Is Look Back in Anger a rage against a frustrating society?

In a stylistic manner, yes. The play Look Back in Anger , by John Osborne, attempts to break free from the former generation of playwrights prior to the 1950's. During that era, playwrights had a tendency to create what is known as "drawing room comedies". These were works that were meant for mere entertainment and featured characters that were superficial, and whose only purpose was to make the audience laugh with their wittiness.

Osborne, however, belonged to a group of playwrights who wanted to offer their version of the reality of a socially unfair society and its effects in the modern man. His style wanted to bring out what was really going on in England at the time without sugar-coating it, to put it in more simplistic terms. After all, Osborne himself was quite unhappy with his own life by the time the play was written. Look Back in Anger is basically Osborne's venting spell at the oppressive life he was leading at the time.

How does Look Back in Anger protest contemporary English society?

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is a protest against an English society that is still dominated by class separation and conflict. Jimmy Porter is an extremely angry man from a working-class background. His wife, Alison, is upper-class, and Jimmy believes that she, like other upper-class people, don't know what it really means to feel or to suffer. He claims that because of his lower-class upbringing, he is more alive than Alison.

Later in the play, Alison tells her friend Helena how Jimmy and friend Hugh Tanner, also a member of the working class, would go on “raids” to parties given by her upper class friends. Alison often felt like “a hostage from those sections of society they had declared war on.” Helena is rather surprised that Alison ever married Jimmy, but Alison explains that Jimmy was determined to marry her mostly because her parents disapproved, and he wanted to spite them. Again, class conflict comes to the foreground.

Jimmy is also obsessed with England's past, which he believes was much better than contemporary society. He honors the memory of his father, who died from wounds he got during the Spanish Civil War, and he firmly believes that England has lost much of the power it ever had. It has grown weak and ineffective, mostly due to the corruption of the upper class.

Many of Jimmy's ideas are certainly a protest against English society, but the protest Osborne incorporates into the play actually runs deeper. Osborne, by presenting Jimmy's excessive anger and occasional cruelty, is also criticizing this class of angry young men who actually pride themselves on being better than others because they are part of the working class. At the same time, Osborne is likely criticizing England's growing weakness and failure to learn from and honor its past. Again though, Jimmy is excessive in his focus on the past to the exclusion of acknowledging the progress made and the good things in contemporary society, and the author seems to be pointing this out as well.