SOURCE: Sierz, Aleks. “John Osborne and the Myth of Anger.” New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 46 (May 1996): 136-46.

[In the following essay, Sierz investigates how Look Back in Anger became an iconic work.]

The people I should like to contact—if I knew how—aren't likely to be reading this book anyway. If they have ever heard of me, it is only as a rather odd-looking ‘angry young man’.

—John Osborne, “They Call It Cricket”

When John Osborne died on Christmas Eve 1994, The Guardian, along with other newspapers, reported the event on its front page. Under the headline ‘John Osborne, founding “angry young man”, dies aged 65’, the report emphasized the two things that readers were expected to know about Osborne: that he was ‘the original angry young man’ and that he was ‘best known for Look Back in Anger, the original kitchen sink drama’.¹ Osborne remains an iconic figure, as much a cultural symbol of the 1950s as James Dean or Marlon Brando.

Our perception of 1956, the year Look Back in Anger was first produced, has been completely colonized by the myth of anger, though few people much under the age of sixty can have a first hand memory of the event. As early as 1958, Kenneth Allsop had already rushed into print with The Angry Decade, though a more accurate title would have been ‘The Angry Eighteen Months’.

By 1969, the extent to which Osborne's first success had become a potent symbol was underlined by Simon Trussler. In The Plays of John Osborne, he opens the chapter on Look Back in Anger by saying that it is ‘at once a play and a myth’. Pointing out that ‘its name and its supposed theme are recognized instantly by many more people than have ever seen a production or read a script’, Trussler observes that ‘it is not altogether possible or even desirable to separate the resultant myth from the reality. A good play, like any major work of art, accretes associations and spawns its own canon of critical commonplaces’.²

But what does it mean for a cultural artefact thus to have become a myth? There are two ways of looking at modern myth: the mythophobic and the mythophilic. The first uses the debunking approach, usually seeing myth as a ‘media event’. In Harry Ritchie's account, for example, the Angry Young Men were a hype ‘invented by the media’, which grew as ‘the great publicity of the myth of the Angry Young Men actually created the reality the writers were supposed to be reflecting’.

For mythophobes, myth and reality don't mix. Ritchie's strength lies in his meticulous account of what happened; his weakness is his superficial understanding of how myth works. Much of the fuss about anger, he claims, ‘could have been avoided if Osborne had chosen a different title for his play’.³ But, as the title page of the manuscript clearly shows, out of the seven titles that Osborne wrote down, six are variations on the theme of anger: Farewell to Anger, Angry Man, Man in a Rage, Close the Cage Behind You, My Blood Is a Mile High—and Look Back in Anger. For its author, the play's theme was anger. Remembering that the Christian apologist Leslie Paul had used Angry Young Man as the title of his autobiography in 1951, it is clear that the idea of anger was not Osborne's alone—it was in the air, a sign of the times.⁴

The other way of looking at myth is mythophilic, the pleasure being to tease out meaning from cultural icons. In Robert Hewison's approach, for example, ‘myths are imaginative versions of truth’—cultural myth a ‘combination of historical truths and popular distortion’. What matters is not the literal truth, but the symbolic resonance. For Hewison, 1956 was the ‘first moment of history after the Second World War about which there is anything like a persistent myth’.

But why do myths persist? Hewison sees how they play a vital social role: in his description of the discontented intellectuals of the mid-1950s, he says, ‘What was needed was a myth, and in 1956 there appeared the myth of the Angry Young Man’.⁵ If the strength of the mythophilic school is that it shows how myth answers a social need, its weakness is that it tends to accept a myth's politics at face value.

And while the mythophobes point out that the opening night of Look Back in Anger on 8 May 1956 was a rather dull evening, the myth-makers see it as an historic moment. For example, in Anger and After, the first standard text about the new wave in postwar British theatre, John Russell Taylor turns a quiet night at the theatre into an explosive occasion: ‘If ever a revolution began with one explosion it was this.’

ORIGINS OF THE MYTH

Taylor's enthusiasm, expressed through an insistent use of the metaphor of revolution, reminds us that myths answer emotional needs. While those who were undoubtedly there remember the opening night as quiet, the many hundreds who claim to have attended describe it as a momentous occasion.⁶ Yet few have asked the question: why was the metaphor of revolution such a vital ingredient in the myth of anger?

Whether mythophobe or mythophile, all commentators look back to the first production of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court as the cauldron in which the myth of anger was cooked up. From the brash imperative of its title to the symbolism of its ironing board and jazz trumpet, it is a play teeming with ingredients for myth-making. What holds them all together is the play's emotionality. Categorized at the time by Allsop as an ‘emotionalist’, Osborne not only explored feelings—he flung them at the audience. Lord Harewood, a member of the Royal Court board, remembers lending the play's text to a friend who protested: ‘People won't stand for being shouted at like that, it's not what they go to the theatre for.’

