Why [Look Back in Anger] no longer generates [its early] enthusiasm is the purpose of this essay, for if we respond to Look Back in Anger at all today we do so because it is an event …, not because it is a play that sucks us into its world and compels us to accept that world on its own terms. (p. 47)

Look Back in Anger deals with a social theme; it is clearly dependent upon its dramatic antecedents (most notably a conventional plot packaged in a well-made play); and its characters are conscious of class, that is to say they are traditional rather than innovative. Yet … it introduces a new element into drama, an element of such proportions that it has been changing the form of drama (though not its substance) ever since.

I want to discuss this new element (actually, it is an old element that Osborne rediscovered), but before doing so I want to explain why the modern response to Look Back in Anger is more respectful than enthusiastic. We must first see how predictably the play rolls along without extending itself beyond the perimeters of a thousand prior well-made plays before we can truly appreciate the new element it introduces.

For our response to a play to be enthusiastic, our minds and our emotions must be engaged by what we are seeing or reading…. Although Look Back in Anger continues to engage our emotions, it fails to engage our minds. After watching or reading it, we feel dissatisfied and disappointed. There are, I think, three reasons for this intellectual failure: the play's transparent structure, its arbitrary motivations, and its bogus characterizations. (pp. 47-8)

In Look Back in Anger the transparency of its disguises is so obtrusive that we become intellectually isolated from it before it is half over. For example, a telephone call from Helena prepares us for the Act I curtain, and a telephone call from the hospital where Hugh's mother is dying prepares us for the Act II, scene 1, curtain. Moreover, Cliff's exit in Act I to buy cigarettes is unconvincing: its dramatic convenience undercuts any believability it might possess. And Cliff's exit before Jimmy's return in Act II, scene 2, is such a reversal that even Osborne feels compelled to rationalize it in a stage direction…. These disguises are so blatant that we aren't even permitted the mental satisfaction of penetrating them. (p. 48)

Seeing through a play to its structure as we do in Look Back in Anger is as disturbing as seeing a stage hand pass by an open window during performance. When the magic tricks are obvious, one feels embarrassed for and contemptuous of and bored by the magician.

Equally as unreliable in this play are the motivations of its characters. They are often as arbitrary as the French scenes are capricious. At some point, a motivation of every character is suspect. Characters have a habit of adopting one stance then another without a convincing reason, sometimes without any reason at all. (p. 49)

[Predictability] is ubiquitous in this play. Its characters don't grow: they regress, although I suppose it can be argued that regression is at least a change. (p. 51)

The major problem with Look Back in Anger is that it wants stature. Its present and passing worlds are the same, with one exception: Jimmy, Alison, Cliff, and Helena have all the Edwardian aspirations, but none of the graces. The world of this play is not so much angry as barren…. In lamenting the passage of the Edwardian world, Jimmy laments indeed the passing of his own. The Edwardian world, however, was real; even as a referent in dramatic dialogue it stands for something. But the world of Look Back in Anger stands for nothing. It is sterile. Its characters talk a lot, but they don't say anything. What this play needs is silence.

We can, I think, attribute these arbitrary motivations and opposing stances (and quite possibly the transparent structure) to the play's faulty characters. Look Back in Anger is a love story that is untrue to itself. The actual lovers in this play are Jimmy and Cliff. Alison and Helen—and Madeline—are included to make its world more universal and respectable (plays in 1956 were still censored by the Lord Chamberlain), and to give Jimmy an opportunity to show off his masculine superiority. Despite these subterfuges, however, the real love affair in this play is homosexual. When Jimmy and Cliff interact, the stage lights up with "revolutionary fire."…

This, of course, throws the play completely out of focus because the action that isn't there is really the action that's taking place, while the action that's taking place is really only a substitute for the action that isn't there. (p. 52)

Jimmy wants to create his own world, to re-order relationships: he wants Alison to be his mother and he wants Cliff to have his babies. Since this is impossible, he makes everyone suffer. The character of Jimmy Porter is so unremittingly selfish, savage, and, at last, destructive that not a shred of humanity adheres to it. Goethe remarks somewhere that "One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man." Poor Jimmy can't even be a man. For dramatic characters in realistic drama, this is fatal.

Because a genre throws its own details into relief, any failure of these details is inevitably amplified. If Jimmy Porter is to be successful, one has to care about him. And we don't. We don't care about him because his constant solipsistic rhetoric cuts off our response. When you get as much affection as Jimmy gets from his world, you have to give something in return. But he never does. He shows us no contrasts and no costs, concomitant components in a changing character. But Jimmy doesn't change. Ultimately, therefore, we don't care about him because he can't risk himself: he has no self to risk.

Why then is Look Back in Anger an important play? What makes it a landmark? The answer is paradoxical: anger. That which prevents our intellectual response to Jimmy is also the very characteristic which engages our emotions. If Look Back in Anger's link with the past is the well-made play, its link with the future is anger: vituperative, vicious, and direct. There are no contrasts within Jimmy Porter because his whole character is a contrast with the surface courtesies of his Edwardian predecessors. In that world where animosity was always dignified, "a vulgar wrangle was unknown."

Jimmy may be indirect about love, but he's eloquently explicit when angry. That much of his anger is misplaced does not diminish the impact of its being expressed. When cornered—as he is throughout the play because his sexual preference is denied expression—Jimmy sucks in his breath, relaxes that stiff upper lip that hasn't spoken a coarse word on stage since the Elizabethans, and lashes out. He takes on everyone and exhausts them all. Indeed, it is precisely because Jimmy's anger is so open that audiences and readers respond to him in spite of themselves. (pp. 53-4)

Look Back in Anger is already an anachronism. But it is also a landmark. And what it marks, namely that anger is a viable dramatic alternative to repression, is worth celebrating. Look Back in Anger's greatest achievement is its emancipation of drama from the restrictions of past generations. Just when we expected emotional outbursts in the theatre to be forever off stage or in impeccably good taste, this play crept upon us, leaving us stunned, drained, almost disbelieving. Jimmy Porter is not an "Eminent Victorian," nor was he "born out of his time". One honors him more, and the play he dominates, by calling him an angry young man. (p. 55)