Look back in Anger

by John Osborne

English drama had become so remote from the facts of modern life that, when
Osborne brought it up to date simply by restoring to it the proper qualities of realism, he
seemed to be doing something revolutionary. Look Back in Anger showed that English drama
was no longer “hermetically sealed off from real life”. The popularity of the play showed that
demand for truly realistic drama did exist. As a realistic play, Look Back in Anger is more like
G.B. Shaw’s “unpleasant plays”! than like Galsworthy’s “slices of life”. However, while
Shaw focuses dramatic interest on social problems (in such plays as Widowers’
Houses), Osborne’s handling of social themes is decidedly haphazard. For Osborne social
themes are not of first dramatic importance. Most of the earlier realistic playwrights had
dramatized social questions in order to arouse social conscience: they had a palpable design
upon their audience, and their plays were therefore didactic-realistic. Look Back in Anger does
not belong to this category. Osborne is not concerned with social theories and remedies.
Social questions are important in his plays only as they are imaginatively apprehended by his
characters, and they do not form the action. The striking rhetorical power of Look Back in
Anger shows an imaginative vitality going beyond that which is commonly associated with
the realistic prose drama. The long speeches of Jimmy Porter have a genuine rhetorical force.
These speeches are at the same time violent and controlled, sardonically humorous and in
deadly earnest.
The play was the inspiration for not one but two important new phrases in the English
language to describe British post-war theatre: the phrase ‘angry young men’ was coined to
refer to a group of British writers of the 1950s who shared Osborne’s desire to rail against the
Establishment, while the term ‘kitchen-sink drama’ also has its roots in Look Back in Anger.
The play also inspired the title of an Oasis single ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. The play’s
influence, it would seem, has spread all over the place. The circumstances surrounding the
writing and staging of the play are as dramatic and interesting as the plot of the play itself.
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. The marriage was not especially happy by this
point, and the home life of Jimmy and Alison Porter in Look Back in Anger sprang from
Osborne’s own wedded misery. Look Back in Anger is as likely to remind us of the other side
to the 1950s, if anything – reminding us that post-war life was pretty wretched for many
women in the years before the arrival of the permissive society in the late 1960s, and that the
‘kitchen sink’ and the ironing board were seen as their rightful place by many men.
Jimmy Porter is an iconic character that represents somehow an entire generation.
Osborne’s opening stage directions acknowledge that to some people, Jimmy Porter is simply
‘a loudmouth’. Many of Jimmy’s impressive tirades are no doubt concerned with the debased
values of modern life, but the action of the play is only very indirectly influenced by such
social questions as the class-system. Alison surely describes Jimmy’s invasion of her upper-
class world as part of the class-war he is waging, with herself as a hostage. Jimmy’s irritation
over the absurdities of the English cast-system also surely colours his whole view of life and
enters into the frustrations of his marriage. But what Jimmy feels himself to be revolting
against is not simply the class-system but something even more frightful; namely, the kind of
intellectual inertia or sluggishness which afflicts people regardless of the class they belong to
and the working-class man, Cliff, as much as the well-bred, middle-class woman, Alison.
Jimmy is infuriated by the lack of imaginative response he encounters everywhere. “Did you
read Priestley’s piece this week?”. Jimmy asks Alison and Cliff, and he goes on to say that
there is no point in his asking such a question because he knows that they have not read that
piece. He adds that they are incapable of raising themselves out of their “delicious sloth”, that
they will drive him mad by their apathy, and that they are devoid of even the ordinary human
enthusiasm which he expects from them. “Let’s pretend that we’re human beings, and that
we’re actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say? Let’s pretend we’re human. Oh,
brother, it’s such a long time since I was with anyone who got enthusiastic about anything”,
he says in desperation.

Jimmy is infuriated by the lack of imaginative response he encounters everywhere.

