Look Back In Anger
| Look Back in Anger | |
|---|---|
| Written by | John Osborne |
| Date premiered | 8 May 1956 |
| Place premiered |
Royal Court Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Drama |
| Setting | The action throughout takes place in the Porters' one-room flat in the Midlands. |
Royal Court Theatre
London
Look Back in Anger (1956) is a play by John Osborne. It concerns a love triangle involving an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working-class origin (Jimmy Porter), his upper-middle-class, impassive wife (Alison), and her haughty best friend (Helena Charles). Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. The play was a success on the London stage, and spawned the term "angry young men" to describe Osborne and those of his generation who employed the harshness of realism in the theatre in contrast to the more escapist theatre that characterized the previous generation.
Written in 17 days in a deck chair on Morecambe Pier,Look Back in Anger was a strongly autobiographical piece based on Osborne's unhappy marriage to actress Pamela Lane and their life in cramped accommodation in Derby. While Osborne aspired towards a career in theatre, Lane was more practical and materialistic, not taking Osborne's ambitions seriously while cuckolding him with a local dentist. It also draws from Osborne's earlier life; for example, the wrenching speech of witnessing a loved one's death was a replay of the death of his father, Thomas.
What it is best remembered for, though, are Jimmy's tirades. Some of these are directed against generalised British middle-class smugness in the post-atomic world. Many are directed against the female characters, a very distinct echo of Osborne's uneasiness with women, including his mother, Nellie Beatrice, whom he describes in his autobiography A Better Class of Person as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent". Madeline, the lost love Jimmy pines for, is based on Stella Linden, the older rep-company actress who first encouraged Osborne to write. After the first production in London, Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, who played Alison; he divorced his first wife (of five) Pamela Lane to marry Ure in 1957.
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Wikipedia