SOURCE: Hinchliffe, Arnold P. “Look Back in Anger.” In John Osborne, pp. 1-25. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

[In the following essay, Hinchliffe surveys the critical reaction to Look Back in Anger.]

John James Osborne was born on 12 December 1929 in Fulham, a suburb of London. His father, Thomas Godfrey Osborne, was a commercial artist whose family came from South Wales, and his mother was Nellie Beatrice Grove. Details of his childhood and adolescence are now brilliantly recorded in the first volume of Osborne's autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981). His childhood in London was dominated by a remarkable galaxy of larger-than-life relations of whom possibly only his invalid father inspired or gave affection. The lack of love comes over very strongly, as in the phrase which he uses to describe his Grandma Osborne's smile: “a thin winter of contempt.” Osborne's use of quotations from the plays to illustrate his early life shows how personal material provided the basis for the plays. Thus his marriage to Pamela Lane is used for the description of Jimmy Porter's marriage to Alison, and Jimmy gets his surname from a cousin who tormented the young Osborne. Billy Rice owes much to Grandpa Grove, who was reputed to have spent a weekend in Brighton with Marie Lloyd! Osborne describes the difference between the two sides of the family—one loud, the other quiet—succinctly:

The Osborne Row differed from the Grove Row but they had their similarities. With the Groves at Tottenham or Harbord Street the atmosphere would be violent, even physically, and thick with accumulated melodrama … The Osborne Family Rows, in spite of the fact that they were unheedingly Christian, were centered on the related subject of money. Their disputations were on wills, testaments, entails; who had been left out, what some loved one's real intentions had been and how subsequently thwarted after death.¹

Osborne's father died in the early years of the war after spending many years in a sanatorium. What Osborne remembers about his childhood is that very little of it can be remembered with pleasure; but the excitement of the war remains. Most of the war was spent with his mother in London, where he attended state schools, but his father's charitable association, the National Advertising Benevolent Society, which had seen the family through the illnesses of both father and son, arranged for Osborne to go to boarding school in the west of England. Osborne was not particularly happy at school and when he was nearly sixteen he was expelled for striking the headmaster (who had switched off a radio playing Frank Sinatra). The Benevolent Society found him a job writing for trade journals such as Gas World and it was at this time that he bought a typewriter and started writing again. An interest in amateur dramatics led to a job as acting stage manager with a touring company and he appeared on the stage for the first time professionally as Mr. Burrells in No Room at the Inn, in 1948, at the Empire Theater, Sheffield. For the next eight years Osborne, medically unfit for National Service, was with stock companies in seaside resorts like Sidmouth and Ilfracombe, with a stint at Derby Playhouse. As Michael Billington points out:

… it was a background of low pay, poor digs, Sunday trains and cold theaters on a Monday morning. With the establishment of so many comfortable, well-subsidized reps and the virtual disappearance of the touring network, it is hard to remember that such an era ever existed. But the meticulous observer will find much of it recaptured in early Osborne.²

Osborne says that he always enjoyed acting but never took himself seriously as an actor, “and neither has anyone else.”³ He married the actress Pamela Lane in 1951, and while he was living with her on a Chelsea houseboat he took the script of Look Back in Anger to the Royal Court Theater. They were divorced in 1957 when Osborne married Mary Ure (who played Alison in London, New York, and the film version). They were divorced in 1962 and Osborne married Penelope Gilliatt, film and later drama critic of the Observer, in 1963. They separated in June 1966 and Osborne did not defend the divorce action in June 1967. In 1968 he married the actress Jill Bennett (who had been cited as corespondent in the divorce proceedings) at the Chelsea Registry Office. Osborne and Jill Bennett were divorced in 1977 and in 1978 he married Helen Dawson, formerly a journalist with the Observer, with whom he now lives in “an Edwardian magnate's house set in 23 acres of Kent.”⁴

EARLY PLAYS

Osborne claims that his first play was produced when he was seventeen and that it was “terrible.” There are, apparently, several works unperformed and unpublished as well as the two plays produced outside London before Look Back in Anger and Epitaph for George Dillon, written in collaboration with Anthony Creighton and performed after Look Back in Anger.

Osborne showed Resting Deep to Stella Linden and she advised “a short sharp lesson in Pinero” and, presumably, in collaboration with Osborne provided that lesson. The play, now called The Devil Inside Him, was performed at Huddersfield in May 1950 (and revived at the Pembroke, Croydon, in 1962 as Cry for Love by Robert Owen). The play is about a Welsh youth whom the villagers think is an idiot and his family a sex-maniac because he writes poetry, but whose talents are recognized by a visiting medical student. Unfortunately a local girl tries to pass him off as the father of her child and he feels obliged to kill her. The play was directed by Patrick Desmond and the Huddersfield Examiner detected “real dramatic instinct” behind the play.⁵

Personal Enemy, written with Anthony Creighton, was presented by the White Rose Players at Harrogate on 1 March 1955, again directed by Patrick Desmond, and seems to be Osborne's first encounter with the Lord Chamberlain. According to John Russell Taylor it is about the response of a soldier's relative when he refuses to be repatriated from Korea, but Patrick Desmond, in a letter to the Observer in 1964, about problems with the Lord Chamberlain, suggests another play:

It dealt with a McCarthy type witch hunt in Canada and the two young men accused of being “Commies” (i.e. liberals) were also smeared with the homosexual brush.⁶

However, four days before the opening night, author and director were summoned to St. James's Palace and presented with cuts that made the play “largely unintelligible.” There was no time to rewrite, resubmit, or rehearse, so the play went on. It is not surprising that the Harrogate Advertiser (5 March 1955) found the piece uneven, though H. H. Walker, theater critic of the Harrogate Herald, who knew of the Lord Chamberlain's interference, thought “they very nearly succeeded in making some sense of the piece.”⁷

THE ROYAL COURT THEATER

When Osborne submitted his script to the Royal Court Theater and became a member of the English Stage Company he joined a family which supported him and which, more importantly, he supported to the greater good of British theater. Osborne's plays in the first five years earned the Court £50,000 as compared with the Arts Council grant of £30,000. Most of Osborne's plays written in his formative years (from 1956-72) were staged there, behind the proscenium arch, and many critics have felt this to be restrictive. Osborne has conceded that with a play like The Entertainer the stage at the Court was a problem (and even more so with the “epic” plays like Luther and A Patriot for Me) but he has also pointed out that he likes “to establish a kind of remoteness between the actors and the audience, which I only like to break at certain times, and I can do that in the picture-frame stage.”⁸ More importantly, though we can only speculate on this, there seems to have been a very close and fruitful relationship between Osborne and George Devine.⁹

The facts about the English Stage Company at the Royal Court are well known.¹⁰ The absence of any theater for experimental work in London was strongly felt and by 1955 the English Stage Company, in its initial stages of formation, was ready to step in and fill the gap. They had very slim resources and originally intended to take over the Kingsway Theater, but in fact they moved into the Royal Court in Sloane Square, reviving memories of the great Vedrenne-Barker period at that same theater—two managements which aimed at a theater removed both by geography and purpose from the commercial aims of Shaftesbury Avenue.¹¹ On 2 March 1956, the first five plays were announced. The third play was Look Back in Anger, which would open on 8 May 1956.