While this may have been perfectly true of Aunt Edna's audiences, the English Stage Company's George Devine was counting on a different public—one for whom Jimmy Porter's in-your-face emotionality struck an immediate chord. On the first night, Kenneth Tynan recognized in the play's lead character a representative of all those who ‘deplore the tyranny of “good taste” and refuse to accept “emotional” as a term of abuse’. And by January 1957, Osborne was making the link between emotion and protest explicit when he mocked the ‘emotion snobs who believe that protest is vulgar’.⁷ Though derided by some critics as incoherent, Jimmy's emotionality was one of the play's strengths. In terms of myth, it sent a signal from the stage to the gallery.

Emotionality in Look Back in Anger is mainly expressed through Jimmy's tirades. In ‘language riding on a high emotional charge’, Osborne created a myth of authentic feeling. Undergraduate in style, aggressively witty, revelling in their wordiness, repetition and exaggeration, Jimmy's fulminations are symbolic of the wider cultural conflict between idealized passion and repressive conformity. Often on ‘the point of breaking into a public rhetorical speech’, his eloquence also represents a fiction of the authentic spoken vernacular. But, contrary to received wisdom, it is ‘the voice of the rebel middle class for all its plebeian pretensions’.⁸

While no one in real life speaks like Jimmy does, his language works at the level of fantasy: ‘Thousands of people wanted to feel that, like Jimmy, they were full of febrile energy and immune to endemic complacency.’ To an audience conscious of stultifying conventions, Jimmy says out loud what Everyman secretly longs to tell his wife or mother-in-law. Thus, Osborne's oft-quoted intention of giving ‘lessons in feeling’ relies on the therapeutic device of wish-fulfilment.

An apocryphal story emphasizes this point: ‘A young Australian painter brought up in a remote mining community tells me that Porter's sardonic quotations from the Sunday papers at the start of the play gripped his attention instantly, because they expressed feelings which he had long been disturbed by himself. … What he found in Osborne was a kind of safety valve.’ Allsop goes further. Because many of us secretly share Jimmy's sadism, self-righteousness, and sentimentality,

it was a great conscience-spree to see them acted out before our eyes in the most tearaway fashion imaginable. … With Jimmy up there on stage saying and doing it all for us, we all came away feeling winged-ankled, purged of a great ballast of guilt.⁹

What enables the myth of anger to come alive is the audience's profound need for it.

HERO AND ANTI-HERO, MYTH AND ANTI-MYTH

It is the job of the cult anti-hero not only to express social anxieties but to cure them at the level of fiction. And so, while Osborne claimed that his play was not a vehicle for a message, it is clear that Jimmy is the message. What spectators take away from the play is not its literary allusions, but the image of Jimmy, whether ranting or reading, playing the fool or stricken with pain. Those who identified with him, loved the play; those who didn't, hated it.

Compared to theatrical heroes such as Terence Rattigan's tight-lipped Freddy, John Whiting's Rupert Forster, or T. S. Eliot's spiritually challenged Lord Monchensey, Jimmy is down-to-earth, angry, and alienated. Central to his persona is the ‘unexamined assumption that working-class people are more real than others because they suffer more’. Though capable of flights of eloquence, it was thus Jimmy who first ‘broke up the death mask of loftiness with which previous writers had attempted to disguise their emotions’.¹⁰

Whether Jimmy is labelled a hero, antihero, or folk hero doesn't matter. What is important for the growth of myth is not just that Jimmy mirrors what his audiences were, but that he suggests so forcefully what they might wish to become. Myth not only expresses needs—it also articulates aspirations.

Most good plays embody more than one myth. Though Jimmy's alienation—his feeling of being out of place, his idealizing of the past, his use of memory as a defence against meaninglessness—drives the play along, none of this happens in a vacuum. What gives Osborne's portrait of the individual its power is that it also portrays a national malaise. Jimmy's personal way of looking back is congruent with his country's way of looking back. Both share assumptions about explaining current woes by contrasting them with an idealized past. And not only is the play's essential Englishness implicit in the structure of its main situations, it is also explicit in its basic belief that literature can change the world. Look Back in Anger became the most symbolic play of its decade not because it was the profoundest, but because it was the most English.

This quality, which George Steiner called ‘deliberate parochialism’, was remarked by foreign critics. Thus, Harold Clurman thought Americans might find Jimmy's anger ‘a little difficult to understand’, while Guy Dumur, commenting on the 1958 French version, asked whether ‘the boredom of the English Sunday, the colonel back from India, and so on—can they be translated into French?’

