Look Back in Anger (by John Osborne) hit England with a bang last year and it is clear enough why. On the one hand, it jabbed some good spiny cactus into the aspidistra drama of the English stage; on the other hand, it clangingly echoed a new generation's call to disorder in English life. And it had something more than the Zeitgeist or England's general theatrical anemia to recommend it; it had a man who could really write.
Look Back in Anger has hardly raised the curtain on the frowsiest-looking attic in years than it catapults upon the audience the most blisteringly vituperative character. While his better-born young wife (Mary Ure) bends over an ironing board and his working-class friend (Alan Bates) sprawls over the Sunday papers, Jimmy Porter looses his bilious scorn, like a revolving gun turret, on everything within range: art, religion, radio, Sunday, England and, again and again, his wife and mother-in-law. As minutely venomous as a wasp, as sweepingly violent as a whirlwind, his mockery sauced with self-pity, his growl subsiding in a whine, he brings to a vast repository of grievances a commensurate repertory of abuse.
As the play proceeds, an actress friend of his wife's comes to stay in the house, lashes back at him, and rouses the put-upon pregnant wife to give him the gate. But after the wife leaves Jimmy's bed and ironing board, her friend suddenly takes over both. At the end, despite her being wild about the brute, the friend clears out from a sense of guilt, while the wife, who has had a miscarriage, pleads with him to take her back.
Postulating a grey-as-ashes England where upper-class loss has not meant lower-class gain, Playwright Osborne writes of a young intellectual who looks back because he has no incentive to look ahead, and looks back in anger because he has no brighter past than future. Exulting in his wrongs rather than crusading for his rights, living in "the American age" but without sharing its rewards, Jimmy—at least on the surface—is resolutely a full-fledged Disorganization Man. But gnawing at him worse than have-not economics is the endemic English intestinal bug of class resentment. Happily, none of this ever becomes a mere plight in man's clothing. Jimmy (extremely well played by Kenneth Haigh) is always real in himself, exasperatingly and vibrantly alive, and with a natural-sounding, real-life gift for witty and eloquent abuse.
Less happily, what is best in all this has been pretty fully conveyed by the end of a brilliant, dynamic first act. Indeed, the first act's very power of assault gives to what follows a diminished impact. But what follows has also too little organic development. The play never really advances from a kind of one-man show to any kind of social drama. To be sure, a negativist, no-exit attitude that shies away from moral crisis cannot develop very far; while at the same time so much overt anger must shut the door on irony. Having shown how angry Jimmy can be, the play chiefly thereafter shows how personally irresistible he is. Perhaps a little concentration on human plight would have helped: it cuts deeper than Bohemian mess.
Not for a good many years has anyone come out of England with Playwright Osborne's verbal talent for throwing stones. But playwrights need an architectural talent too, for placing one stone on top of another.