[In the following essay, Egan considers the enduring appeal of Look Back in Anger, focusing on the character of Jimmy Porter.]

I

If we are reluctant to let go of 1956 as a convenient watershed point in the history of British theatre, we no longer tend to regard Look Back in Anger as a one-play revolution. John Osborne himself long ago pronounced it “a formal, rather old-fashioned play,”¹ and with the virtue of hindsight we can identify its technical affinities with the earlier dramatists whose theatre it was once thought to have obliterated: the aphoristic turns of Coward, the set-piece speechifying of Shaw, even the sentimental studies of Rattigan. Yet Look Back remains a unique play. The major revivals that have occurred repeatedly over the thirty years since its première have demonstrated that, removed from its early avatar as cultural rallying point, it has not lost its special energies as a theatre event.

That those energies derive in large part from the play's exploitation of its looming central character has been clear from the start. But it no longer suffices, I think, to term the play, as Simon Trussler did in his excellent early study of Osborne, “a well-made problem play of considerable psychological insight” focusing on a “special case” individual.² Jimmy Porter may well be a suitable case for treatment; yet he commands our attention in the theatre not as a case study but as a dynamic source of energy and utterance. The role is a bravura one, and to find its equivalents we must refer to other, more frankly declamatory traditions than either the well-made play or psychological realism. Hamlet and Alceste come to mind, the former closest to Jimmy's self-image, the latter to his nature. All three plays are dramas of the unrealized self, all three characters inveterate self-dramatisers; and all three call forth an actor's most overtly theatrical, self-displaying capacities.

Several critics have pointed out that his inherently histrionic nature has much to do with Jimmy Porter's dynamism, making Look Back in Anger, in Michael Billington's words, “every inch an actor's play.”³ Certainly, although he is not an actor by trade, Jimmy is every inch a performer. It is not only difficult to picture him at work in his sweet-stall (an occupation Osborne seems to have chosen for its very peripherality, its inessential quality as work or worldly action of any sort); it is difficult to imagine him anywhere but onstage. In fact, he is rarely elsewhere, and then frequently asserting his presence by his unruly trumpet. On the few occasions when he is entirely absent, the play noticeably shifts gears as the other characters engage in low-key dialogue and exposition almost exclusively about the phenomenon of Jimmy. They await his re-entrance as we do, and with it the resumption of the play's proper action.

I want to examine that action, not simply to point out its high incidence of histrionic concerns but to explore the inseparability of such concerns from the play's method of meaning. Building upon what Billington, Michael Anderson, and others have observed—that Look Back is suffused with the sensibilities of a young actor/author for whom the theatre was a sphere of existence before it was a writer's medium—I am going to suggest that the transaction of histrionic performance is in Osborne's work not merely a conduit through which other meanings can flow, but an object of concern and source of meaning in and of itself. What the actor does, in short, is the central matter of the dramatic fiction as well as the means of bringing it to life. This proximity of medium to message is, I believe, a key to the special intensities of experience which impressed the first audiences of Look Back as revolutionary, and which the play continues to generate today.

II

One facet of Look Back in Anger that must have struck its early spectators as unprecedented is the extraordinary degree of dramatic energy Osborne manages to channel through a minimal situation. Act One contains very little plot per se: a young man, his friend and his wife are together in a room, the wife ironing, the men reading newspapers and talking. Eventually, after a physical tussle, Jimmy deliberately pushes Cliff into Alison, causing her arm to be burned. Jimmy leaves the stage, whereupon we learn that Alison is pregnant. He returns and is reconciled with her, until the imminent arrival of Helena sends him storming out again. That is all that literally “happens” in plot terms, which in no way account for the scene's power to involve us in its momentous interplay of forces. Jimmy, of course, is the motive force, and the key to his actions lies in a particular conjunction of character psychology and acting dynamics. In large measure, Jimmy's concerns and objectives as a character are parallel to those of the actor playing Jimmy, in that each is attempting to provoke an audience response through increasingly energetic and elaborate acts of performance.