If the play's themes are English, so too is its idiom—especially its concern with registers of class. Clurman pointed out that the English understand the anger ‘because the jitters which rack Jimmy, though out of proportion to the facts within the play, are in the very air the Englishman breathes’.¹¹ Or in the very myths the English believe in.

What Osborne typically does is to oppose the dominant myths of his day with their repressed opposites. Compared to Colonel Redfern's idea of two people marrying for love—which assumes love is an altruistic emotion—Jimmy embodies the idea that marriage is a battle between two animals, which assumes that you can only be honest by being hurtful. Both myths are romantic. And, as in the sex war, so in the class struggle, Look Back in Anger pits the idea of commitment—which assumes society can be changed by doing something—against the feeling of disillusionment, which provides an alibi for doing nothing.

Two other images pervade the play: one is Alison silently ironing (she is made to find meaning through humiliation); the other is Jimmy talking himself into a corner (he is made to seek truth through masochism). Within a paradigm defined by the tension between conformity and transgression, no solutions are offered. The play is fertile ground for myth because it is fuelled by this tension between opposites.

As well as thematic tensions, Look Back in Anger also has a circularity of plot. If, in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, nothing happens twice, ‘then in Look Back in Anger nothing can be said to happen three times’.¹² Unable to do anything about their lives, the characters constantly complain about the boredom of a life in which nothing changes.

Ironically, it may be this absence of a myth of change at the heart of the play which allowed it to be seen less as a story about a troubled marriage and more as a play about society. The politics implied by this ‘original kitchen sink drama’ centre not only on its gestures of negation, but are also implied by its pervasive sense of powerlessness. With an ending that emphasizes irresolution and illusion, the play both reflected and legitimated the political contradictions of its admirers.

The much-vaunted realism of Look Back in Anger has less to do with its set—it is typical of myth that the ‘original kitchen sink drama’ takes place in an attic without a sink—and more with the fact that audiences were prepared to recognize Jimmy as a real person. The first sign of the play's escape from the confines of fiction and into the bracing air of cultural mythology was Ken Tynan's Observer review. Though Harold Hobson's review in the Sunday Times was more perceptive about the play, Tynan's was a much better myth-making exercise.

THE HERO AS REAL PERSON

Using a barrage of rhetorical devices, Tynan gives Jimmy opinions about flogging, lynching, and colonialism—subjects that don't appear in the play. And, after savaging those who doubted its excellence, he turns Jimmy's ambiguities into his own point of view, praising the ‘drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of “official” attitudes, the surreal sense of humour … the casual promiscuity’.¹³

There is no better list of what liberal intellectuals wanted from a radical play in the mid-1950s. The need to see Look Back in Anger in these terms blinded many not only to its traditional character, but to the fact that one of its main subjects is a marriage. Instead, the play grows rapidly as a myth—mainly because Osborne and Jimmy, author and creation, soon became one in the public mind.

The ‘sense of naked honesty that came from the identification between author and protagonist’ gave a powerful boost to the image of authenticity at the heart of the play.¹⁴ This image gained further strength from its associations in English culture. Since JO and JP are both truth-tellers, they remind us of other artists of authenticity, such as F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence. Myth thus unites an idealized tradition with a new icon of rebellion, the Angry Young Man.

Whether or not it was George Fearon, the Royal Court's press officer, who, in despair at publicizing the play, coined the phrase ‘Angry Young Man’ does not matter. The significant thing is that Osborne was not only identified with an anti-heroic persona, but was also lumped together with other ‘dissentient’ writers, such as Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Colin Wilson, to form a composite character. Such apparently casual mixing produced a compelling myth, whose most surprising asset was Osborne himself. His idea of the authentic artist was a man who spouted aggressive opinions on every subject under the sun—an early example of the rentaquote personality.

THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN AS SYMBOL

As a potent symbol, the figure of the Angry Young Man spoke volumes about popular culture. Its connotations are fertile with meaning. Anger, at a time of buttoned-up emotions and stiff upper lips, meant losing your cool. A very non-U feeling, anger signified behaving badly, scandal, foreignness, threat: in a word, otherness. As English culture's repressed Other, anger was seen as provincial rather than metropolitan, rough rather than well-spoken, predatory rather than safe— nd dissatisfied rather than complacent.