If Look Back in Anger was not an immediate success it certainly made Osborne successful, with enough offers to keep him busy for five years, the play considered for a film, and a salary on which he had to pay his first income tax. But it was never done in the West End. Donald Albery wanted to do it but would only put it on at Wyndham's if Osborne “cut out the fun about bears and squirrels because he said it embarrassed everyone. I said ‘I know it does, but I'm sorry, no.’”¹² It continues, however, to make money. In 1981 Osborne announced a video production in New York for which he got something like ＄50,000, which he compared to real estate: “You get a return not through more work, but through a change in values.”¹³

The English Stage Company purchased first refusal rights on the next three plays (for £50) and the American rights on Look Back in Anger (for £200). Osborne's play, in fact, was the only one out of about 750 which the Court received in response to an advertisement in the Stage which the two directors, Devine and Richardson, considered.

From its opening in April 1956 ten years of continuous activity followed and, until October 1965, everything was under the direction of George Devine, who died in 1966 at the age of fifty-five. It found new writers, though it never achieved its initial hope of creating a stock company, an ensemble of actors playing together continuously. Accusations of left-wing bias in this period are simply not borne out by the list of plays produced. Whatever Devine's own political beliefs may have been, his aim at the Court was simply to give the playgoer the best available in drama. As part of its program the Court also tried to educate critics in responding to new and experimental work. Some of the momentum was lost after a while and it is fair to say that the loss of George Devine was deeply felt. But if British theater needed a movement the Court provided the impression that it had one. Foreign authors like Artaud, Brecht, and Beckett were also introduced into British theater, and most importantly—particularly for Osborne's plays—the style of acting changed:

What it unleashed was a pride of lion-like young actors and actresses into a world of roles formerly denied to them … So far as the good, brave causes lamented by Jimmy Porter were concerned, there was none more swiftly won than the victory implicit in Jimmy's presence on stage.¹⁴

THEATRICAL IMPACT

It was this “presence” which suggested to the critic of The Times a comparison with Coward's The Vortex, “which established Mr. Coward as the sympathetic voice of another post-war generation. It has the same air of desperate sincerity … the heroes of both plays are neurotics, but they suffer, and when an author can convey that suffering on the stage is genuine, it matters not how thin-spirited the sufferer; we are moved.”¹⁵ It was this voice, speaking for a postwar generation, rather than the formal qualities of the play, that convinced Devine and Richardson to stage the play, and although it was immediately dubbed “kitchen-sink” and its success seemed to send the Court on a course of social realism, the initial staging was not completely naturalistic: “… there was a sky-cloth instead of a ceiling, and all the props were still inside the surround.”¹⁶

Osborne himself confused the matter by describing Look Back in Anger as “a formal, rather old-fashioned play” that “broke out by its use of language” and confessed, in 1961, that it embarrassed him to look at it.¹⁷ More recently he has come to think those remarks misguided:

In fact I took a lot of daring risks. For instance, it was almost a rule when I first started working in the theater at all that you never discussed anyone on the stage who never appeared because it worried the audience … In Look Back in Anger there are about 27 people referred to and only five of them actually appear.¹⁸

It is easy, too, to say that Look Back made a lot of noise because the theater was so empty. A whole generation of playgoers had grown up who were no longer satisfied by a diet of Rattigan, T. S. Eliot, and Agatha Christie. The leading commercial production in 1956 was probably Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden at the Haymarket, with Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, and Felix Aylmer. Tynan described the dialogue of this comedy as speech of “exquisite candour, building ornamental bridges of metaphor, tiptoeing across frail causeways of simile and vaulting over gorges impassable to the rational soul.”¹⁹ Osborne noted that critics had ignored Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity at the Royal Court while giving serious attention to this play, which he described as “the doddering apotheosis of the English theatrical decadence of the last thirty years.”²⁰ Yet his own play was—in one sense at least—old-fashioned. Allardyce Nicoll has pointed out that all the ingredients are similar to those used in plays between 1900 and 1930 and he makes specific comparison with The Best People (1926), by David Grey and Avery Hopwood, and Galsworthy's The Fugitive (1913).²¹ Eliot and Fry, too, had been dealing with restlessness and loss of direction but in language so mannered and decorated that it was self-regarding and little else. The most immediate parallel was made by Irving Wardle, who pointed out that Look Back was running alongside Ronald Duncan's Don Juan. Both plays had heroes who were men of passion invading “the territory of good manners”:

The message is the same. England has gone to sleep behind its mask of respectability. … The all-important difference between the two is the language. In Duncan it is so self-admiring that it gets in the way of what was being said. … With Osborne you have no time to observe the stylistic pirouettes, because the sense hits you like a blow in the mouth.²²

Clearly Osborne's early plays reflect the kind of thing he had been acting in for the last eight years and, like Pinter, he begins by writing plays which resemble them in form but which confound audience expectation either by parodying the content or abandoning it. To an older playgoer the content was shocking but to younger playgoers both situation and language were, at last, “real”—not everyone, after all, had french windows and a tennis court. Look Back in Anger, therefore, broke new ground even if that ground was familiar. As Ronald Duncan commented:

The so-called “kitchen-sink” dramatists are still writing within the conventions of Mrs. Tanqueray. They have swopped the drama of duchesses and cucumber sandwiches for bus drivers and empty sauce bottles.²³

In fact, though both dramatists use language differently, Osborne and Pinter are acutely aware of the cucumber sandwiches, and Osborne specifically directs our attention to them: that is part of the shock of recognition. But Osborne's hallmark, according to Wilson Knight, is his ability to rush on, expand, and exhilarate:

The attack is delivered through an amazing resource of half-slangy, intensely modern phrases; it is a kind of poetry, coming naturally from an educated young man of low birth and blending a contumacious proletarianism with the academic tradition, for Jimmy Porter's reference is wide.²⁴

Osborne has called these speeches “arias” and they are elaborate solos to be performed by a star actor. Michael Billington finds Jimmy more a typical young man in a stock company than a university graduate though Gareth Lloyd Evans sees him as using the typical language of an undergraduate—“a neutral speech” by which Osborne makes little attempt to indicate character, class, or accent:

