Look Back in Anger

by John Osborne 
Almeida Theatre, London

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, performed in repertory with Arnold Wesker's Roots, is part of a "Young and Angry" season at the Almeida Theatre featuring revivals of two groundbreaking British plays from the 1950s. These were part of the wave of realist, kitchen sink dramas that portrayed the gritty realities of life in contrast to the more grandiose, escapist theatre of the previous generation. They often featured ordinary, working class voices and protagonists disillusioned with the system, spawning the term 'angry young men' to describe this emerging group of writers. 

Director Atri Banerjee's production certainly pulls no punches. It revolves around the young, disaffected Jimmy Porter (Billy Howle) who runs a sweet shop. He lives with his wife Alison (Ellora Torchia) and amiable Welsh lodger Cliff Lewis (Ian Davies). As the men sit reading the Sunday papers, it becomes obvious that there is a huge gulf between Jimmy and Alison, a woman who married him despite objections from her moneyed military family. 

Howle's Jimmy is the very picture of toxic masculinity, projecting his class rage onto his wife and mocking her impassive behaviour as she quietly irons. He spits out his words, stomps around and behaves like an overgrown child. "Pusillanimous", he tells Cliff, is word that perfectly describes Alison, a woman who simply refuses to show her emotions, circling her menacingly like a vulture. Torchia turns in a performance of quiet anguish as a woman who feels trapped in a marriage to a man she no longer feels any attraction for, using silence as a means to shut herself off from others. It's only when goaded by her steely actress friend Helena (Morfydd Clark) that she decides to take a stand.

As much as the play may be significant in the canon of British theatre, it comes across as having aged particularly badly in this production. It's also not helped by this version of Jimmy being so grating and misogynistic that the character lacks any nuance. When Alison finally leaves Jimmy and Helena takes her place in a grim echo of the beginning, it barely feels plausible. Unlike tortured anti-hero Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire, there is nothing remotely appealing about this man. 

Set designer Naomi Dawson gives us a sparse, circular set with rotating drum that feels decidedly modern and expressionist in contrast with the lived-in reality of the play. There's an interesting tableau at the start of each half that features the main couple locked in a tango and one of them slowly sinking into a central hole while the other gazes down at them. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the very genre of kitchen sink drama?

The Crystalwords score: 2.5/5