What does the Young in AYM connote? At a time when sociology was coming up with new ways of discussing the youth question, the AYM became a potent metaphor for youth. Just as critics were divided on Jimmy's character—whether it personified deviance or hope—so what you felt about the AYM depended on what you felt about youth. In the 1950s, the quarrel between generations was widely seen as newly nihilistic. In George Steiner's words: ‘The mumble of the drop-out, the “fuck-off” of the beatnik, the silence of the teenager in the enemy house of his parents, are meant to destroy.’

Newly visible, the teenager was both a problem and a market opportunity—anything that was sold as ‘new’ had now to be dressed up as ‘young’. And by 1959 Colin MacInnes had glimpsed a changed social landscape:

The ‘two nations’ of our society may perhaps no longer be those of the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ (or, to use old-fashioned terms, the ‘upper’ and ‘working’ classes), but those of teenagers on the one hand and, on the other, all those who have assumed the burdens of adult responsibility.¹⁵

Though no longer teenagers, the Jimmy Porters and Lucky Jims were symbols of negative youth. Often they were equated with the teddy boys. Typical of such assumptions was Tynan's equation of youth and radicalism—he believed that everyone between the ages of 20 and 30 would like Look Back in Anger.

What does the Man in AYM connote? At a time when women (and Alison is a good example) were often metaphors for suffering and symbols of victimization, men were perceived as active subjects—even if the activity led nowhere. Masculinity equalled freedom and mobility. For men, sex meant aggressive conquest rather than pleasurable languor. It was also a method of social climbing: Look Back in Anger is typical of its decade in that the class war was fought in the bedroom—an example of what Anthony Burgess called ‘hypergamy’, meaning marriage by a man into a social class higher than his own.

It is also significant that the play's classic ‘There aren't any good, brave causes left’ speech begins: ‘Why, why, why, why do we let these women bleed us to death?’ First seen as an attack on society, the play's plot is actually based on the degradation of women. As far as Osborne is concerned, his bad boy image at the time of Suez had less to do with politics than with misogyny—in the Daily Mail, for example, he blustered: ‘What's gone wrong with Women?’¹⁶ Whether Osborne's misogyny was due to homosexual ambivalence, or to a wider anxiety about maleness in a society where roles were starting to be questioned, is immaterial. Anger remained man's business.

Although the Angry Young Man was partly a media hype, he was mainly a much-needed myth who both summed up a problematic present and suggested ways of dealing with it. He could both attack society and prove that you could succeed in it. He was both English and anti-English. As the ‘educated thug’, he had to resolve the tension between the image of success held out to the majority and the actual attainment of success by a mere minority—he had to personify not only the scholarship boy, but other youth as well.

Allegedly a product of the 1944 Education Act, the AYM exemplified the growing vogue for sociological explanation. Vaguely lower class, he represented social mobility; vaguely lefty, he promised change. A rebel without a cause, he implied that to be politically aware meant being politically disengaged. More than the sum of his parts, the AYM gave the impression that individuals could be part of a movement for change simply by being honest. It was the job of the myth of anger to resolve such contradictions.

THE METAPHOR OF REVOLUTION

Because myth answers contradictory needs, it is rarely coherent. While the Angry Young Man was rather apolitical, he has become associated in our cultural memory with changes that were highly politicized. He was both an icon of nihilism and part of a project of constructive reform. As such, he needed the metaphor of revolution.

John Russell Taylor may have described the new wave drama as a revolution more insistently than others, but his was by no means a lone voice. In January 1957, Tynan claimed he heard ‘the distinct sound of barricades’ being erected at the Royal Court. In 1958 Allsop called Osborne, Amis, and Wilson ‘The Three Musketeers of the revolutionary army’. Just a year later, Lindsay Anderson was agreeing with Osborne that a ‘revolution’ in drama had taken place, and Hobson was equally hyperbolic: Look Back in Anger was ‘praised as a call to something like revolution, and the overthrow of all accepted values’. Even those who, like Christopher Booker, looked askance at the changes, agreed they were a ‘revolution’.¹⁷

Of course, the idea of revolution takes many shapes. For Martin Banham, Look Back in Anger, the ‘first manifestation of a dramatic revolution’, was ‘not a revolution in form but rather one of content’. Like Taylor, Ronald Hayman notes that, though sudden, ‘it obviously wasn't a revolution that happened overnight’. For Booker, there was irony in the fact that ‘the “revolution for which Tynan, Anderson, and so many of the New Oxford Group had eagerly been waiting, was now taking place almost faster than they could take it in’.¹⁸ Although the metaphor of revolution is a figure of speech and thus not to be taken literally, it all powerfully conditions the way we think about what happened in 1956.

