT GIVE LOOK BACK IN ANGERITS IMPORTANCE.” Barker, John. A review of Look Back in Anger in Daily Express, May 9,...
Browne, Terry W. Playwrights’ Theatre; The English Stage Company at the Royal Court, Pitman, 1975. Rusinko, Susan. British Drama, 1950 to The Present, Twayne, 1989. Taylor, John Russell. The Angry Theatre, Hill and Wang, 1969. Trussler, Simon. The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994.
Look Back in Anger follows a young husband and wife, Alison and Jimmy Porter, as they attempt to navigate class conflict and deal with a deteriorating marriage in 1950s England. Alison comes from a traditional upper class background.
In 1958, Osborne joined Look Back in Anger director Tony Richardson and film producer Harry Saltzman to form Woodfall Film Productions, in order to produce Richardson's 1959 film adaptation of Anger and other works of kitchen sink realism, spearheading the British New Wave.
Nov 3, 2023 · Look Back in Anger is a play by English playwright John Osborne, first published and performed in 1956. The story focuses on a young married couple named Jimmy and Alison Porter and their...