It is the language of educated youth feeling its feet and determined to put things right. It is the language of a certain self-conceit—often not a vicious or deep one, but a cosy one born of self-awareness of intelligence, a sense of words, and a desire to chalk up a victory in the intellectual stakes.²⁵

Evans lists the characteristics of this language as eloquence, lucidity, exaggeration, repetition, and the danger of always “seeming to be on the point of breaking into a public rhetorical speech.” But other critics have noted that Osborne can use silence; that his language is theatrical and hence not entirely verbal:

… it is in the simple silences without movement that the sustaining energy of his characters is most nakedly revealed. Between the various and resourceful engagements of their encounters, there are moments when the characters are not fighting or defending themselves, and then they reveal their basic desires and needs, that are dumb and helpless.²⁶

Such a description could almost equally apply to a play by Pinter and it hints at the Strindbergian side of Look Back, though initially the play was praised for what seemed like its political statement. Thus Hayman insists that Osborne does not use language to characterize Jimmy Porter; rather Jimmy is offered as a spokesman for a generation that in America would be responding to James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955):

Without being a revolutionary, Jimmy set himself up as a pugnacious enemy of the status quo and of the apathy it was floating on.²⁷

Jimmy, then, could be seen as a spokesman in a play with a deliberate political and social aim and, indeed, Look Back in Anger rapidly became, as Simon Trussler caustically remarks, “a harbinger of the New Left, of Anti-Apartheid, and of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.” But, Trussler also reminds us, if Jimmy's emotional needs were typical his response was clearly exceptional.²⁸

POLITICAL COMMITMENT

Jimmy Porter, obviously, would not have been clamoring to join any of these organizations but that is no answer. Coward, after watching Look Back in Anger, found it “electrifying” but believed “it to be composed of vitality rather than anger.”²⁹ It is a nice distinction but we must still ask what were the roots of that vitality, the causes which made it take the direction it did take. As John Russell Taylor has pointed out, no past is “so imaginatively remote as the recent past, just out of one's own field of vision and not yet far enough away to be history.”³⁰ Recalling the anxieties of 1956 requires a very conscious effort and even reading what contemporary observers thought was the mood of the time can be a difficult, often sardonic exercise. It was a period of labels and nouns:

Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Spain, Imperialism, Hitler, Stalin, … Pearl Harbor, Hungary, Suez … names of violence and disaster, of guilt, betrayal, spiritual exhaustion.³¹

It was a period when Protest linked Angry Young Men in England with the Beat Generation in America—a generation responding to and finding expression about contemporary history. In England young men felt that socialism had let them down. They found that in spite of their education (which had made them rootless) the class structure still excluded them as it has excluded their ancestors for centuries; they had the privilege of a university education but they were, in Somerset Maugham's word, scum. Lumping together Osborne and Kingsley Amis or John Wain was a journalistic convenience and there is little point in exploring it here.³² Amis's Lucky Jim has little in common with Jimmy Porter. Jim Dixon has little concern for those around him and draws back from involvement whereas Jimmy Porter cries out for people to come alive, be involved—in anything. Jimmy Porter, therefore, easily became an all-purpose hero—since he was angry about everything he embraced the angers of everyone. Most would agree with Laurence Kitchin, however, that our sympathy for him is qualified:

He shares his home with a friend and grieves at an old woman's death. His ill-treatment of his wife can partly be condoned as the by-product of a collision of values. … But his job, selling sweets in a market, seems a self-imposed misuse of education, a gesture of self-pitying exhibitionism. He is less angry than petulant. …³³

There is wide agreement that Osborne is not didactic. His plays are “lessons in feeling” and, therefore, “more instinctive than calculated and more passionate than coherent”;³⁴ the social themes are not of first importance.³⁵ Yet for Harold Ferrar Look Back is

a virtual compendium of urgent mid-century concerns; isolation and alienation, non-communication, the death of ideals and the vanishing of heroism … the confrontation of nothingness, the uselessness of awareness for changing a cruel world.³⁶

Ferrar, moreover, goes on to suggest that those who find this political content upsetting note Jimmy's narcissism, paranoia, sado-masochism, and escapist nostalgia and use these symptoms to discount the political content. So Jimmy, often confused with his author, is representative of a generation which is lost; a generation trying to adjust to a peacetime situation at home and confronted, internationally, with the fiasco of Suez and the spectacle of Russian tanks rolling into Hungary. Osborne's own comment on Suez is revealing:

What made Suez a typically Tory venture was not only its deception, its distaste for the basic assumptions of democracy, but the complete ineptitude of its execution.³⁷

The tone of that comment is precisely what so often foxes critics. Mander, for example, taking the hint Osborne gives us about Jimmy—“to be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal”—goes on to apply this to the whole play. Despite the force of Jimmy's personality and the fact that he has been taken as a spokesman for a generation Mander finds the play “fundamentally non-committal”; it does not “add up to a significant statement about anything. The anger is not realized in terms of human relationships, and worked into the dialectic of the play. …”³⁸ From this Mander pursues a familiar argument. If the play is to be taken seriously then we must take Jimmy's views seriously in their dramatic context. The play must counterpoint Jimmy against society, yet the other characters do not exist sufficiently to do this and we are left only with Jimmy's energy. The play gives us

one powerfully realized, entirely possible human being; and a setting in which other human beings, despite the talk, are not much more than stage-furniture … Such values as it expresses are simply Jimmy's values, with which the author is evidently in agreement.³⁹

But this, as literary criticism, will not do, either. The idea that Osborne and Jimmy are in agreement overlooks the dramatic distance the author keeps from his hero; and it can be argued that the other characters do exist, more than sufficiently. A more serious problem arises on the thematic level when a critic like Edwin Morgan takes Osborne's statement about making people feel and letting them think afterward:

Supposing we don't make the effort—or if we do make the effort and find that no very definitely formulated theme emerges—or that a theme emerges which doesn't deserve our approbation?⁴⁰

OSBORNE AND POLITICS

Look Back in Anger was obviously not what it seemed. As Gordon Rogoff puts it:

By what was undoubtedly an unplanned sleight-of-thought, the play gave all the appearance of being lined up with new Left political positions. It seemed to be about commitment, it seemed to be a protest, it seemed to be political, and it even seemed to be new, though the only startling “innovation” was that what seemed to be a five-character play was really a monologue.⁴¹

