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Fifty years of angerOn May 8 1956, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger premiered at
the Royal Court in London. It shocked the theatre world, some
acclaiming it as the voice of a new generation, others damning it
as a squalid rant. Mark Lawson looks back to the night that
changed British theatre
Mark Lawson
The Guardian, Friday 31 March 2006
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'Impressive and depressing' ... Kenneth Haigh expresses Jimmy Porter's rage in the company of (left to right) Mary
Ure, Alan Bates and Helena Hughes, during the first night's performance of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court
In early May 1956, Britain was rehearsing for destruction. A civil defence exercise took
place in London and Birmingham, based on the hypothesis that 10-megaton hydrogen
bombs had exploded at dawn. The Times reported volunteers with fake blood and burns
lying on street corners, waiting to give practice for ambulances and police cars.
Within four months, there would indeed be a war, although it involved not a Russian
nuclear attack on the UK but Egypt's seizure of a vital shipping channel. But, between
the Eden government's dry-run for atomic apocalypse and its implosion over Suez, the
capital's theatre district was shaken by a metaphorical explosion of its own: on May 8,
the Royal Court theatre premiered a first play by a 26-year-old actor called John
Osborne.
The other big London theatrical opening of the week was The House by the Lake, a
Christie-ish crime comedy by Hugh Mills about two people trying to kill the same man.
The major movie opening was Hitchock's The Trouble With Harry. The literary pages
were excited by Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. On what was still called the
wireless, the BBC Third Programme had just premiered a verse-drama by the poet
Louis Macniece, called The Dark Tower.
The legend is that Look Back in Anger changed British theatre for ever, replacing
stage-sets of Belgravia mansions with a drab Midlands flat, and smart upper-class
remarks with the angry anti-establishment rants of its hero, Jimmy Porter.
It's a measure of how unexpected the setting was that, at the first performances, the
sight of Alison Porter's ironing-board on stage is said to have drawn from the audience
the sort of gasp of surprise otherwise achieved only by the most innovative cinematic
special effects. In an era of feel-good theatre (although Rattigan's plays were darker or
deeper than their first productions allowed them to be), Look Back in Anger
deliberately provoked bad feelings about Britain, the war-time generation and
conventional drama.
Certainly, the ruling forces of the UK stage seem to have sensed a revolution. The
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impresario "Binkie" Beaumont, camp baron of the profitable comedy and well-made
play and with 40 theatres at his command, walked out of Look Back in Anger at the
interval. Terence Rattigan, Beaumont's house dramatist and the author of The Winslow
Boy and Separate Tables, tried to follow him but was dissuaded by TC Worsley, theatre
critic of the Financial Times. Even so, when Rattigan left at the end and was asked by a
reporter what he thought, he trembled: "I think the writer is trying to say: 'Look how
unlike Terence Rattigan I am, Ma!'"
It's in the nature of the theatre that even its great events are momentary and vanish. But
this particular evening at the Court is even harder to reconstruct than most, because of
the melancholy fact that almost no one connected with Look Back in Anger caused
much trouble to the pension industry.
Osborne was just 65 when he died in 1994. The director, Tony Richardson, had gone
three years earlier, aged 63. Mary Ure, who played Alison Porter, though the youngest
of the cast, had not even lived until the 20th anniversary, dying in 1975 at 42. George
Devine, who accepted the play for the Royal Court, died at 55 in 1966. Even Alan Bates,
who played Jimmy's emollient friend Cliff, can no longer give eye-witness testimony; he
died three years ago, aged 69. The first Jimmy Porter, Kenneth Haigh, survives, though
he is very unwell. For the most part, the gang was variously lost to smoking, drinking,
depression and terrible illnesses.
The result of this is to leave historians of the first night dependent on memoirs, and to
make the few remaining first-person memories precious. William Gaskill, a young actor
at the time, would become a director and run the Royal Court. But in 1956, in his early
20s, he was a friend of Richardson's. The director had shown him a copy before
rehearsals and he was "knocked over by it", finding a "passion and freshness, a rhetoric
that had gone from theatre: one person speaking directly to the audience".
He remembers his first meeting with the writer. Osborne was "raffish, I suppose. An
old-fashioned word! I remember him as very charming and flirtatious. I never saw him
angry in person; that only came out in the plays." But Gaskill recalls no sense of history
on the first night. Nine years later, when Edward Bond's Saved opened at the Court with
a scene of stones being thrown at a child in a pram, there were boos and a feeling of
boundaries being crossed. Anger, though, had a much slower impact. The stories of the
play's revolutionary effect - such as Beaumont storming out - became celebrated only
later.