“Did you read Priestley’s piece this week?”. Jimmy asks Alison and Cliff, and he goes on to
say that there is no point in his asking such a question because he knows that they have not
read that piece. He adds that they are incapable of raising themselves out of their “delicious
sloth”, that they will drive him mad by their apathy, and that they are devoid of even the
ordinary human enthusiasm which he expects from them. “Let’s pretend that we’re human
beings, and that we’re actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say? Let’s pretend we’re
human. Oh, brother, it’s such a long time since I was with anyone who got enthusiastic about
anything”, he says in desperation. Jimmy knows that such imaginative suffering is a
profoundly solitary experience. The heaviest, strongest creatures in this world, he tells Alison,
seem to be the loneliest, like the old bear, following his own breath in the dark forest. There’s
no warm pack, no herd to comfort this bear. “The voice that cries out doesn’t have to be a
weakling’s, does it?” he asks Alison. It is ironical that Alison asks Helena not to take away
Jimmy’s suffering from him because he would be lost without it. But Alison’s statement is
literally true. Jimmy would surely be lost without his suffering. Yet, at the same time, and
quite naturally, he resents the capacity for self-torment with which he is endowed. He kicks
against the pricks, seeing all round him people who live their lives free of demons, the people
who are untroubled. “They all want to escape from the pain of being alive,” he says and, he
longs for Alison to be initiated into suffering too. He would like her to have a child that dies.
“Let it grow, let a recognizable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and
wrinkles”, he says, pointing to her body. Such outbursts, verging on hysteria, show the strain
which his sense of the difference between himself and others imposes on him. Alison, by
withdrawing behind an appearance to detached indifference makes communication between
him and herself impossible. “That girl there can twist your arm off with her silence”, is his
bitter comment on her reaction. Her behaviour is also, of course, natural under the
circumstances: they are both defeated by an incompatibility that goes too deep to be cured by
the sexual harmony which undoubtedly they have been able to achieve.

Jimmy seeks from women much more than he could ever hope to get from them, and
when he is disappointed turns on them with savage resentment. He wants release from his
tormenting consciousness. When he first fell in love with Alison, it seemed that she could
offer him that release. He was attracted by what seemed her “wonderful relaxation of spirit”.
But, as he puts it, “In order to relax, you’ve first got to sweat your guts out”, and this, as he
soon discovers, is something that Alison cannot do. Her calm is only that of a sleeping
Beauty. His rage on finding his mistake is irrational and unfair, but, as it springs from so deep
a need, it compels our pity.

There is often a wistful note in Jimmy’s attacks on people who have escaped “the pain
of being alive” by living in dreams or in the past. The Edwardian world in which Colonel
Redfern seems to live is such a dream world. Jimmy’s comment on this world is: “What a
romantic picture. Phoney too, of course. It must have rained sometimes. Still, even I regret it
somehow, phoney or not. If you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the
passing of someone else’s.

Sexual passion does offer an occasional escape to Jimmy but it cannot solve his
problems. He alternates between sexual yearning and sexual disgust in a way that is difficult
to understand. In a famous passage he asks why women bleed men to death. He says that men
have no alternative but to let themselves be butchered because men find no good, brave
causes to die for: “I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any
longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids.”
Jimmy’s lament over missing causes is not meant by Osborne to set us thinking of the good,
brave causes that do exist. This is not a play about causes but about a special kind of feeling,
what Osborne has described as “the texture of ordinary despair”. Jimmy is a suffering hero,
and the action is designed to illuminate his suffering rather than to force a conflict.

The key to understanding Look Back in Anger is not in the ‘angry’ or ‘man’ part, but
the ‘young’. In a telling remark, Alison chides Jimmy for being like a child. Her and Jimmy’s
fondness for playing ‘bears and squirrels’ with their cuddly toys suggests a desire to retreat
into a world of child’s play, to insulate one in a safe, innocent world that is free from the
gritty realities of post-war Britain, but also from the adult pressures (and adult knowledge) of
the class system, the need to earn a living, the sense of time slipping by unused (to borrow a
Larkinesque turn of phrase) as the characters drift ever more quickly and inexorably towards
middle age. It might also be analysed as significant, in this connection, that Jimmy Porter runs
a sweet stall – more child’s play. There is a sense of shared despair between Jimmy and
Alison at the end of the play. Men and women, bears and squirrels, were both doomed.

In conclusion, it seems that Look Back in Anger arrived like a hand grenade in British
theatres, blowing apart old attitudes: as Kenneth Tynan observed upon seeing the play, it was
‘a minor miracle’ to see ‘qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage’. Tynan’s
praise of the play transformed its fortunes. Many of the initial reviews of Osborne’s play were
negative, but after Tynan announced his love for what Osborne was doing, people’s interest
was piqued. Whatever its ultimate value, Look Back in Anger deserves continued critical
attention for bringing about a miniature revolution in British theatre, precisely at the point
when it most needed it. Osborne was the angry man of the hour: his was the right play at the
right time.