Now it is just possible that Osborne knew what he was doing both as a dramatist and as one concerned with politics and society. The idea that his main characters from Jimmy Porter onward speak for Osborne is seductive, and Osborne has often shown a tendency to speak like his characters—even sometimes quoting from them. It is an appealing idea since the main characters are rarely challenged within the world of the play. They do turn into public speakers but it is precisely this art of public speaking, of showmanship, that attracts Osborne. The failure of his characters to pursue a calculated and consistent program marks them out as characters and not megaphones. In 1957 Osborne was asked to make statements about his social and political beliefs but in his replies he consistently reminds us that he is an artist. Take, for example, his famous comment in “They Call It Cricket”:

I want to make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think afterwards. In some countries this could be a dangerous approach, but there seems little danger of people feeling too much—at least not in England as I am writing. I am an artist—whether or not I am a good one is beside the point now. For the first time in my life I have a chance to get on with my job, and that is what I intend to do. I shall do it in the theater and, possibly, in films.⁴²

Osborne will fulfill his role as a Socialist by being an artist who cares. Thus the theater, for Osborne, is a weapon and those who work in the theater have power which they should never underestimate. The theater in which they work “must be based on care, care for how people feel and live.”⁴³ When Osborne was sent a list of questions posed to writers by the London Magazine in 1957 he took care to specify that his care operated for him “as a writer working in the theater.” Commenting on the indifference of writers to the problems of human freedom like Hungary and the Rosenbergs, Osborne felt these were ignored because writers find it difficult to be engaged in problems on their own doorstep. Surrounded by inertia at home it is easy to make up your mind when people are being thrown into the ash-can but now, with material prosperity, it is not easy to see that people are still being thrown into the ash-can because it is such a comfortable one. It is the writer's duty to find the language with which to speak to those people who have been thrown into the ash-can.⁴⁴ As a Socialist writer he can say very little about kinds of houses, schools, or pensions, but there are questions he can ask:

… how do people live inside those houses? … What are the things that are important to them, that make them care, give them hope and anxiety? What kind of language do they use to one another? What is the meaning of the work they do? Where does the pain lie? What are their expectations? … Experiment means asking questions, and these are all questions of socialism.⁴⁵

They are not, many critics have observed—with some justice—exactly the questions Osborne has asked in his plays. Moreover as the years have passed critics have grown uneasy as the angry rebel seemed to be turning into an irascible High Tory who would like to see “this whole hideous rush into the twentieth century halted a bit.” In the Tynan interview of 1968 he was asked if he had not moved in the last few years toward a right-wing position:

That's what people would say, but I doubt whether it's true. I've always had leftist, radical sympathies. On the other hand, I'm an authoritarian in many ways, simply because of the kind of work I do. If I didn't subscribe to some kind of discipline, I wouldn't be able to do it. In that respect, I'm inevitably a conservative rather than an anarchist. But a lot of left-wing feeling nowadays strikes me as instant-mashed-potato radicalism. It hasn't been felt through and worked through. I find it easy and superficial and tiresome.⁴⁶

This contrasts with his backward glance from 1981 recalling the feeling—felt through and worked through—that gave rise to Look Back in Anger:

… In the 1945 election when the Labour Party got in, people like me thought the world was going to change, but instead it became more drear and austere. It was a dull time, joyless and timid. This was followed by the collapse of the Empire and the Suez crisis. We became very disillusioned, and out of this feeling came our writing, which so many people identified with because it was expressing what they felt themselves.⁴⁷

Osborne, then, emerges as a serious artist concerned with social and political matters, as any dramatist must be whose work for those causes occurs in the theater; whose main weapon is language, which he uses as extrovertly when writing about socialism as he does when creating a character.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

In a review of Tennessee Williams published in the Observer (20 January 1957) called “Sex and Failure” Osborne suggests that a playwright criticizing another playwright is merely explaining how he would have written the plays. He could also have said that a playwright writing about another playwright tells us a great deal about himself. He praises the plays of Tennessee Williams for their portrayal of suffering and sees them as “an assault on the army of the tender-minded and tough-hearted, the emotion snobs who believe that protest is vulgar, and to be articulate is to be sorry for oneself.” The plays of Tennessee Williams are about failure, which is what makes human beings interesting, and to those critics who say that the characters are neurotic and therefore too exceptional Osborne replies:

Adler said somewhere that the neurotic is like the normal individual only more so. A neurotic is not less adequate than an auditorium full of “normals.” Every character trait is a neurotic writ small. I like my plays writ large, and that is how these are written. … These plays tell us something about what is happening in America and that is something we must know about. Lacking a live culture of our own, we are drawing more heavily than ever on that of the United States … America is as sexually obsessed as a medieval monastery. That is what these plays are about—sex. Sex and failure.

Look Back in Anger was started in May 1955 (and, incidentally, was never called On The Pier At Morecambe, though some of it was written there); it is a play writ large. Its central character is a neurotic and it is about sex and failure, problems rooted in social and political history. The first thing we notice when reading Osborne's play is a liking for long and explicit stage directions. Osborne has since dismissed this habit of showering his scripts with “irrelevant” stage directions⁴⁸ but we cannot ignore them. They remind us of Shaw, but he at least had the excuse that his plays would not be produced and the habit of reading plays was more usual (so much so that dramatists like Ibsen published separate reading editions). Are these directions aimed at the director, the actor, the reader or, perhaps, all three? They certainly provide hints without which the text would be the poorer, like the well-known description of Jimmy:

… 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. Blistering honesty, like his, makes few friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth. To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.⁴⁹

The location—a flat in the Midlands—and the time (early evening on an English Sunday) provide a static situation where boredom has set in and the only thing to do is talk, to pass the time. The French title, La Paix du Dimanche, was a good, ironic translation which also removed the need to ask what Jimmy was angry about. But the anger is important and by no means as unselective as the rambling discourse would suggest. Mention of the Sunday newspapers allows Jimmy to range over a large number of topics but they all boil down to the basic causes of Jimmy's rage: class and inertia. Sunday—always the same—emphasizes the inertia and leads into his cry for a little enthusiasm and his plea that they pretend to be human beings, alive and human. But the stage direction in the middle of this (he bangs his breast theatrically)⁵⁰ reminds us that this is a performance, for an audience. For when we talk of talk we mean monologue. If Jimmy is on stage the other characters are his audience and if he is not they tend to talk about him. But this is not to say that they do not develop as characters as many critics have suggested. In act 1 they feed Jimmy with topics of one sort or another. Alison leads to mention of her father “still casting well-fed glances back to the Edwardian twilight,” which in turn leads to Jimmy and patriotism—a liking for Vaughan Williams (“Something strong, something simple, something English”) and Jimmy's surprising sympathy for the Colonel. The backward glance is tempting, particularly as “it's pretty dreary living in the American Age,” but Jimmy is not lost in the vision of high summer, long days in the sun, croquet and crisp linen:

What a romantic picture. Phony too, of course. It must have rained sometimes. Still, even I regret it somehow, phony or not. If you've no world of your own, it's rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's. I must be getting sentimental.⁵¹

Osborne then deflates the high seriousness with a kick at Cliff, who has been sitting there not listening. Understandably—but again lacking the kind of vitality, curiosity that characterized Madeline and that is conspicuously lacking in brother Nigel. After one brief meeting Nigel provides Jimmy with a large topic—but the speech is less about a particular Nigel and more about what Nigel stands for: all the things Jimmy hates and needs to fight. Jimmy's hatred of women is disturbing (though the comic tone qualifies the disturbance) particularly as his relationship with Cliff seems so warm. Indeed his previous relationship with Hugh was close enough to arouse the suspicions of Alison's mother, though this, again, tells us more about Alison's mother than about Jimmy and Hugh. Jimmy admits that “sometimes” he “almost” envies Gide and the Greek chorus boys, but his confession (in act 3, sc. 1) that friendship is one thing but sex is something else, and more important, puts homosexuality like nostalgia into perspective.