Of course, the actor playing Jimmy seeks our silent attention and involvement, our occasional laughter and our eventual applause, whereas Jimmy himself is after a more complex response from Cliff and Alison, one that involves both the focused apprehension of a theatre audience and the verbal and physical response of fellow players. Bored and claustrophobic from the stale rituals of another Sunday, immobilized by a sense of futility which will expand as the scene develops, Jimmy turns to Cliff and Alison for very proof that he exists:

You two will drive me round the bend soon—I know it, as sure as I'm sitting here. I know you're going to drive me mad. Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm—that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! (He bangs his breast theatrically.) Hallelujah! I'm alive! I've an idea. Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say? Let's pretend we're human. (He looks from one to the other.) Oh, brother, it's such a long time since I was with anyone who got enthusiastic about anything.⁴

The comic exaggeration here disguises the serious need beneath his invitation. As will become clear, Jimmy has no other source of self-affirmation, no real means of pretending that he is “human” and “actually alive,” outside the currents of energy given and received which bind him to the other two. Therefore he thrusts toward them in a series of verbal and emotional displays. Yet for the most part, both Cliff and Alison deny him the response he seeks, refusing to join in his “little game”. Cliff plays along in the scene's earlier moments, but eventually withdraws from Jimmy both as listener and interlocutor. Alison refuses from the outset either to engage in the direct dialogue or to afford the attentive audience Jimmy requires. Especially where she is concerned, the game Jimmy offers to play involves unremitting antagonism. Brawling, as he says, “is the only thing left I'm any good at” (p. 53). Refusing to be his gladitorial partner, she responds to his challenges with passive and deliberate silence.

So the scene develops in a dangerous spiral, Jimmy bidding for attention with an escalating series of jokes, demands, insults and oratory, yet repeatedly balked by the non-responses of the other two. Osborne plots his mounting frustration in a series of stage directions:

He looks up at both of them for reaction, but Cliff is reading, and Alison is intent on her ironing.

(p. 14)

He looks up sharply for a response, but there isn't any.

(p. 14)

He's been cheated out of his response, but he's got to draw blood somehow.

(p. 21)

She is used to these carefully rehearsed attacks, and it doesn't look as though he will get his triumph tonight.

(p. 22)

The only substantial response he can provoke is through the physical violence of the ironing-board incident, but the brief explosion this triggers in Alison only clears the air temporarily, and the cycle soon begins again. It is a no-win situation for all three of them. Alison and Cliff are caught between the choices of being Jimmy's antagonists and so fueling his anger, or neglecting him and suffering his consequent wrath. Since they choose the latter option, Jimmy finds himself performing in a void: launching ever more extensive, formal and “carefully rehearsed” rhetorical tirades and failing to receive the validating response he seeks.

An interesting theatrical mechanism at work here (and throughout the play) is that, as Jimmy's performance progressively fails, that of the actor playing Jimmy progressively succeeds. More and more, we become the proper audience to Jimmy's tirades, affording them much of the response they are denied by Cliff and Alison—naturally enough, since only in the theatre is Jimmy's histrionic mode of action accorded full validity. Anywhere else, such incessant outpourings of words and feeling, accompanied by demands for undivided attention and response, are either suppressed or ignored. Yet we find Jimmy's behavior fascinating and richly worth attention. After all, indulgence in language, emotion, and imagination separate from any practical activity is literally what we have come to see; we regard it as the actor's proper and “real” mode of action. Sartre observes that the actor “unrealizes” his own being in service of his character's fictional being.⁵ Jimmy Porter represents an intriguing inversion of this principle: engaging in actions that are almost exclusively histrionic, he unrealizes himself as a person in the play's world and is simultaneously realized as a dynamic presence, a brilliant theatrical artifact in ours.

