1956 The first performance of John Osborne’s play took place at the Royal Court theatre, Sloane Square, under the auspices of the newly formed English Stage Society. Their inaugural plays were, like Osborne’s, aggressively anti-English.
Look Back in Anger is a foundation text (along with Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim) of the so-called ‘Angry Young Man’ movement (the phrase is attributed to Harold Hobson, then theatre critic on the Sunday Times).
The play’s core is a savage denunciation of middle-class England – principally via the dissident, twenty-something hero, Jimmy Porter. Osborne anatomises him in the opening stage direction:
He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike.
Jimmy is searingly intelligent, the (drop-out) product of a ‘university which is not even redbrick, but white tile’. Proletarian by self-assertion, he is something of a cultural snob – liking only traditional jazz, 9d Sunday newspapers (i.e. the Observer) and good books. Less ‘disconcerting’ than – in the preferred American phrase (as immortalised in James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause (1955)) – ‘crazy mixed up’.
The challenging task of capturing Osborne’s explosive ingredients was entrusted, on the first run, to Kenneth Haigh; two years later Richard Burton played Jimmy on film, to an audience of millions.
Literary movements typically require a helpful push from the critical establishment to give them shape and impetus. The critical reception of Look Back in Anger was largely confused and nervous. Waiting for Godot, produced the year before, had earlier rattled the London theatrical press out of its comfortable stock responses.
Typical was Philip Hope-Wallace in the Manchester Guardian who labelled Look Back in Anger ‘a strongly felt but rather muddled first drama’, and Patrick Gibbs in the Daily Telegraph who thought it ‘a work of some power, uncertainly directed’. The uncertainty (and, arguably, the muddle) was among the critics. The Times (grandly anonymous) thundered negatively: ‘his first play has passages of good violent writing, but its total gesture is altogether inadequate.’
Osborne’s gesture, of course, was two fingers to everything The Times stood for.
One critic – in the same twenties age group as Porter and Osborne – had no uncertainty. Already hailed as the most powerful theatre critic since George Bernard Shaw, Kenneth Tynan lauded the play uncompromisingly in the Observer (12 May). Astor’s paper was Porter’s Sunday reading. In 1956 – virtually alone in Fleet Street – it condemned Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure; indifferent to the circulation loss that its lack of ‘patriotism’ incurred.
Tynan began by recalling Somerset Maugham’s comment on the dramatis personae of Amis’s Lucky Jim: ‘they are scum.’ He then went on to assert: ‘Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is.’ More importantly, Tynan saw in Porter not just a ‘character’ but a portent. Porterism was a movement on the move:
The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of ‘good taste’ and refuse to accept ‘emotional’ as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless. Mr Osborne is their first spokesman in the English theatre.
There were, Tynan calculated with mocking pseudo-precision, some 6,733,000 Porters in Britain: ‘that is the number of people in this country between twenty and thirty.’ Tynan himself was in that army: ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of the decade.’