The noisy scenes must also be balanced with the quiet scenes. Thus, when Cliff leaves there is an interlude between Alison and Jimmy which explores the bear and squirrel relationship, the only level, fantasy, on which their marriage works. It is therefore, as Trussler suggests, compensatory rather than complementary:

Now this, surely, suggests what the play is about—or what it was about, before the myth-makers got to work: it explores, within a formally unexceptionable framework, a particular kind of sexual relationship, the incidental frustrations of which (expressed in Jimmy's outbursts about everything but his feelings towards his wife) just happened to set off or coincide with a theatrical chain reaction.⁵²

Again, Osborne is not credited with doing what he is doing. The framework is “formally unexceptionable”: Alison has just told Cliff that she is pregnant (so we know but Jimmy does not) and Jimmy describes the plot of the play by hoping that she will have a child and lose it (which she does), but his hope is that she will learn to feel:

If only something—something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! … If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognizable human face emerge from that little mass of india-rubber and wrinkles. Please—if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognizable human being yourself. But I doubt it.⁵³

Drawn to Alison by the relaxation her class has given her he finds that she is only a Sleeping Beauty. The causes of frustration are social and political as well as emotional. And they can be explored only if an outsider, Helena, arrives. Helena, an actress, looks as if she might fight back. Osborne's stage directions speak of the “royalty of that middle-class womanhood, which is so eminently secure in its divine rights” that she can behave with “an impressive show of strength and dignity.”⁵⁴ We are also told that the strain is beginning to tell. Living with Jimmy is not easy, and though he does not know how cruel his wish for a dead child was, we do and we can appreciate that Alison needs a rest and must go away. Helena, however underdrawn, at least in act 2 (“little more than a dramatic convenience”⁵⁵) can ask the questions that by this stage are puzzling us. Why and how did Alison marry Jimmy? Why can the marriage exist only intermittently on a nursery level—itself a fine ironic touch? This allows Alison to tell us how they met and how the image of the knight in shining armor turns into the game of bears and squirrels—“a silly symphony for people who couldn't bear the pain of being human beings any longer.”⁵⁶ Helena also helps to crystallize Jimmy's feeling about feeling, which he locates as a response to death (though death is linked with virginity—about which Jimmy has been angry, too). Carter believes that this is the clue to Jimmy's anger—he cannot bear the thought of dying in the same way as his father:

Is there not something wrong with a society which permits such a death and comfortably goes about its everyday life? Can society make people so unfeeling?⁵⁷

But Jimmy's view of his father's death is more complex than that. His father fought in Spain and came back to die. His family were embarrassed by this, exhibiting the emotions of the middle class; his mother was only interested in “smart, fashionable” minorities and left the failure of a man with an audience of one small frightened boy who could not understand what his father was saying and could only feel despair, bitterness, the smell of death:

You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about—love … betrayal … and death when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in all your life.⁵⁸

It is true that the substance of the speech is Jimmy rather than his father, and that is the point; it is a helpless Jimmy, one who fails to measure up, if through no fault of his own, to the requirements of the moment. He does not want to fail again when confronted with the death of Hugh's mum. But Helena has arranged for Alison to go home just when he needs her. Even here Osborne puts us at a distance from the emotions. His stage direction is quite specific. Jimmy cannot believe that Alison has refused him, and picking up the teddy bear he throws it downstage, where it “makes a rattling, groaning sound—as guaranteed in the advertisement.”⁵⁹ Jimmy's pain at that moment is without an audience and dumb—except for that trivial comic groan.

Scene 2 introduces the Colonel and, again, stage directions indicate his character. Where his wife would have relished the situation (Alison leaving Jimmy) he is only “disturbed and bewildered by it.”⁶⁰ Colonel Redfern never meets Jimmy, though, according to Jimmy, he nearly runs him down with his car. The Colonel, too, asks questions about the marriage to fill in the background. Why the sweetstall, for example? And the sordid business of private detectives? When Alison repeats Jimmy's description of him his reply—simply and without malice—is that Jimmy has “quite a turn of phrase,” which, in its modest way, is perceptive. He recognizes, too, what marriage to Jimmy has done for Alison. It has taught her a great deal though he cannot understand all this talk about challenges and revenge and cannot believe that love is really like that. His nostalgia is, like Jimmy's, more complex than critics will allow; he knows that life for him was over when he left India, though the knowledge does not alter his unhappiness. As Alison recognizes, her father is unhappy because everything is changed, and Jimmy is unhappy because everything is the same.

When Jimmy returns he is preoccupied with the death of Hugh's mum, which, characteristically, gets muddled up with Alison's not sending any flowers because Hugh's mum was “a deprived and ignorant old woman” who said the wrong things in the wrong places and could not be taken seriously. What terrifies Jimmy, of course, is that once more he has had to face death alone. When Helena slaps him he cannot even hit her back, but contact has been made and, in pain and despair, he allows her to seduce him.