III

Thus the play steadily shifts from its basis in realism toward a more presentational mode. Jimmy's many rhetorical set-pieces and our responses to them constitute self-contained theatrical events, recalling earlier, non-realistic conventions of actor-audience communication. If they echo Shaw's use of rhetoric, they lack his argumentative consistency and dialectical intent. As dramatic poetry they are much closer to the Senecan set speech and its descendants: the Elizabethan blank-verse monologue and Racinean tirade. Michael Goldman's remarks on that tradition are useful here:

The Senecan contribution was a rhetoric that made suffering action, or rather pushed suffering toward dramatic action by making it aggression. It allowed psychic states to come thrusting out at the audience. The expansion, intensification, and elaboration typical of Senecan rhetoric allows the audience to be caught up in that familiar Elizabethan grip of half-insane agitation, of an ego enlarging itself through and beyond the largest available objects of desire or destructive will. Its related achievement is to connect this intensity to a large world by sweep of reference, that geographical and cosmological reach which is not exclusively Senecan but can only be used effectively in stage speech when it can be attached to the thrust of an actor's personality.⁶

Just so, Jimmy's tirades convert states of mind into dramatic action, at the same time affording a series of windows both outward on a particular “large world” and inward on the enlarged, agitated ego responding to that world. Each speech has its own set topic and its inner structure of rhythm, build, and climax. All are effective, entertaining performance pieces, characterized by richness of imagery, of language, and of wit. And each is an act of aggression, aimed at a particular target of the speaker's anger. Indeed, taken together their topics constitute a catalogue of all that Jimmy finds unacceptable in his world: “The American Age” (p. 17), “Brother Nigel” (pp. 20-21), “Pusillanimous,” (pp. 21-22), “The Eternal, Flaming Racket of the Female,” (pp. 24-25), and so on.

In this respect, the tirades also indicate why Jimmy is incapable of any effective action outside of the histrionic, for if they place him in a concrete world—Britain of the mid-fifties—they also delineate clearly his separation from that world, mapping out a reality in which Jimmy finds no acceptable means of self-definition, no coherent structure of belief or meaning which might make possible his commitment to action. An Englishman in the American Age, he sees no historical direction to look save backwards, to the era of a lost empire the history of which he holds in contempt while envying its settled, Edwardian world-view, having no world of his own. His sense of class identity is shot through with ambivalence and dislocation. Intensely nostalgic for the working-class origins of his father and Hugh's mother, he is separated from that heritage by his mother's middle-class connections, his university education and his marriage to Alison, whose suburban background both repels and attracts him. Even religion provokes a divided response in him. Militantly atheist and “satanic,” he is also fascinated and troubled by Christianity, whether the mass enthusiasm of converts at an American revivalist's meeting or the single-minded purposefulness of Helena's Anglicanism. His elaborate sneers betray his insecurity:

Do you think that some of this spiritual beefcake would make a man of me? Should I go in for this moral weight lifting and get myself some over-developed muscle? I was a liberal skinny weakling. I too was afraid to strip down to my soul, but now everyone looks at my superb physique in envy.

(p. 79)

Unable to bang his breast and shout “Hallelujah, I'm alive,” Jimmy is forced to envy the spiritual beefcake of those who can.

Jimmy's sexuality reflects another version of indeterminate selfhood. He loves and desires his wife, yet he manifests a visceral hatred of her femaleness, indeed of all things female. He envies the revolutionary possibilities of “old Gide and the Greek Chorus boys” (p. 35) and recognizes a kindred spirit in Alison's homosexual friend Webster. Indeed, latent impulses in that direction are evident in the successive triangular relationships he and Alison have shared with Cliff and, before him, Hugh. Yet even as he declares his dissatisfaction with heterosexuality, with equal emphasis Jimmy rejects homosexuality as a personal option.