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had been staged in August 1955, introducing an
unprecedented bleakness of dialogue and design; Bertolt Brecht, a pioneer of political
theatre, died in 1956. So, logically, Look Back in Anger, following Beckett and Brecht,
cannot have been quite the shock to audiences and critics that the theatrical annals
insist. But those challenging dramatists had been Irish and German, and their stage
techniques abstract. Osborne wounded the traditionalists much more because he was
English and realist.
Osborne had more than theoretical experience of the kind of drama his own play helped
to replace. His memoir Almost a Gentleman (1991) records his time as an actor in
regional repertory theatres, often working, as it happens, for Binkie Beaumont. Rapidly
dissatisfied with acting, he was prone to theatrical pranks. Appearing in an army
melodrama, he applied spirit-gum to both sides of his fake moustache so that, after a
romantic clinch, the leading actress was left with the facial-hair stuck on her upper-lip.
Stage-props were also at risk; a plate of sandwiches for a meal scene would be
sabotaged by the addition of what was then called a rubber johnny.
Such stunts led to longer gaps between engagements and Osborne began to write,
initially verse dramas in the then fashionable style of Christopher Fry. In 1955, already
separated from his first wife Pamela Lane, he was living in Hammersmith with a friend
called Anthony Creighton. Gossips insisted that the men were lovers, a claim supported
by Creighton in an interview before his death, but Osborne and his family have always
denied this. Gaskill, who saw them together many times, says now: "I just don't know.
Their relationship was anyone's guess."
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Creighton's own ambitions as a dramatist were initially more advanced than Osborne's.
Together, they wrote Epitaph for George Dillon, revived last year in London. But on
May 4 1955, Osborne noted in his pocket diary the start of a solo project: "Began Look
Back in Anger."
The situation of the central character Jimmy Porter - trapped in a combative marriage
in cramped digs - recalled Osborne's own situation with Lane; Porter's torrential
monologues about the stasis and decay of Britain were distillations of the playwright's
own politics. In late May, Osborne took a small part in a production at Morecambe of
Seagulls Over Sorrento, by Hugh Hastings. He finished writing his own play sitting in a
deckchair on the beach, looking out at sea.
Water would become strangely important to the fortunes of Look Back in Anger.
Osborne had persuaded Creighton to spend a legacy from his mother on an old rhine
barge, the M/Y Egret, which was moored near Chiswick in west London. Friends always
commented that it smelled of cabbage: the barge-mates were experimenting with
vegetarianism.
Reading on deck a copy of the theatrical paper the Stage, the aspiring writer saw an ad
for a new group called the English Stage Company whose director, George Devine, was
seeking new plays. He posted off a script which, after the rejection of possible
alternative titles including Man in a Rage and My Blood is a Mile High, was again called
Look Back in Anger. On August 12 1955, a grey-haired, breathless man was to be seen
approaching the boat, having unwisely rowed out at high tide. This was Devine, who
offered Osborne £25 for an option on the Porter play.
It would be staged in a season at the Royal Court beginning with The Mulberry Bush, a
drama by the then modish novelist Angus Wilson. Devine was nervous about the
box-office prospects of the unknown Osborne and so sought to protect his play by
scheduling only a short run before two verse dramas by Ronald Duncan, Don Juan and
The Death of Satan. The fact that these supposed bankers are now quite forgotten - and
that Anger had to be extended when Duncan's unspeakable historical pieces were
pulled off after catastrophic reviews - may stand as a warning for theatre managers
against making too many assumptions.
Hopes for Anger were very low. Dozens of actors turned it down, horrified by its
bolshieness. According to Osborne, one "revered theatre dame" explained her refusal of
a part with the view that "it should be thrown into the river and washed out to sea so
that it can never be seen again". It is unclear if this was an instinctive insult or if she
knew that the writer lived on the Thames.
Richardson, hired to direct, recalled in his posthumously published autobiography The
Long-Distance Runner (1993) that "rehearsals were terse and a bit glum". Osborne's
own phrase was "subdued and unspeculative". One day, Richardson gloomily observed
that the third act was sagging; the author wrote a quick song on the bus.
Publicity was also considered problematic. George Fearon, press officer for the new
season, read the script and summoned its author to a meeting in a pub, where he
informed Osborne that he was appalled by the drama and saw no hope of interesting
the papers, before offering a psychological summary of the unfortunate author: "I
suppose you're really ... an angry young man?" Fearon was, as Osborne recalled, the first
to say a phrase that, against the publicist's predictions, was indeed taken up by the
papers.
