2. John james osborne (1929)

The playwright was born in Fulham, London, the son of a commercial artist who died in 1940. The first volume of his autobiography , “A Better Class of Person” (1981), describes his childhood in suburbia, his brief spell as a journalist, and his years as an actor in provincial repertory, during which he began to write plays, the 1^st of which was performed in 1950. He made his name with “Look Back in Anger” (1957), which was followed by “Ephitaph for Georg Dillon” (1958), “The Entertainer” (1957) which starred Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, a faded survivor of the greats days of music hall; “Luther” (1961), based on the life of Martin Luther, which much emphasis on his physical as well spiritual problems. Iconoclastic , energetic, and impassioned, Osborne’s works at their most positive praise the qualities of loyalty, tolerance, and friendship, but his later works, which include “West of Suez” (1971), “A Sense of Detachment” (1972), “Watch it Come Down” (1976) have become inereasingly vituperative in tone, and the objects of his invective have become apperently more arbitrary. His outbusts of rage against contemporary society are frequently exhilarating, for the anger thet made him known as an “Angry Young Man” remains one of his strongest theatrical weapons. He also expresses from time to time an ambivalent nostalgia for the past that his own work did so much to alter.

a) Look back in ange) A general summary

The actions takes place in a midlands town, in the one-room flat of Jimmy and Alison Porter, and centres on their marital conflicts, which appear to arise lorgely from Jimmy’s sense of their social incompatibility: he is a jazz-playing ex-student from a ‘white tile’ university, working on a market sweet stall, she is a colonel’s daughter. He is by turns violent, sentimental, maudlin, self-pitying, and sadistic, and he has a fine line in rhetoric. The 1^st act opens as Alison stands ironing the clothes of Jimmy and their lodger Cliff, as Jimmy reads the Sunday papers and abuses her and the “Edwardian brigade” which her parents represent. In the 2^nd act the battle intensifies, as Alison’s friend Helena attempts to rescue her from disastrous mirrage; Alison departs with her father, and Helena falls into Jimmy’s arms. The 3^rd act opens with Helena at the ironing board; Alison returns, having lost the baby she was expecting, and she and Jimmy find a manner of reconciliation through humilitation and games-playing fantasy. In its use of social milieu, its inconclastic social attitudes, and its exploration of sado-masochistic relationship, the play was heghly influential.

b) COMMENTARY

When the play was put on at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956, its author was totally unknown. The play was a tremendous success. In the years immediately after the war England possessed some notably successfull dramatists, but even the best of them wrote mainly about the problems of the rich and well-to-do. Working class characters rarely appeared and when they did, it was usually to supply comic relief. With the arrival of “Look Back in Anger” the whole situation changed. It was written by a young author about his own generation. Its hero, an aggressive and unsuccessful university graduate Jimmy Porter, appealed by all the indifference and apathy around him, freely attacks the upper slass, religious relief, etc. He is probably the best-known manifestation in Britain’s angry spirit. He is also a very disagreeable hero – a bully, a self-centred sadist filled with self pity, but pitiless with others. He is angry with his wife and with his mother-in-law. He is also angry with the education, religion, love, government and almost anything and everything that happens to come into his sight.

“I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all done for us in the’20s and ‘40s, when we were still kids. There aren’t any good causes left. If a big bang does come and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand, design.”

Jimmy Porter came from a worker’s family, but had broken away from his own slass. He is an enormous cultural snob – reads only the safeclassic, likes only the most traditional jazz, only good books and Sunday Paper. He lives in a tumbledown attic flat in a drab Midlandtown and makes his living by keeping a sweet stall in the market. Everything in his life dissatisfies him and the tone of his conversation which is mainly monologue, is one of complaint.

The other characters of the play (4 altogether) only help to reveal Jimmy’s conflict with the society, the reason of this anger, bitterness and solitude that run through the whole play. It is a play about people who felt that the world of today as not treating them according to their expectations. Jimmy finds no cartainty anywhere, out-side himself or within. He is a rebel without aim.

“Look Back in Anger” was a landmark in the history of the theatre. Althoung not generally thought of as a great play in itself, it nevertheless manages to convey the sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction of the time with intensity and vigour, in the idiom of the actual speech of the young. After its first production in 1956 the theatre in Britain opened up to a whole range of influences and became livelier than at any time for more than 250 years.