Act 3 opens very much like act 1, with Helena instead of Alison at the ironing board. Circularity is much admired in Beckett but in Osborne it is criticized as primitive stagecraft. Yet, as in Beckett, things are the same but not quite. Helena, we are told in the stage directions, is looking “more attractive than before, for the setting of her face is more relaxed”⁶¹ while Cliff has developed, too, and is “actually acquiring … a curiosity.”⁶² Though he falls into the old routine with Jimmy (this time it is Flanagan and Allen) he is preparing to leave and Jimmy provides him with the right tone to manage this: “rather casually,” a tone Cliff picks up in explaining that the sweetstall is all right for Jimmy, who is educated but he needs something better. The interchange when Cliff says that his feet hurt and Jimmy advises him to try washing his socks shows the depth and easiness of their relationship but, as Jimmy admits, though Cliff has been “loyal, generous and a good friend” he is prepared to let him go for something he knows Helena will not give him, and it is this theme of women bleeding men to death, through sex, which introduces the brave-causes speech. Dying for brave causes was possible in the 1930s and 1940s but now there are no causes left. There is no longer any grand design, only the big bang, which makes death as “pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus”; so all that is left for men is to let themselves be butchered by women. Again the stage direction indicates the tone: “In his familiar, semi-serious mood.” Katharine Worth is perfectly correct when she points out that this speech is not meant to set us thinking about brave causes that do exist:

This is not a play about brave causes but about a special kind of feeling, what Osborne has described as “the texture of ordinary despair.” Jimmy is a suffering hero, and the action is designed to illuminate his suffering rather than force a conflict.⁶³

But, as Alison acutely points out, Jimmy would be lost without his suffering. He may be trapped by it and lost with it but it is all he has left. Spain in a sense was the last cause about which a moral choice could confidently be made. Jimmy is quite specific—he sees himself as part of a generation that has inherited the debt of brave causes and dying for them but which is confused, understandably in the year of Hungary and Suez, about moral choices. Heroism is impossible, so all that is left is personal relationships, and for him (Alison has made it clear to her father that only some men and women talk of challenge and revenge in marriage) that experiment has failed. It is often overlooked that life without Alison is brighter and more relaxed; the tone of act 3, initially, is easy and even cheerful, but people are preparing to leave Jimmy. Cliff goes first, and then, when Alison returns, Helena too. Jimmy is described as an Eminent Victorian—“slightly comic—in a way”⁶⁴—and the brave causes are discussed in his “familiar, semi-serious mood.” Jimmy can cope with pain through language and sex. When Alison returns he avoids her challenge and they withdraw into the game of bears and squirrels on which note the play ends. As he insisted she has lost her child, she can and does grovel. She is also sterile.

This ending contains the possibility of two interpretations. The pattern is circular—we are back where we were before. In the debate after the production Tony Richardson insisted that it was a hopeful play—the relationship had improved, they were playing the game for the last time, with irony; as the stage directions suggest. Alison has really suffered, and Jimmy and she can now feel together. But for Hayman the irony does not work and the ending can only be taken as a “retreat into immature emotional cosiness.”⁶⁵ Carter, feeling Alison has suffered enough, sees a reconciliation as possible:

Alison's submission allows them to unite hopefully in the dream world they have created, where Alison is a gleamingly beautiful squirrel, and Jimmy a strong powerful bear, content perhaps never really to make out as successful human beings in a mundane, futile world.⁶⁶

John Russell Taylor, who had seen the ending as escapist in Anger and After, is less certain in the Casebook:

It seems possible that this basis of warm, animal love might, on the other side of suffering, lead to happiness, though some critics think otherwise, and see in the ending only a temporary further escape into whimsey. Both possibilities are left open, and remarkably so in a play which has often been thought propagandist in aim.⁶⁷

CRITICISM OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER

“A piece of shit” was, according to Osborne, Olivier's first reaction to the play but he was persuaded to visit it again and changed his mind. On this occasion he was accompanied by Arthur Miller, who saw Look Back in Anger as

… the only modern, English play that I have seen. Modern in the sense that the basic attention in the play is toward the passionate idea of the man involved and of the playwright involved, and not toward the surface glitter and amusement that the situation might throw off … an intellectual play … and yet it seems to have no reflection elsewhere in the theater.⁶⁸

As far as press reviews were concerned it is now generally agreed that the immediate reception of the play was “almost uniformly favorable” and most critics agreed that Osborne was a dramatist to watch.⁶⁹ The French reaction to La Paix du Dimanche was noncommittal without being vehement: “It is a play to reassure everyone: it attacks nothing, it demonstrates nothing.”⁷⁰ This seems to suggest that something was lost in translation. American audiences were intrigued as to what Jimmy was angry about:

Jimmy “risen” from the working class is now provided with an intellect which only shows him that everything that might have justified pride in the old England—its opportunity, adventure, material well-being—has disappeared without being replaced by anything but a lackluster security. He has been promoted into a moral and social vacuum. …⁷¹

For Arthur Schlesinger, Jimmy's anger had nothing to do with either intellectual frustration or class conflict. He was angry because he would not recognize that he was a homosexual,⁷² but Leslie Corina replied immediately that Jimmy was not gay and the play was about class struggles.⁷³ Gordon Rogoff saw him as born out of his time:

Jimmy Porter, railing against his wife and contemporary England, was simply the old British Rajah turned inside-out, a pukka sahib gone sour. …⁷⁴

The review that made the most impact was, of course, Kenneth Tynan's in the Observer, where he suggested that Osborne's picture of a certain kind of modern marriage was hilariously accurate:

… he shows us two attractive young animals engaged in competitive martyrdom, each with its teeth sunk deep in the other's neck, and each reluctant to break the clinch for fear of bleeding to death. The fact that Osborne writes of this situation with charity has led many critics into believing that Osborne's sympathies are wholly with Jimmy but nothing could be more false: Jimmy is simply and abundantly alive; that rarest of dramatic phenomena, the act of original creation has taken place; and those who carp were better silent. Is Jimmy's anger justified? Why doesn't he do something? These questions might be relevant if the character had failed to come to life; in the presence of such evident and blazing vitality, I marvel at the pedantry that could ask them. Why don't Chekhov's people do something? Is the sun justified in scorching us?

Tynan found in the play qualities he had despaired of seeing on the stage—“the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of ‘official’ attitudes, the surrealist sense of humor” but above all the fact that the Porters deplore the tyranny of good taste and refuse to accept “emotional” as a term of abuse. Osborne was the first spokesman for this group, a minority taste (he estimated the number in that minority at roughly 6,733,000 people), he admitted, and concluded that he could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger, the “best young play of its decade.”⁷⁵

Harold Hobson's review, if less forceful, was, in restrospect, remarkably perceptive. He detected two plays in Look Back in Anger:

One of them is ordinary and noisy, and Mr. Osborne has written it with some wit but more prolixity; the other is sketched into the margin of the first, and consists of hardly words at all, but is controlled by a fine and sympathetic imagination, and is superbly played, in long passages of pain and silence, by Miss Mary Ure.⁷⁶

This both begins to recognize the two silences with which Pinter's work has familiarized us and, more significantly, recognizes the existence of other characters in what was often called a monologue. It directs us to style and behavior as well as pain and despair. But the social questions continued to nag. This Wolverhampton Hamlet, as T. C. Worsley dubbed Jimmy, led to comparisons with Hamlet, brilliantly in the case of Wilson Knight,⁷⁷ casually by Mary McCarthy.⁷⁸ Hamlet, with his Oedipus complex, encouraged the psychoanalytical approach and pushed aside the social dimension of M. C. Bradbrook's comparison:

