Look Back in Anger

The premise of the play is that Jimmy is lower-middle-class, both Helena and Alison are upper/middle-class, and most of their problems stem from this difference. Alison is less excitable and...

Jimmy Porter is a member of the first wave of working-class people in England that attended university. However, like many of the so-called angry young men of the fifties and sixties, he feels that...

Look Back in Anger is a pivotal work in the kitchen sink realism movement of the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, young British playwrights were reacting to a theatrical tradition they viewed...

There are several reasons for Jimmy's anger. One is socioeconomic: Jimmy, as a member of the lower-middle class, is discontent with his role in life as the proprietor of a sweet shop. He yearns for...

I would argue that Cliff is presented as the antidote to Jimmy. While Jimmy is angry, Cliff is calm. While Jimmy is prone to throwing around verbal abuse, Cliff is a peacemaker. Cliff is warm,...

Look Back in Anger centers on Jimmy’s preoccupation with death and loss. While these concerns are rooted in his childhood loss of his father, Jimmy harbors anger through his inability to free...

Jimmy Porter is one of the most challenging antiheroes to come out of the twentieth-century theater. He is a frustrated man: though highly intelligent, the rigid English class structure prevents...

One way in which the theme of Osborne's drama has relevance to the modern setting is how Jimmy still exists today. Jimmy feels fundamentally slighted by the world around him. He feels that he has...

John Osborne wrote the play Look Back in Anger in 1956. The play is an intensely realistic tale, a "kitchen sink" drama that presents harsh realism as a counter to the escapist plays and musicals...

While different characters embrace anger and frustration in Osborne's work, no character embodies it more than Jimmy. His entire being is the result of anger and frustration. One aspect of...

Look Back in Anger was a revolutionary play for the mid-1900s because it (1) was loaded with emotion, (2) represented the alienation of much of England's youthful population during a time of...

Look Back in Anger presents an interesting psychological portrait of the main character, Jimmy. When he was young, Jimmy watched his father die from wounds sustained in the Spanish Civil War. This...

Jimmy Porter feels alienated from both his wife and society in general. He is a struggling middle class working man who is bored and confined by his monotonous life. His wife Alison has come to...

The short answer to this question is that Helena has an affair with her best friend's husband. Unfortunately, this is another manifestation of the air of cynicism that pervades the play. It's...

One of Jimmy's consistent lines of social critique is the fact that modern England consists of people who do not "feel" anything. They are insulated by routine, a sense of monotony that prevents...

It is a matter of debate whether Look Back in Anger is a misogynistic play or whether it simply reflects the attitudes of its time. A certain school of feminist thought tends towards the former...

Look Back in Anger first opened in 1956. Declared a chauvinistic play by the critics of the time, it has undergone revision over the years, and many contemporary scholars think that it is unfair to...

The bear and squirrel symbolizes Jimmy's and Alison's immature role-play game to escape from their socially and emotionally violent class differences. Jimmy and Alison are bear and squirrel living...

John Osborne was married five times, and his first marriage ended in 1957, the year after Look Back in Anger was first staged. Alison Porter is clearly based on Osborne's wife, Pamela, and it would...

Look Back in Anger is often viewed as a drama, but it could be played as a dark comedy as well. Dark comedy mines serious subject matter for humor—generally the more taboo the better. Osbourne...

Of John Osborne's themes in Look Back in Anger, I would single out two as having special importance. First, the play deals with class conflict. Jimmy, though he has been to university, despises the...

The "Angry Young Men" generation was defined with a spirit of "Damn you, England." It was a statement that sought to actively construct a dissenting stance against conformist affirmations of the...

We learn later on that she is ultimately going to have an affair with Jimmy, and after she tells him that Allison is pregnant, she also receives the wrath of him which is received with a...

Let us remember that this play is famous for its depiction of the iconic angry young man, a character which became a feature of such plays and works emerging from around this time. When we consider...

I think that one way in which we can find the theme of Osborne's work relevant to modern times is because there is not merely one theme that applies, but multiple themes from the work that have...

At least in its outward message, Osborne's approach toward women does not come off well by modern standards and even by the standards of his own time, the 1950s. It would be difficult to make a...

The effects of World War II are apparent on the characters in Look Back in Anger. Jimmy Porter is a cynical character who voices the feeling of the age. He tries to remind his friend Cliff Lewis...

Writers use the idea of a foil as a way to highlight the flaws in one character by contrasting the differences between them. In John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Cliff is clearly a foil for Jimmy...

In a stylistic manner, yes. The play Look Back in Anger , by John Osborne, attempts to break free from the former generation of playwrights prior to the 1950's. During that era, playwrights had a...

How the characters in Look Back in Anger influence each other is a very interesting question. Some critics might argue that part of the existential dilemma of the play is that they don't influence...

Jimmy, the angry young man of Look Back in Anger (1958) by John Osborne, is angry because of death, and because of helplessness in the face of death. He states that he became angry while watching...

Osborne's work depicts how there is a frustration and anger within the younger generation because of the lack of fulfilled promises. With the ending of the war, there seemed to be a feeling in...

The relationship between Jimmy and Alison Porter in Look Back in Anger is highly dysfunctional and abusive. Jimmy is the original "angry young man" of the realist school of British theater known as...

The ending of Look Back In Anger has generated a good deal of critical controversy over the years. For some critics, the ending feels somehow tacked on; an artificially sentimental final scene in a...

I think that Osborne depicts Jimmy as having moments where he is sadistic. I don't think that he can be seen as a pure sadist because he does recognize that his love with Alison is, at its core,...

Look Back in Anger introduced impassioned and controversial commentary of modern society onto the British stage. John Osbourne's play features a highly unlikeable, angry protagonist in the verbose...

One can answer your question partly by recognizing that, in the 60 years since Look Back in Anger premiered, our ideas on what actually constitutes masculinity have changed. Jimmy Porter seems...

The various symbols are used throughout the play to highlight what Jimmy Porter sees as his stultifying existence in 1950s Britain. One such symbol is the broadsheet newspaper, which symbolizes...

Jimmy regularly takes out his frustration on his long-suffering wife, Alison. He subjects her to regular bouts of verbal abuse, creating a deeply unpleasant domestic atmosphere from which Alison...

Jimmy Porter's anger stems from feeling alienated and helpless in a rigid class system. The real power and opportunities are for those people who were born into money and have the right family...

In the play 'Look Back in Anger' by John Osborne, the character named Jimmy is very complicated. Psychologically, the most obvious trait of his personality and the one with which he has 'issues' is...

Look Back in Anger by John Osborne is primarily a commentary on the social, economic, and political situation in England, not Europe as a whole. Unlike the cosmopolitan modernists, the Angry Young...

Though John Osborne's play represented a new level of realism, occurring during the same period as Tennessee Williams's and Arthur Miller's work in the U.S., much of Look Back in Anger can be seen...

The aim of the play is to show the way in which the closed and stratified British class system creates anger in working-class people like Jimmy Porter. Though Jimmy is an intellectual with a...

John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger is one of the seminal works in a movement sometimes called the "Angry Young Men" or, informally, the "Angries". This group arose in the 1950s in Britain, just...

I actually grew up in the Midlands, believe it or not! What is interesting about the Midlands as an area of the UK is that it is considered to be a location of the rising middle classes, which we...