Here we seem to verge on the psychological case-study which Trussler sees in the play. I would suggest, however, that Jimmy's various forms of ambivalence and non-commitment are less important as symptoms to be analyzed than as features of a character incapable of action in any sphere other than the histrionic. In fact, much of Jimmy's brilliance as a performer lies in his ability to play artfully with his many obstacles to self-realization, making them mirror, interweave with, and metaphorically reflect one another. His refusal of homosexuality is especially adroit in this respect:

No, as far as the Michaelangelo Brigade's concerned, I must be a sort of right-wing deviationist. If the Revolution ever comes, I'll be the first to be put up against the wall with all the other poor old liberals.

(p. 36)

Wittily, Jimmy casts his sexual ambivalence in a metaphor drawn from leftist politics; yet leftist politics are an equally pertinent and troubling topic for Jimmy. Politically, he is “a sort of right-wing deviationist,” uncommitted yet guiltily yearning for the heroic militancy of his father, fatally wounded in Spain. Thus the conceit might as easily be reversed, and Jimmy's sexuality employed as metaphor for his politics, his divergence from the Michaelangelo Brigade figuring his disloyalty to the International Brigades.

This artful conflation of personal confusions climbs to a tour de force level as Jimmy begins to improvise on the word “pusillanimous,” which he intends as an elaborate insult to Alison:

Pusillanimous! It sounds like some fleshy Roman matron, doesn't it? The Lady Pusillanimous seen here with her husband Sextus, on their way to the Games.
looks troubled, and glances uneasily at Alison.
Poor old Sextus! If he were put into a Hollywood film, he's so unimpressive, they'd make some poor British actor play the part. He doesn't know it, but those beefcake Christians will make off with his wife in the wonder of stereophonic sound before the picture's over.
  leans against the board, and closes her eyes.
The Lady Pusillanimous has been promised a brighter easier world than old Sextus can ever offer her. Hi, Pusey! What say we get the hell down to the Arena, and maybe feed ourselves to a couple of lions, huh?

(pp. 21-22)

Jimmy's creative performance here—the instant, transforming leaps from word to image to enacted parody (complete with an American dialect) of a Hollywood epic, is as theatrically gratifying to us as it is painfully uncomfortable to Cliff and Alison, who must go to extreme lengths trying to ignore it. And though he claims otherwise, the speech expresses Jimmy himself far more than it “sums up” (p. 21) Alison. His sense of futility as an Englishman in the American age merges with his sexual uncertainty and fear of inadequacy, all finding their comic embodiment in the figure of the “poor British actor” forced to appear in a trashy American spectacle. And these connotations of national and sexual impotence segue to his corresponding obsession with religion: the Americans who make off with poor old Sextus's wife are “beefcake Christians,” recurrent bugbears, as we know, to the “liberal skinny weakling” Jimmy.

My point is that the formidable energies of Jimmy's tirades derive from the critical mass of his fused insecurities. Their rhetoric vividly engages the manifold reality of his world only to reject it unequivocally. Thus their force as histrionic action—their creative power and theatrical impact on us—is inseparable from their denial of any cohesive self, hence any practical action, on Jimmy's part. Repeatedly, we encounter an inverse proportion between his performative power and his efficacy as a person.

IV

In effect, the entire plot of Look Back in Anger can be read as a series of variations on this paradox of histrionic power and personal powerlessness, exploring and applying it in the context of two sexual relationships. Alison, we have seen, refuses to join willingly in Jimmy's “game” of being human, as its rules require her to stand in for a world the reality of which he rejects and rages at. But she does join him in another performative sphere, the dramatic game of “Squirrels and Bears,” which defines itself as refuge from “the pain of being human beings.” Essential to their sexuality, “Squirrels and Bears” affords them the benefit of Jimmy's fictive imagination and language disentangled from his anger, since it posits an entirely created world, a “cozy zoo for two,” in which union between Jimmy and Alison is possible not in their human selves but in the artificial identities of two “little furry creatures with little furry brains” (p. 47). A fragile refuge at best, “Squirrels and Bears” is placed potentially out of reach by Alison's pregnancy. The birth of a child, after all, would constitute an unbreakable link with reality, rendering impossible the illusion of other-than-human identities in an other-than-real world. This, I think, is the essential logic in Alison's decision to leave Jimmy, as well as in her miscarriage and return to him. Her loss of the child fulfills Jimmy's wish as expressed in the curtain speech that ends Act One:

Oh, my dear wife, you've got so much to learn. I only hope you learn it one day. If only something—something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! (Coming in close to her.) If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little mass of indiarubber and wrinkles. (She retreats away from him.) Please—if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it.
She moves away, stunned, and leans on the gas stove down L. He stands rather helplessly on his own.
Do you know I have never known the great pleasure of lovemaking when I didn't desire it myself. Oh, it's not that she hasn't her own kind of passion. She has the passion of a python. She just devours me whole every time, as if I were some over-large rabbit. That's me. That bulge around her navel—if you're wondering what it is—it's me. Me, buried alive down there, and going mad, smothered in that peaceful looking coil. Not a sound, not a flicker from her—she doesn't even rumble a little. You'd think that this indigestible mess would stir up some kind of tremor in those distended, overfed tripes—but not her!
Crosses up to the door.
She'll go on sleeping and devouring until there's nothing left of me.

(pp. 37-38)

The self-canceling paradox of Jimmy's histrionic power is here set forth in its most frightening form; for the speech is a creative act the main thrust of which is a denial of creation. The image of a life, an evolving self, in the “recognizable human face” is called into being for the sole purpose of wishing it dead. We know, of course, that just such a face is gathering within Alison at the moment, giving Jimmy's words the weight of a curse. Then, in a grotesque progression of images combining his sexual fear of Alison with his Oedipal need of her, he figures himself in her belly, a rabbit in the entrails of a python. Mother and child become predator and victim; pregnancy becomes digestion. A consummate act of self-expression, the piece denies all possibility of a realized self to Jimmy or to anyone else.

Alison is willed away by Jimmy, then, because she literally contains too much of reality, constituting a bridge to the unacceptable world beyond the boundaries of his performative powers. Helena, on the other hand, while she seems at first to embody all the bourgeois conventions most repellent to Jimmy, proves in fact to be an ally in disguise. The logic of their rapid involvement lies in her profession as an actress. Her essential source of energy and power, like his, is histrionic, and her ability to meet him on that plane characterizes every phase of their relationship. From the start, she affords him in full measure what Alison has refused him throughout Act One: a direct and enthusiastically antagonistic response to his tirades. But Helena seeks a closer tie than the understanding of antagonists, and sets about manipulating the scenario accordingly. It is ironically appropriate that her excuse to Alison for staying on in the garret is a potential acting engagement for which she has been sent a script; for her pursuit of Jimmy is indeed the pursuit of a new script and a new role. Jimmy, on reading Alison's farewell note, asks Helena if it is “a line from one of those plays you've been in.” His subsequent tirade concludes with a thundering finale: “Well, the performance is over. Now leave me alone and get out, you evil-minded little virgin.” The performance, however, is anything but over:

She slaps his face savagely. An expression of horror and disbelief floods his face. But it drains away, and all that is left is pain. His hand goes up to his head, and a muffled cry of despair escapes him. Helena tears his hand away, and kisses him passionately, drawing him down beside her.
CURTAIN
END OF ACT II

(pp. 73-4)

If there is a strong tinge of the formulaic in this one-two punch of violence and sexuality, such are simply conventions of the theatre in which Helena (like the actor John Osborne) has worked. She is, after all, a professional: she knows how a sensational curtain moment is created.