Stage censorship would remain in force in Britain for another 12 years and so LBIA, in
common with all scripts at the time, was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, the royal
official historically charged with keeping theatres clean. The response of the Queen's
blue pencil was, with hindsight, slightly surprising. CD Heriot - a notably conservative
assessor who two years later would dismiss Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party as "an
insane and pointless play" - seems, uncharacterisitically, to have got Osborne's point. In
March 1956, he reported that "this impressive and depressing new play breaks new
psychological ground". He asked for nine changes, including "page 41, cut the
homosexual reference" and "page 16, alter reference to 'excessive love-making'", but
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granted the play a licence and concluded with a summary that would not have disgraced
a theatre critic: "The play's interest, in fact, lies in its careful observation of the
anteroom of hell."
In fact, as it turned out, none of the play's first professional reviewers would be either as
insightful or as kind. In his memoir, Osborne recalls waking fully-clothed and totally
hungover in his cold cabin and crossing the river to Mortlake to buy the dailies. Even 35
years on, he omitted to quote them, either because the memory or the research was too
much for him. But the overnight verdicts still stand as a warning to critics about how
much they can miss. The Times complained of the very detail that would make Osborne
celebrated: "The piece consists largely of angry tirades." The Manchester Guardian
knew what the play thought it was doing, but didn't think it succeeded: "The author and
actors do not persuade us that they 'speak for' a new generation." The London Evening
Standard called it "a self-pitying snivel".
In his memoir Richardson recalls sitting with Osborne "in the little coffee shop
adjoining the theatre and opposite the Sloane Square tube station, frozen in depression,
with little belief in our futures". He does not include the savage line that Osborne
attributes to him in his own book: "But what on earth did you expect? You didn't expect
them to like it, did you?" But, by the time both wrote their memoirs, Osborne and
Richardson were enemies, still festering over issues dating from the movie of Tom
Jones they made in 1963.
During the first weekend of Look Back in Anger's run, the play was featured on the BBC
Third Programme's The Critics, forerunner of subsequent broadcast cultural bust-ups.
The programme was presented that week ("conducted", as Radio Times has it) by Sir
Gerald Barry, with critics Catherine de la Roche, Lionel Hale, Alan Pryce-Jones and
Ivor Brown.
Brown led the attack on Anger: "The play's setting - a one-room flat in the Midlands - is
unspeakably squalid. It is difficult to believe that a colonel's daughter, brought up with
some standards, which we are led to believe Alison is, would have stayed in this sty for a
day ..." The chairman cut in to advise listeners that Alison Porter spent most of the play
at an ironing board: "I almost had a nervous breakdown waiting for her to iron one
pyjama top."
But though dismissed by The Critics, Osborne was saved by another sabbath institution.
Kenneth Tynan, a 39-year-old peacock who championed new theatrical writing with a
critical prose every bit as original as Osborne's drama, published in the Observer words
that have become at least as quoted as any lines in the play: "All the qualities are there,
qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage ... I doubt if I could love anyone
who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger."
Tynan did not generally go short of lovers but, in the summer of 1956, he would have
been somewhat lonely if he had operated the veto suggested in his review. Even his
write-up did not make the production a significant success. The force that lifted the play
into the history books would come from an unexpected source.
This was a period when theatre feared the competition from television; a second British
channel, ITV, had been added the previous year. Somehow, however, the BBC was
persuaded to screen a 25-minute extract. These days, such a gesture would be
artistically unlikely and indeed legally impossible, amounting to little more than free
advertising. But the chunk, introduced by the artistic grandee Lord Harewood and
giving the play a first stamp of establishment approval, did its commercial work,
attracting a new audience to Sloane Square.
Osborne became a celebrity, pictured in magazines in a Rolls-Royce at London Airport
with Mary Ure, whose Mrs Porter had led to her becoming Mrs Osborne. The Royal
Court became for 50 years the nursery for British playwrights, incubating David Hare,
Christopher Hampton, Caryl Churchill, Roy Williams and many others. The title which
Osborne had finally decided upon on Morecambe Beach entered the English language,
encouraging, among other tributes, a famous headline about a library strike: Book Lack
in Ongar.
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Oddly, the one thing not to prosper was the play. There have been few major revivals,
although Peter Hall plans one in Bath this year and Radio 4 broadcasts a cut-down
version tomorrow afternoon. It is perhaps revealing that the piece benefits from this
severe trimming, as genuine classics shouldn't.
The problem maybe is that the moment of Look Back in Anger's explosion on to
Britain's postwar theatrical scene is impossibly lost. Just as the deaths of all the major
participants make the details of the first night hazy, so time has removed the context
that made the play shocking. How can we imagine what it was like, in a London caught
between nuclear fears and Suez, for an audience that had watched the previous night
The House by the Lake by Hugh Mills, to look up from their programmes and find
Jimmy Porter raging from the stage?
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