Comment on the historical significance of Look Back in Anger
The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger. 8 May 1956 is one of the most momentous dates in British
theatre history it was the press night of Look Back in Wrathfulness at the
Royal Court Theatre, London, only the third product of the recently formed
English Stage Company. The date sprucely divides 20th-century British theatre
into ahead and later; this was the moment, so it's said, when British theatre
rediscovered its cultural soberness, its youth, its politics, its wrathfulness.
The historical significance of Look Back in
Anger. But encountering Look Back in Wrathfulness now, for the first time, it
can be hard to see what all the fuss was about. The play centres on Jimmy
Porter, an eloquent malcontent, living with his upper- class woman, Alison, and
their friend Cliff. Jimmy spends his time berating the world and his woman, so
to speak, trying to provoke a response from the stoical Alison. When ultimately
she's goaded beyond abidance and leaves, Jimmy begins an affair with her
friend, though that too descends into cruel collective loathing. When Alison
returns, having suffered a confinement, she and Jimmy begin a conditional,
broken conciliation. Osborne himself described Look Back in Wrathfulness as a‘
formal, old-fashioned play’, (1) and indeed his playmaking has not made that
vault into fustiness that characterises his after plays similar as The Imitator
(1957), Luther (1961) and Inadmissible Substantiation (1964). There are strong‘
curtain lines’ ( designed to evoke applause at the end of a scene), and some
rather awkward exits and entrances that are evocative of the veritably theatre
that Osborne’s revolution is said to have made obsolete. It would be in after
plays and playwrights that cult would completely see the influence of European
pens similar as Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger.
What was so striking about
the play in the theatre of themid-1950s, however, was its eloquence. What was
exquisite in the work of playwright Terence Rattigan, for illustration, was the
use of understatement, subtext, the unsaid. There's veritably little unsaid in
Look Back in Wrathfulness Jimmy Porter switches out verbally at a huge variety
of motifs – the class system, American evangelists, Alison’s family, women in
general, flamboyant homosexuals, church bells, Sundays and further – and the
tone is unstrained scornful, facetious, ferociously eloquent. Osborne called
them‘arias’, like a solo in an pieces, and each time Jimmy Porter launches
another verbal shower into the room bone can smell indeed now the power of this
new music on the London stage. The glamorous high society locales of so
numerous plays of the 1940s give way in Look Back in Wrathfulness to a pokey
garret room in the Midlands, the leaning roof acting to stifle and oppress the
characters, but Jimmy’s language breaks through that, not just bursting out of
that garret room, but indeed acting to break the fourth wall. The followership
at the Court on 8 May 1956 felt disrespected, skewered, thrilled or inspired.
The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger. Of course,
infrequently do revolutionary artistic changes actually be overnight and this
was no exception. That the play’s youthful author (Osborne was 26) was unknown
to utmost critics added to the sense of a play coming out of nowhere, though
he'd been a jobbing repertory actor for some time and this was his third
professionally produced play. He'd written this bone in a flurry between 4 May
and 3 June 1955 while acting in Hugh Hastings’s Seagulls over Sorrento in
Morecambe, heading down to the pier each morning and writing scenes in a
deckchair. Osborne tried out a number of further or lower dreadful titles –
including Man in a Rage and My Blood is a Mile High – before alighting on Look
Back in Wrathfulness.
The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger. As for late
success, the play got mixed reviews but made enough impact for its run to be
extended, though it only began to make a wider artistic impact four months
latterly when a long excerpt was broadcast on TV. The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger. Osborne advantaged from the Court’s publicist, George
Fearon, coining the expression‘angry youthful man’, a term incontinently
employed to gather together a distant group of pens, including Colin Wilson,
Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine. Although John Osborne had met none of
them, and they all differed hectically in style and outlook, it helped fix the
public print of a new artistic movement – full of political wrathfulness – of
which Look Back in Wrathfulness was its primary theatrical incarnation. The
historical significance of Look Back in Anger.
The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger. To a contemporary
followership, it may be less clear why the play is considered such a corner of
political theatre. Jimmy’s targets aren't precisely named, and his spirit seems
more lawless than anything differently. Jimmy indeed declares‘there are n’t any
good, stalwart causes left’, (3) a strange claim at a time of nuclear
proliferation, a cold war, intolerance, radical isolation and further. Further,
his sexual politics, as has been refocused out several times, are far from
progressive. (4) Jimmy’s geste to Alison is incontrovertibly cruel, callous and
designedly misogynistic, and while Jimmy is given all the awful language,
Alison spends much of the first act of the play quietly ironing. It's
important, however, to understand the play’s power on the stage. While it's
true that Jimmy has numerous further lines, there's commodity
unresistant-aggressively important about Alison’s presence, and her successes
in the connubial war are felt when Jimmy falls silent, having failed to provoke
her, the silence filled by the unrhythmic thump and hiss of theiron.More
mainly, however, it would be wrong to seek Look Back in Wrathfulness’s politics
in the content of Jimmy’s harangues. Rather, the politics is in their form
specifically, in their passionate eloquence.
The historical significance of Look Back in
Anger.
The historical significance
of Look Back in Anger. Throughout the
work of the Angry Young Men is a pervasive sense that the polished shells of
the new consumerist society hid an emotional absence beneath. The emotional
restraint of Terence Rattigan's or J B Priestley’s plays was part of this
separation between appearance and profound feeling. In 1957, in the collection
Protestation, as near to a fiat as the Angry Young Men ever wrote, Osborne
blazoned‘I want to make people feel, to give them assignments in feeling’. (6)
For Osborne and others, Britain’s political sickness was this incapability to
feel, and their work was designed to change this. The politics of Look Back in
Wrathfulness lay not in the targets of Jimmy’s wrathfulness, but in the
wrathfulness itself. (7)