Thus Jimmy acquires not only a new mistress but an adept co-performer, one who—far from shunning his histrionic displays—enters into his performance sphere with skill and energy. That is especially evident in Act Three, scene one. Despite the opening sight-gag of Helena ironing in Jimmy's shirt while he and Cliff read the Sunday papers, there is an evident difference between this triangle and that which opened the play. From the outset, Jimmy is no longer orating in a void of non-response. His set-pieces now have the ensemble support of both Helena and Cliff, who echo and amplify his increasingly humorous rhetoric, contributing the right feeds for his punch lines. His one genuine attack on Helena is parried with relative ease and good humor, and he immediately announces “a new song,” suggesting that they “work it into the act” (p. 79) whereupon the three of them proceed to perform a well-rehearsed music hall sequence, including a comic sketch and a song-and-dance. Helena enters the routine unsure “if this is really her cue” (p. 81), but her professional experience does not fail her. “T. S. Eliot and Pam” is indeed “a good double” (p. 86), and we experience its vitality directly. Jimmy, Cliff, and Helena play at being on a stage, positioning themselves before an imaginary audience to whom they refer directly (“Can't you see I'm trying to entertain these ladies and gentlemen?” [p. 80]). Their game, of course, is our reality. For a few moments, we play the role of an imagined audience within the play's fictive world, while conversely, the three characters pursue an objective identical to that of the three actors playing them—performing consciously in our presence and for our pleasure. We are indeed entertained, our enjoyment of the scene heightened by our appreciation of the theatrical joke.

Helena's histrionic presence, then, serves as catalyst for Jimmy's most exuberant and elaborate moments of performance. Yet for Jimmy, this is not enough. As he tells her, he is “heartily sick … tired out, hungry and dry” (p. 86); and he confides to Cliff that he wants from Helena “something I know in my heart she is incapable of giving” (p. 84). He never quite articulates what that “something” is, but we might surmise that for Jimmy Helena's limitations are indivisible from her strengths. If Alison had too much of the real world about her and within her, Helena has about her too much of the theatre's artificial world. “T. S. Eliot and Pam” is certainly an act of greater theatrical dynamism than “Squirrels and Bears,” but it is no less detached from reality. Its created, music hall sphere is purely self-referential (unlike the music hall in which Osborne's Archie Rice will later perform). Nor does Helena bring to Jimmy any more effective model of self-realization than he has previously known. Adept as a role-player, she gives no strong evidence of a recognizable self behind her shifting masks. Indeed, the character she plays to perfection in the music hall sketch is “Nobody” (p. 81).

Jimmy's dissatisfaction with Helena, then, is equivalent to his dissatisfaction with histrionic performance as an end in itself. She has, perhaps, afforded him too complete a withdrawal into dramatic fiction. Her reasons for leaving him upon Alison's return center upon her unwillingness to share Jimmy's vulnerability to reality, her refusal to “take part—in all this suffering” (p. 93). And Alison, now returning on the heels of a miscarriage, shows no reticence where suffering is concerned. Thus she brings back into the garret the uncontrollable reality which Jimmy rejected in her. Yet one crucial aspect has altered: she has fulfilled Jimmy's curse by enduring the loss not only of her child but of her ability to have any other children. Sterile, she no longer carries the possibility of irreversible engagement with the world.

Thus Alison is now able to share Jimmy's pained, ambivalent condition. Yet the conflicting terms of that condition are in no way reconciled. He greets her with a set piece eulogizing his lonely, estranged ego crying out in vain for fulfillment:

Was I really wrong to believe that there's a—a kind of—burning virility of mind and spirit that looks for something as powerful as itself? The heaviest, strongest creatures in this world seem to be the loneliest. Like the old bear, following his own breath in the dark forest. There's no warm pack, no herd to comfort him. That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's, does it?

(p. 94)

The momentum of the rhetoric nearly carries us past its self-canceling nature. But Jimmy's “virility of mind and spirit” exists exclusively within the sphere of performance. His identity as an “old bear” is valid in the heart's forest of imagination where “Squirrels and Bears” can be played, but not beyond its enchanted boundaries, where the voice that cries out is, in fact, “a weakling's.”

