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Look Back in Anger

by John Osborne

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Why is Look Back in Anger a milestone in contemporary British drama?

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Look Back in Anger is considered a milestone in contemporary British drama because it helped introduce a rawer, less refined kind of play to audiences. Its passionate commentary helped define what social plays would look like in the postwar period.

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Look Back in Anger introduced impassioned and controversial commentary of modern society onto the British stage. John Osbourne's play features a highly unlikeable, angry protagonist in the verbose and provocative Jimmy Porter. Its focus on the lower classes sets it apart from other popular plays that focused more on the rich or the bourgeois.

Largely, the play taps into the unsaid emotions of the postwar culture: the spiritual emptiness and emotional shallowness of a consumerist culture ruled by bourgeois values and a repressive class system that continues to linger in the United Kingdom. While Jimmy Porter has no one single enemy in all of his rants (though the middle class, the wealthy, and religious groups all get their turn), he does yearn for a "cause" to fight for and a life beyond the drudgery of his candy stall job.

The play was among the first in a movement known as...

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"Angry Young Man" literature. These were works created by working-class and/or left-wing British writers who were dissatisfied with the British establishment's values and class prejudice.Look Back in Anger is likely the most famous work from this movement, encapsulating the fury and indignation these writers felt for the socially disenfranchised.

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Why is "Look Back in Anger" significant in British theatre history?

Huge question - and one about which people have written entire books. When it premiered on the 8th May 1956 at the Royal Court, "Look Back" caused uproar - it opens, of course, with Alison Porter doing the ironing, and at the sight of an ironing board, the audience gasped.

The prevalent style before "Look Back" might be best seen by comparing it with another popular play from the period ("The Chalk Garden" by Enid Bagnold might be a good place to start) - but they tend to be set in drawing rooms, to be classified usually as comedies, and to focus on upper-class characters.

John Osborne actually started the movement with "Look Back" that came to be known as the "Angry Young Men" - who brought writing which, like Osborne's play, sparkled with energy and determination, eschewed politeness, and sympathetically depicted middle-class characters realistically - ironing boards and all!

Though critics like Dan Rebellato have since argued otherwise, the premiere of "Look Back" is traditionally seen as the beginning of the "Angry Young Men" movement in British Theatre.

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