A Fond Remembrance: LOOK BACK IN ANGER and its effect on English theatre

Osborne's masterwork Look Back in Anger is a difficult yet interesting beast to analyze because it is remembered in different ways. It is often hailed as the savior of English theatre: a departure from the mundane conventional plays that the dreary English public had grown accustomed to. This sort of sentiment has carried through to today when Osborne is hailed as as the quintessentially English 20th century playwright. Look Back in Anger was the catalyst for this movement looking to create theatre that was undeniably created in England. Many citizens of the British Empire related to this movement and Osborne's first solo work (which they had taken as their flag) because it exhibited their love of country, culture and style while reflecting their dissatisfaction with the state of their homeland under its current system of government. The antithetical personality of Jimmy Porter personifies mixed feelings of the English public.

This is a double edged sword however, and many find Osborne's first work to be nothing more than a trite re-hash of commonplace cynicism. Dan Rebellato parodies the nostalgic reminiscence of theatre scholars and critics alike in his book 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama: 

"By 1956, British theatre was in a terrible state. The West End was dominated by a few philistine theatre managers, cranking out emotionally repressed, middle-class play, all set in drawing rooms with French windows, as vehicles for stars whose only talent was to wield a cigarette holder and a cocktail glass while wearing a dinner jacket... Then on 8 May 1956, came the breakthrough. At the Royal Court, Look Back in Anger, John Osborne's fiery blast against the theatre establishment burst onto the stage, radicalizing British theatre overnight.... A new wave of dramatists sprang up in Osborne's wake; planting their colours on British stages, speaking for a generation who had for so long been silent, they forged a living, adult, vital theatre." [1-2] 

 To put this into historical perspective with what we have been talking about in class think about the following artists and their works that we have discussed in class:

Osborne (right) during the premieres of Look Back in Anger

• 1948- Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle first opened in Philadelphia 
• 1950- first performance of Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano in Paris, France.
• 1953- Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot opens in France, comes to England by 1955.
• 1956- Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night premiered in America.
• 1959- Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun premieres.