Calling Look Back in Anger a revolution implies it was a sudden overnight success that changed everything. As John Russell Taylor announced: ‘Then, on 8 May 1956, came the revolution.’¹⁹ Actually the play took months to become a success. That doesn't mean that a cultural revolution didn't happen, but it does show how a metaphor both expresses wishful thinking and smuggles in often unwarranted assumptions under the cloak of the self-evident. When the metaphor of revolution is linked with natural phenomena such as an eruption, earthquake, explosion, or new wave, a social event is legitimated by being characterized as natural.

To call a cultural event a revolution is to give it various moral connotations. Psychologically, revolution implies decisive rupture, a point of no return. By assuming that revolutionaries are better people and have a truer picture of reality, it suggests that good triumphs over evil. Politically, a just revolution is left-wing, with the assumption that what went before was a corrupt ancien régime which could not be reformed but which had to be swept away.

When revolutions are seen as natural they are not only good but necessary: is Crane Brinton's classic study (which incidentally mentions Colin Wilson's The Outside in its preface), revolution is a ‘fever’ which ‘burns up wicked germs’.²⁰ The myth of cultural revolution thus both expresses a longing for a moral utopia and obscures the messy reality of what actually happened.

Perhaps the most confusing illusion in the myth of anger was the claim that changes in theatre had working-class support. For Tynan, Jimmy was ‘a working-class hero’. In 1969, Hayman imagined that ‘the working-classes that had been banging at the door [of British theatre] for so long have been let in’. Being working class was assumed to guarantee both personal authenticity and artistic integrity. ‘Osborne’, as Mary McCarthy observed, ‘is a socialist who prefers working-class people to people who have never seen a flat with an outside toilet’ because ‘they are more real’.²¹

Often patronising, such commonplaces gave a moral value to being ‘working class’ which obscured the true nature of cultural change. Using strong metaphors such as revolution may have resulted from the justifiable desire to equate what happens in culture with what happens in politics, but it sometimes confused the Royal Court with the Winter Palace.

THE NARRATIVE OF REVOLUTION

Just as the rhetoric of 1956 involved necessary simplifications—by means of which the winners in a cultural struggle colonized our perception of events—so the metaphor of revolution was usually embedded in a narrative which gave a structure to the myth of anger. Three of these stories are worth considering.

The first is the narrative of the three-pronged attack. Here the Loamshire play comes under assault from three directions: from Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Brecht's Berliner Ensemble (a necessary continental ally). When the dust settles, good theatre is seen as composed of three camps: Angry (young working-class rebels finding their voices in naturalistic settings); Absurd (underdog characters in empty landscapes making sense of a Godless world); and Brechtian (didactic dramas using alienation effects to teach us how to take sides).

Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, and John Arden are conscripted into these respective categories; then David Mercer, Tom Stoppard and Edward Bond. In some versions, the ‘three-pronged suburban assault’ is geographic rather than stylistic, coming from the west (Royal Court), the City (Bernard Miles's recently opened Mermaid), and the east (Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in Stratford).²²

The second narrative is that of the revolution betrayed. Exiled by the Stalins of subsidy, the Trotskys represent the true radicals. Here Littlewood's Theatre Workshop is cast as the socialists who stayed in touch with the people. Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, and the group project Oh What a Lovely War! rewrite the theatrical agenda. Marginalized by a compromised mainstream, this camp is swelled by renegades such as Arden and John McGrath. Though starved of resources, the true revolutionaries retain a purity of practice.

The third narrative is that of the revolution recuperated. This claims that very little was changed by the revolt. Most people found out about kitchen-sink dramas and characters living in dustbins by hearsay, through cartoons and clichés in the media. For this mass audience, what mattered was the ability of ‘middle-class’ domestic comedy to absorb elements of radical theatre. Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Bennett, and Michael Frayn acclimatized mainstream audiences to new ideas.

And so Anger comes to mean star actors wrestling with their consciences (Albert Finney in Osborne's Luther); alienation effects turn into ironic narrators (Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons), and epic into lavish spectacle (Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun). What ‘finally managed to make sense of all that Beckettian dustbin business’ turns out to be Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.²³

None of these narratives is wrong, but each is a myth which depends on all sorts of unarticulated assumptions. They are important not only because they condense many meanings into a memorable story, but also because they express a profound desire for change. And since changes in British theatre were neither as rapid nor as complete as many radicals wanted, it was often easier to elaborate on the myth than to alter the theatre system further.

It would be wrong to assume that the myth of a revolution in drama went completely unchallenged. In 1960 Ronald Duncan wrote, ‘It is true that proletarian drama is now more fashionable, but a change in fashion should not be confused with a revolution in taste.’ Looking back on 1958, Charles Marowitz says, ‘I accepted the fictitious “war situation” between the Angries and the Establishment and didn't realise until much later that each was as unreal as the other’.