Jimmy is a child casualty of the war before last—the Spanish Civil War. “There aren't any good brave causes any more” he says, in the year of Suez. His torrents of invective are set off by Cliff, the decent Horatio to this Hamlet of the Butler Education Act, and by the Colonel, an honest man of good will, whose Army memories are of military bands in India.⁷⁹

This approach, according to Roy Huss, misses the point altogether. A large part of Jimmy's behavior can be explained by “the unresolved Oedipal situation in which he is enmeshed,” indeed, by the classic pre-Oedipal neurosis when the child decides to turn his fear and resentment toward his mother into masochistic enjoyment. Thus all references to social iniquities are really “a subterfuge masking his underlying predicament with women” to which Osborne, “knowingly or unknowingly, gives dramatic context.” Thus we cannot compare the play to Strindberg since Jimmy Porter's problem is not that women threaten him. Indeed they are propelled toward him by the same sadomasochistic impulses:

To overlay this kind of atmosphere with a theme of social protest, as Osborne does, is to distort, not sharpen, the real dramatic focus in the play.⁸⁰

Some might feel it was a little pretentious to analyze a character as if he were a real person. M. D. Faber defends this approach, however, claiming that it is justified “as long as we confine ourselves to the text,” and so, from the “fact” that Jimmy is continually eating and drinking (and keeps a sweet-stall) we move inexorably to the conclusion that what the play really presents us with is “an orally fixated neurotic who projects his own psychological shortcomings onto the external environment.”⁸¹ Ironically, the next article, by David H. Karrfalt, is called “The Social Theme in Osborne's Plays” and opens with the sentence: “John Osborne's view of man is primarily social.” The real difficulty in justifying analysis “as long as we confine ourselves to the text” is that the text is only part of the drama. Moreover, the original interpreters of Jimmy Porter—Kenneth Haigh and Richard Burton—were not the weedy neurotics the text rather invites but substantial, even heroic, figures. Jimmy is very much a mixed character—“a warm-hearted idealist raging against the evils of man and the universe” but also “a cruel and even morbid misfit in a group of reasonably normal and well-disposed people”:

In short, if Osborne intended elements of self-portrait then he did so in no uncritical mood … if Jimmy is offered as a “typical” hero, he is so as Hamlet is—a recognizable and recurring type, perhaps, but also a permanent possibility in the make-up of any sensitive person; but in a minority in any generation and in most individuals resolutely suppressed.⁸²

This view is echoed by John Elsom, who points out that Jimmy is himself a chief example of the social malaise he attacks:

Through Jimmy Porter, Osborne had opened up a much wider subject than rebelliousness or youthful anger, that of social alienation, the feelings of being trapped in a world of meaningless codes and customs. Osborne's ambivalence towards Jimmy is apparent even from his descriptions of him in the script. …⁸³

When Look Back was revived at the Royal Court in 1968 John Russell Taylor noted that those qualities which had given it urgency and topicality thirteen years ago now seemed curiously incidental. Jimmy in this production was seen much more as a character in relation to other characters; his tirades

… as something both arising out of his own nature and directed with particular purpose to those around him, to needle them out of their apathy, to stir them one way and another by challenging their social assumptions, outraging their political ideas, or even arousing them sexually by provoking them just blindly to strike out, resist, hit back.

Victor Henry, in the role of Jimmy, managed to suggest both sides of the character—the heroic Jimmy of what he says and the unheroic Jimmy of the stage directions and, though he still dominates, there was a more complete sense of the network of relationships which binds the group together:

… the two women, Alison and Helena, are given a sharper and more satisfying individuality as played by Jane Asher and Caroline Mortimer respectively. Jane Asher especially manages to bring out the underlying dogged stubbornness of Alison, the hard determination not to give in disguised under the apparent apathy. She thus makes more sense of the final bears-and-squirrels game, which now appears as a continuation and development of a complex relationship rather than a sentimental evasion of a straight admission of defeat.

This, Taylor felt, was all in the text but perhaps time was needed to remove the play from its immediate “inflammatory context” so that we could see it, and see, too, that it was the formal, old-fashioned elements that make the play “more than a spectacular flash in the pan.”⁸⁴

Pamela, in Time Present, warns us to listen to the content of the tone of the voice and not be trapped into taking what is said as wholly significant. Osborne himself complained very early of this inability to listen:

At this I can hear all kinds of impatient inflections. “Well, if your characters only mean what they say some of the time, when are we supposed to know what they're getting at? What are you getting at? What do you mean?” At every performance of any of my plays, there are always some of these deluded pedants, sitting there impatiently, waiting for the plugs to come singing in during the natural breaks in the action. … I offer no explanations to such people. All art is organized evasion. You respond to Lear or Max Miller—or you don't. I can't teach the paralyzed to move their limbs. Shakespeare didn't describe symptoms or offer explanations. Neither did Chekhov. Neither do I.⁸⁵

Look Back in Anger is a play full of talk, and Osborne's view of character is essentially theatrical. Jimmy has a sympathetic audience (at least on stage)—he usually knows how far he can go, though he does sometimes get carried away by the pleasure of his own images. But the interchange when Cliff breaks the news that he is leaving shows Jimmy offering Cliff the right tone to complete the break decently: the truth of what is said must be measured by the way it is said. If it is perfectly phrased it will be quite as true as any observation in civilized life should be. But is what happens in Look Back in Anger civilized? Again the tone helps; the play is funny. Osborne recalls that at a preview of the play a lot of students came and roared with laughter all the way through. Richardson and Devine asked in puzzlement why they were laughing and Osborne replied: because it's FUNNY. He himself thought of the play as “quite a comedy” but everybody else insisted that it was Human Drama.⁸⁶ It is foolish to take out of context certain speeches and press them for answers on causes, women, homosexuality, class, or anything else—though remarkably all the themes of the later plays are already here. Subsequently Osborne chose as his main characters men or women who had at least something of the actor in their professional life. Jimmy himself is an actor—as Michael Billington remarks:

… the play plausibly reflects the problems of an actor buried in the rut of a Midland's weekly rep in the 50s, knowing that he has a talent and energy that have so far gone unrecognized.⁸⁷

The extra turn of the screw that Osborne provides is that Jimmy does not know that he has talent that has gone unrecognized. The heroes that follow are also failures whose talent is questionable.

Notes

1. A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography: 1929-1956 (London and Boston, 1981), p. 54.

2. Michael Billington, The Modern Actor (London, 1973), pp. 162-63.

3. “That Awful Museum,” reprinted in John Osborne: Look Back in Anger: A Casebook, ed. John Russell Taylor (London, 1968), p. 66; hereafter cited as Casebook.

