It was a foggy and snowy night but that didn’t stop me from getting out to see John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, at the 7 Arts Bar in Chapel Allerton.
I had recently read the play twice, and watched the 1956 film by Tony Richardson, who was renowned for his angry young men/kitchen sink work.
The play and the film are very different in many ways, but above all they’re distinct in how they make you perceive the nature of the characters. One of the things that the Leeds University Theatre Group succeeded in doing was adding another dimension, and allowing the audience further perspective.
When I first read it what really struck me was its incredibly modern feel for a play published in the 1950s. Osborne cruelly represents how the post-war period shaped people’s lives, and perhaps anticipating through harshness and strong realism some of the complexities of our current uncontrolled consumerist society.
The motifs in the play are very modern and ahead of their time, touching upon the intricate world of relationships, unexpressed emotions, sexuality and marriage. It also explicitly represents the bitterness addressed towards stereotypical middle-class English traditions through the callous, and sometime cynical, monologues of Jimmy Porter.
Jimmy – the angry young man in question – has been married to Alison for three years and his favourite activity seemed to be venting his repressed rage with angsty – and sometimes, I must admit, hilarious -remarks, all addressed to poor Alison who often appears helpless behind her ironing board.
The couple’s dynamic is balanced by the Welsh figure of Cliff, an old friend, who contrasts Jimmy’s anger with his quietness and heart-felt kindness toward Alison. The balance is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Helena Charles, another old friend. She sees Alison’s pregnancy and manages to convince her to leave the mad house in order to go back to living with her parents where she can finally find peace.
The second part of the play has major twists and turns. It’s surprising when after Alison’s leaving, Helena and Jimmy find they have enough in common to fall unexpectedly in ‘love’, or whatever you may want to call their passionate but miserable liaison. Helena literally takes the place of Alison behind the ironing board.
The performances at this point had been sublime – Helena’s character assumed an even more distant and mysterious charm than she did in the film making me honestly feel furious. Why on earth did she do this to her best friend Alison? Has she been plotting all this since the beginning?
Compare this response to the point in the film when I was almost sympathising with her, maybe due to Claire Bloom’s interpretation which made it all feel spontaneous and not calculated at all, even naïve at some points. Nevertheless, the interpretation of her character in this production gives Helena Charles an aspect of coldness that made her look scarily similar to Jimmy.
Jimmy, probably the toughest and most confusing character to interpret, came across less irritating than when reading the play or watching the film. The articulated and pointy monologues of Jimmy couldn’t have been better acted, although Richard Burton’s performance in the film looked angrier.
During the last act of the play, Alison appears again on stage and eventually breaks the uneasy balance created by the new couple. She has lost her baby and she has lost herself, but she cannot live without Jimmy, and neither can Helena. No-one it seems can live without their angry, ranting man.
Helena and Alison are two different women who are not so different after all. They both stand behind an ironing board for longer than they should do, they both love the same angry man and they both lead an unhappy life.
While I was making all these considerations, the drama of the ending iscomplemented by an outstanding live performance from a trumpet player. The whole play assumed a new dramatic pace that followed the rhythm of the melancholic and lonesome trumpeting.