Yet in Encore magazine ‘readers were constantly being urged to run to the barricades, store up ammunition, invade enemy territory’. And, for some, such symbolic images have exerted their spell for almost forty years: Keith Baxter still remembers how, in the late 1950s, ‘British theatre was in revolution. If critic Kenneth Tynan was its bugle, the centre of operations was in Sloane Square where director George Devine was summoning up the tumbrels.’²⁴

Revolutions need manifestos, and the nearest thing to a manifesto for anger was Declaration, which was published in 1957 and includes essays by Osborne, Tynan, and Anderson. Within three months, it had sold 25,000 copies. Clearly a new audience was buying into the myth of anger. And what was important about them was not their youth, class, nor education—what distinguished them was their style consciousness. The first beneficiaries of the post-war boom, they began to assert their identity not only through what they wore (teddy boy or beatnik clothes) but through the culture they consumed.

Theatre in the late 1950s became important because it offered such social groups a series of exciting images of revolt. In fact, the success of Look Back in Anger owed everything to a new audience—one which hadn't heard about the play by reading Tynan's ecstatic review, but which bought tickets only after an extract had been broadcast on television.

Anecdotal evidence of these changes includes Michael Halifax's memory of the Royal Court's ‘completely new audience’: ‘After the TV extract, all these people started arriving. People you never see in theatres.’ Other observers offer glimpses of their cultural style. Derek Granger saw them as ‘fisher-sweatered noctambules from Espressoland’, while George Melly remembers ‘Fair Isle-jerseyed suburbanites and battle-dressed art students’. And, in warmer weather, they struck Tynan as ‘young people in flimsy dresses and open-necked shirts’ who spoke ‘a vivid vernacular made up of Hollywood, space fiction, and local dialect’.²⁵

CLASS, CULTURE, AND POLITICS

Just as style is an outer badge of identity, so myth is an inner token of esteem. Whatever its intellectual inconsistencies, the myth of anger helped place all who believed in it.

First, it located them in their decade. ‘Not one of us’, says Jeff Nuttall, ‘had any serious political preoccupation’, but all had a ‘crackling certainty of Now’.²⁶ After the misery of post-war austerity, the idea of anger offered the excitement of risk. In a Now where the new heaven of consumer pleasure clashed with the new hell of atomic warfare, English angst stressed both fear and anger. Of the two, anger helped establish identity—it made people take sides.

In class terms, anger appealed less to secure social groups and more to the newly mobilized lower-middle class, unsure of its bearings. Osborne's autobiography is a good example of the uncertainties experienced in an age of rapid social change. Upward mobility needed cultural lodestars. Anger focused resentment not on class society as such but on some of its ‘phoney’ values.

Attacks on old-fashioned mores could go hand-in-hand with sympathy for upper middle-class individuals—such as Look Back in Anger's Colonel Redfern. Thus, Osborne's nostalgia for the Edwardian age arose because the past represented stability, while the 1950s felt insecure. Like the Movement poets before them, the angries suffered ‘an uneasy combination of class-consciousness and acceptance of class division’. For some, ‘the anger of the fifties was as often a rage of frustration at the lack of access to a limited number of privileges, as passionate moral outrage at the caution and spiritlessness of the age’. Wesker puts it more strongly: ‘I was never an angry young man. … We were all very happy young men and women. … Discovered, paid, applauded, made internationally famous overnight!’²⁷

In cultural terms, then, anger offered an alternative to modernism, which was often seen as elitist, foreign, difficult, or amoral. Despite the strong presence of continental drama on the margins, it was anger—expressed through naturalism—that won the mainstream. For audiences, one way of developing a secure identity was to value ‘kitchen-sink’ realism and to reject upper-class aloofness, avant-garde modernism, and homosexual sensibility.

Not only was naturalism populist, it also allowed a minority interest—theatre—to join hands with television, films, and novels. One result was the pose of the ‘intellectual teddy boy’—philistine, provincial, provocative. Could Osborne's misogyny also be interpreted as an aspect of this anti-Establishment posture?²⁸ In political terms, anger was negative, representing more a coming to terms with the Butskellite era than a coherent project of change. The ‘dissentience’ of the 1950s wanted ‘not so much to rebel against the old order of authority and standards, but to refuse to vote for it’.

If the myth of anger expressed the moment between the conformism of the early 1950s and the commitment of the late 1950s, it was a time when the absence of ‘good, brave causes’ didn't prevent you being self-righteous. As David Marquand records,

‘Look Back in Anger’, one prominent university left-winger shouted at me recently, his voice almost shaking with passion, ‘is a more important political document than anything the Labour Party has said since 1951.’²⁹

But what made anger so memorable was that gradual cultural change collided with two external events that suddenly aroused political passions: Suez and Hungary.