4. Observer, 18 November 1979.

5. Quoted in Martin Banham, Osborne (Edinburgh, 1969), p. 100.

6. Quoted in Richard Findlater, Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967; Panther edition, 1968), pp. 213-14.

7. Quoted in Banham, Osborne, p. 100.

8. “That Awful Museum,” p. 66.

9. Osborne's refusal to contribute to Irving Wardle's study The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978) is unfortunate for us but his reason, the private nature of his ten-year relationship with Devine, must be respected. Some inkling of his feeling comes through in “On the Writer's Side,” in At The Royal Court: 25 Years of the English Stage Company, ed. Richard Findlater (Derbyshire, 1981), pp. 19-26.

10. See Wardle, Theatres of Devine; Terry Browne, Playwrights' Theatre (London: Pitman Publishing, 1975); At the Royal Court, ed. Findlater; and John Russell Taylor, “Ten Years of the English Stage Company,” and Gordon Rogoff, “Richard's Himself Again,” both in British Theatre: 1956-1966, Tulane Drama Review, no. 34 (Winter 1966), pp. 120-31, 29-40.

11. During the Vedrenne-Barker regime at the Court (1904-7), of the thirty-two plays performed eleven were by Shaw. Galsworthy's first play, The Silver Box, was accepted immediately and during these three years the Court also performed plays by Yeats, Housman, Maeterlinck, and Schnitzler.

12. Sunday Times, 1 March 1981.

13. Ibid.

14. Rogoff, “Richard's Himself,” p. 33.

15. Quoted in Sheridan Morley, A Talent to Amuse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 345.

16. Wardle, Theatres of Devine, p. 181.

17. “That Awful Museum,” pp. 66, 67.

18. Sunday Times, 24 November 1974.

19. Kenneth Tynan, A View of the English Stage (Frogmore, 1976), p. 175.

20. “They Call It Cricket,” in Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), p. 81.

21. Allardyce Nicoll, “Somewhat in a New Dimension,” Contemporary Theatre, ed. J. R. Brown and B. Harris (London, 1962), pp. 77-95.

22. Wardle, Theatres of Devine, p. 183.

23. Casebook, p. 192.

24. Wilson Knight, “The Kitchen Sink,” Encounter 21, no. 6 (December 1963):50.

25. Gareth Lloyd Evans, The Language of Modern Drama (London, 1977), p. 106.

26. John Russell Brown, Theatre Language (London, 1972), p. 131.

27. Ronald Hayman, British Theatre Since 1955: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1979), p. 10.

28. Trussler, Plays of Osborne, p. 55.

29. Morley, Talent to Amuse, p. 350.

30. Casebook, p. 12.

31. Protest, ed. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York: Citadel, 1958; London: Souvenir Press, 1959), p. 12.

32. See, however, Kenneth Tynan, “The Angry Young Movement,” Tynan on Theatre (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 54-62; John Holloway, “Tank in the Stalls: Notes on the ‘School of Anger,’” Hudson Review 10 (1957-58):424-29; and Carl Bode, “The Redbrick Cinderellas,” College English 20, no. 7 (1959):331-37.

33. Laurence Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama (London: Faber, 1960), p. 100.

34. Banham, Osborne, p. 2.

35. Katharine J. Worth, “The Angry Young Man: John Osborne,” in Experimental Drama, ed. William A. Armstrong (London, 1963), p. 149.

36. Harold Ferrar, John Osborne (New York, 1973), p. 11.

37. “They Call It Cricket,” p. 84.

38. John Mander, The Writer and Commitment (London, 1961), p. 22.

39. Ibid., pp. 187-88.

40. Edwin Morgan, “That Uncertain Feeling,” in Encore Reader (London: Methuen & Co., 1965), p. 53.

41. Rogoff, “Richard's Himself,” pp. 30-31.

42. Declaration, p. 65.

43. Introduction to International Theatre Annual, Number Two, ed. Harold Hobson (London: Calder, 1957), pp. 9, 10.

44. Casebook, p. 61.

45. “They Call It Cricket,” pp. 83-84.

46. Observer, 7 July 1968.

47. Sunday Times, 1 March 1981.

48. A Better Class of Person, p. 23.

49. Look Back in Anger (London, 1957), pp. 9-10.

50. Ibid., p. 15.

51. Ibid., p. 17.

52. Trussler, Plays of Osborne, p. 45.

53. Look Back in Anger, p. 37.

54. Ibid., pp. 39, 40.

55. Trussler, Plays of Osborne, p. 50.

56. Look Back in Anger, p. 47.

57. Carter, Osborne, pp. 54-55.

58. Look Back in Anger, p. 58.

59. Ibid., p. 63.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., p. 75.

62. Ibid., p. 77.

63. Worth, “Angry Young Man,” p. 155.

64. Look Back in Anger, p. 90.

65. Ronald Hayman, John Osborne (London, 1968), p. 22.

66. Carter, Osborne, p. 61.

67. Casebook, pp. 29-30.

68. Ibid., p. 193.

69. Ibid., p. 17. The reviews are collected in the Casebook; see also John Elsom's Post-War British Theatre Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 74-80.

70. Casebook, p. 173.

71. Ibid., p. 170.

72. Arthur Schlesinger, “Look Back in Amazement,” New Republic 137 (23 December 1957), pp. 19-21.

73. Leslie Corina, “Still Looking Back,” New Republic 138 (10 February 1958), p. 22.

74. Gordon Rogoff, “British Theatre: 1955-66,” Tulane Drama Review 34 (Winter 1966):31.

75. Casebook, pp. 49-51.

76. Ibid., p. 47.

77. See “The Kitchen Sink,” Encounter 21, no. 6 (December 1963).

78. “A New Word,” Harper's Bazaar, April 1958, reprinted in Sights and Spectacles (London: William Heinemann, 1959), pp. 184-96, and Casebook, pp. 150-60.

79. M. C. Bradbrook, English Dramatic Form (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), pp. 186-87.

80. “Osborne's Backward Half-Way Look,” Modern Drama, no. 6 (1963), pp. 20-25.

81. D. Faber, “The Character of Jimmy Porter: An Approach to Look Back in Anger,” Modern Drama 13 (1970-71):67-77.

82. See whole discussion: A. E. Dyson, “Look Back in Anger,” Critical Quarterly 1, no. 5 (1959):318-26.

83. Elsom, Post-War British Theatre, p. 77.

84. Plays and Players, January 1969.

85. “They Call It Cricket,” pp. 69-70.

86. Sunday Times, 24 November 1974.

87. Billington, Modern Actor, p. 164.