mark lawson on look back in anger the guardian 31-03-06 (1)

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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

Mark Lawson on Don't Look Back in Anger | Stage | The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/mar/31/theatre2/print

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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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mark lawson on look back in anger the guardian 31-03-06 (1)

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