Nothing is new here. What is surprising is that Alison, for the first time in the play, responds to this speech of Jimmy's with a full-dress tirade of her own in an emotional rhetoric as lavish as his. Her ordeal-by-sterility has given her the performing ability to enter Jimmy's proper sphere completely, raising her cry alongside him: “I want to be a lost cause. I want to be corrupt and futile!” (p. 95) They renew their marriage on the sacred ground of their shared fictive world—not Jimmy and Alison but the Bear and his Squirrel:

We'll be together in our bear's cave, and our squirrel's drey, and we'll live on honey, and nuts—lots and lots of nuts. And we'll sing songs about ourselves—about warm trees and snug caves, and lying in the sun. And you'll keep those big eyes on my fur, and help me keep my claws in order, because I'm a bit of a soppy, scruffy sort of a bear. And I'll see that you keep that sleek, bushy tail glistening as it should, because you're a very beautiful squirrel, but you're none too bright either, so we've got to be careful. There are cruel steel traps lying about everywhere, just waiting for rather mad, slightly satanic, and very timid little animals. Right?

(p. 96)

The speech effects a close to the play at once moving and unsettling. Its odd musical power derives partly from its echo of King Lear's “Come, let's away to prison” speech to Cordelia, another lyrical vision of escape from the world's cruel steel traps. But the allusion points up an essential difference. Jimmy and Alison are not tragic figures on the verge of immolation. The two timid little animals may sing and tell each other tales, but only “about ourselves,” for they have achieved no vision of the world from which their “silly symphony” (p. 47) protects them. For the final time, Jimmy has conjured up through performance a fiction powerful enough to proclaim disengagement from his world and so negate his complex humanity.

V

The dynamics of Look Back in Anger, then, are intriguingly paradoxical. They are inseparable from one character's histrionic power. Yet the very exercise of his power denies and demolishes any powerful projection of self on that character's part. What are we to make of such contradictions, beyond noting the prodigious theatrical energies they give off?

“Why,” asks John Russell Taylor of Jimmy, “should someone so forceful remain so impotent?” and he finds the answer in “the deficiencies of the modern world.”⁷ I would argue rather that the play's inner logic locates the cause of Jimmy's powerlessness not in his world but in the nature of the histrionic impulse itself. It may help to return to Sartre's comments on the actor as one who unrealizes his own being in the service of fiction, allowing the substance of his self to be “devoured by the imaginary.”⁸ The root assumption here is that effective histrionic performance and efficacious self are polar opposites. Dramatically and philosophically, Sartre explored the histrionic tendency in much human activity toward unreality and self-negation. Indeed, the theatre of Sartre's discovery Jean Genet mirrored the world as little other than an arena of such tendencies. In The Balcony, closely contemporary to Look Back, the energies of the revolution aspire toward their own neutralizing in the histrionic scenarios of the bordello, and ultimately in the iconic dramaturgy of the tomb. Look Back in Anger might be regarded as Osborne's exploration of parallel issues in the context of his own national moment. In the sterile performance space of Jimmy Porter's garret, as in that of Mme Irma's Grand Balcon, acting negates action, and the histrionic undoes the essential. These are not premises with which Osborne remained content. The Entertainer, his next play, posits successful performance and realized self not as opposites but direct counterparts to one another, through the figure of a professional performer failing at both. Yet Look Back in Anger remains very much with us—an extraordinary force field between whose poles of identity and performance the phenomenon of Jimmy Porter's character is suspended, a kind of dramatic Escher drawing, perpetually making and unmaking itself.

Notes

1. John Osborne, “That Awful Museum,” in John Russell Taylor, John Osborne, Look Back in Anger: A Casebook (London, 1968), p. 66.

2. Simon Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne (London, 1969), pp. 54, 51.

3. Michael Billington, The Modern Actor (London, 1973), p. 167.

4. John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (London, 1957), p. 15. Further reference to the text is cited parenthetically.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theatre, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, tr. Frank Jellinek (New York, 1976), pp. 158-70.

6. Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom (New York, 1975), p. 98.

7. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (rev. ed., London, 1969), p. 45.

8. Sartre, p. 162.