REVOLT INTO STYLE

Despite the mythophobes, ‘May 1956 has become a moment of mythic significance’.³⁰ What Osborne's writing expressed about the 1950s was the decade's contradictory mix of discontent and nostalgia. Happy to promote the image of the angry young artist, he became one of the first literary pop stars—and, despite his disclaimers about media hype, he loved it. With a talent to accuse and arouse, he pushed theatre into the spotlight of cultural myth-making.

Seen today, Look Back in Anger seems more long-winded and less radical than its reputation suggests. More than ever prone to be a one-man show, the irony is that the more charismatic the lead actor, the more unbalanced the play. Another irony is that, having successfully changed public taste, Osborne's Jimmy is today more than ever likely to appear self-indulgent and melodramatic.

A further consequence of the success of the myth of anger was that it narrowed the options for the actor playing the lead. In a note to Déjàvu (his play of 1991 that in true postmodern fashion revisits the original Look Back in Anger), Osborne complained that incarnations of Jimmy were ‘often strident and frequently dull’. Only Kenneth Branagh's mild delivery satisfied his own requirement that Jimmy be a ‘comic character’ with an ‘inescapable melancholy’.³¹

The closer you look at the class politics of the myth of anger, the shakier its underlying assumptions are. Already, in 1957, David Watt saw through the prole cred of Look Back in Anger: ‘The ordinary working man was just as likely to want to take a strap to Jimmy Porter as any retired Brigadier.’ Osborne, realized Allsop, tended to be ‘romantic and sentimental about Ordinary People’.

At worst, says John McGrath, the new drama was ‘no more than the elaboration of a theatrical technique for turning authentic working-class experience into satisfying thrills for the bourgeoisie’—and he notes that in a competitive profession people used any means, even ‘pretending to be more working class than they really were’, to get to the top. Above all, Wesker questions a central tenet of received wisdom about anger: ‘I remember writing fairly early on articles saying that this was not a theatrical revolution.’³²

Perhaps the most damning criticism of all appeared in the Parisian magazine Internationale Situationniste in 1958. Just as Allsop was describing how the ‘old class system’ was simply ‘under new management’, the situationists pointed out that English culture was thirty years behind the times, condemning the Angry Young Men as ‘particularly reactionary in their attribution of a privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature’.³³ Thus the French radicals attacked one of the central assumptions on which the myth of anger thrived—that culture could be as radical as politics.

The audience for the new drama is usually characterized as being young, lower middle-class, and left-liberal. For this group, the myth of anger offered a radical identity which helped them cope with the insecurity of rapid social change. It glamorized the politics of negation and provided a new role model. It united on a symbolic level what reality kept apart: left-liberals might never meet a teddy boy, but a myth could bring them together on the level of fiction. The myth of anger offered both the hope of change and the consolation of a secure identity. Myth explained chaotic events, gave heart to confrontation, and legitimized new feelings. Its function was partly to acclimatize people to social change and partly to push for more.

But the most insidious trap for radical theatre was ‘a tendency to attract like-minded audiences, who instead of being challenged were able to congratulate themselves’. While Stuart Hall and Wesker debated whether the ‘new spirit’ of commitment after Suez was just a ‘literary and aesthetic experience’, a fad, it remained easier to change cultural style than to alter social conditions.³⁴ Audiences might flatter themselves by thinking that ‘working-class’ drama could help change society, but all it did was change drama. Cultural images of the working class were a place where the middle class worked out its ideas. On the other side of town, working-class life followed completely different agendas.

If we cannot avoid using myth when we look at the past, we can at least be conscious of what a myth means—and what its hidden assumptions are. The myth of anger is now central to the way we remember the 1950s, not only because it gives a vivid image of the origins of post-war culture but because it also provides a blueprint for change. If, in the end, such change was mainly a matter of style, then perhaps style too has a role to play in altering social conditions.

Notes

1. Lawrence Donegan, The Guardian, 27 December 1994, p. 1.

2. Simon Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne: an Assessment (Gollancz, 1969), p. 40.

3. Harry Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England 1950-59 (Faber, 1988), p. 207-8, 205, 211, see also p. 31-2.

4. Kenneth Allsop makes a similar point: ‘It would have been surprising if such an obvious grouping of ordinary words had not been used before 8 May 1956.’ See The Angry Decade: a Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the 1950s (Peter Owen, 1958), p. 11. For the play's title page see John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman: an Autobiography, Vol. II, 1955-66 (Faber, 1991), Illustration 2.

5. Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War (Methuen, 1988), p. 151, 148, xv-xvi. The 1950s were a good time for mythographers: Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay on ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ was published in 1955 and Roland Barthes's Mythologies in 1956.

6. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After: a Guide to the New British Drama (Eyre Methuen, 1969), p. 9, 14, 17, 28, 33; Ritchie, Success Stories, p. 126; Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, p. 20.

7. Harewood, quoted in Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 180; Kenneth Tynan, A View of the English Stage 1944-65 (Methuen, 1975); p. 178; Osborne, quoted in Martin Banham, Osborne (Oliver and Boyd, 1969), p. 8.

8. Laurence Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama (Faber, 1962), p. 30; Gareth Lloyd Evans, The Language of Modern Drama (Dent, 1977), p. 106-7; Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (Paladin, 1970), p. 43.

9. Ronald Hayman, British Theatre since 1955: a Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 10; John Osborne, ‘Some Call It Cricket’, in Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration (MacGibbon and Kee), 1957), p. 65; Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama, p. 101; Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 111.

10. Gãmini Salgãdo, English Drama: a Critical Introduction (Edward Arnold, 1980), p. 193; John Elsom, Post-War British Theatre (Routledge, 1979), p. 74, 80.

11. Quoted in John Russell Taylor, ed., John Osborne, ‘Look Back in Anger: a Casebook’ (Macmillan, 1968), p. 186, 47, 169-70, 174.

12. John Bull, Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Mainstream Theatre (Macmillan, 1994), p. 50.

13. Tynan, View, p. 178, 199, 271.

14. Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 103.

15. Steiner, in notes to Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim: with an Introduction by the Author (Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), p. 225; Colin MacInnes, ‘A Taste of Reality’, Encounter, No. 67 (April 1959), p. 66.

16. Burgess, in Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 218; Osborne, in Ritchie, Success Stories, p. 128.

17. Tynan, View, p. 199; Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 8; Anderson, quoted in Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama, p. 176; Harold Hobson, Theatre in Britain: a Personal View (Phaidon, 1984), p. 188; Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (Pimlico, 1992), p. 43, 80, and passim.

18. Banham, Osborne, p. 1, 10, 104; Hayman, John Osborne (Heineman, 1969), p. 3; Booker, Neophiliacs, p. 122, 98.

19. Taylor, Anger and After, p. 28.

20. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (Vintage, 1965, preface 1956), p. 16-20.

21. Tynan, View, p. 271; Hayman, Osborne, p. 1; Mary McCarthy, Sights and Spectacles 1937-58 (Heinemann, 1959), p. 196.

22. Martin Priestman, ‘A Critical Stage: Drama in the 1960s’, in Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed, eds., Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (Routledge, 1992), p. 118-20; Tynan, View, p. 252, 255-6.

23. Priestman, ‘Critical Stage’, p. 120.

24. Duncan, in Taylor, Casebook, p. 192; Charles Marowitz, Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: a London Theatre Notebook 1958-71 (Eyre Methuen, 1973), p. 45; Charles Marowitz et al., eds., The Encore Reader: a Chronicle of the New Drama (Methuen, 1965), p. 39; Baxter, in the Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1994.

25. Halifax, quoted in Wardle, Devine, p. 185; Granger, quoted in Hewison, In Anger, p. 170; George Melly, Revolt into Style: the Pop Arts in the Fifties and Sixties (Oxford, 1989), p. 31; Tynan, View, p. 272, and in Maschler, Declaration, p. 128.

26. Nuttall, Bomb Culture, p. 24.

27. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Methuen, 1980), p. 74-5; Hewison, In Anger, p. xi; Arnold Wesker, As Much As I Dare: an Autobiography 1932-59 (Century, 1994), p. 7.

28. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Blackwell, 1989), p. 81.

29. Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 9; Marquand, quoted in Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), p. 99.

30. Bernard Bergonzi, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and Its Background 1939-60 (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 153.

31. Lloyd-Evans, Language, p. 108-9; John Osborne, Déjàvu (Faber, 1991), p. vii.

32. Watt, in Encore Reader, p. 59; Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 99; John McGrath, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form (Methuen, 1981), p. 1-13; Wesker, in The Big Issue, 30 Jan.-5 Feb. 1995.

33. Internationale Situationniste 1953-69 (Champs Libre, Paris, reprint 1975), p. 5.

34. Alan Sinfield, ‘Theatre and Its Audiences’, in his Society and Literature 1945-70 (Holmes and Meier, 1983), p. 181; Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture, p. 260, 153, 81; Encore Reader, p. 111.