Look Back In Anger

Director – Rowan Finken

Playwright – John Osborne

Director’s Synopsis of Piece:

‘Angry young man’ Jimmy Porter lives with his wife Alison and friend Cliff in their one room apartment in an industrial town.  They spend their Sundays reading the papers and ironing. Jimmy torments Alison with her upper-class background and Cliff with his working class ignorance. The Porter’s relationship is crumbling while Cliff tries to keep everything on an even keel. Things get a whole lot worse with the arrival of Alison’s best friend, Helena Charles, who advises her to leave this volatile relationship. This results in a test of everyone’s loyalty.

My Interpretation of Look Back In Anger:

I will admit that I had never heard of this piece before and from speaking to a few of my peers, who would interested in theatre, neither had they. However upon researching the piece I found it to have quite a reputation. The drama was the beginning of a new type of theatre when it debuted in 1956, the kitchen-sink drama (the then new wave of realistic drama depicting the family lives  of working‐class characters, on stage and in broadcast plays). this style of theatre is not to everyone’s taste and honestly I did not know what my reaction would be. The UCC Dramat production staging was different to what I had seen before. There was no standing set, just furniture, depicting a one room apartment where the drama in its entirety takes place. As soon as I sat in the audience and observed the staging I knew the writing would have to be strong as the production could not rely on flashy production elements. Lighting,sound,costume and make-up  remained uniform and well matched with the neutral and muted tone of the set design. All production elements combined to support the writing of the drama as oppose to stand out. I was quite impressed with this as I tried to dissect the production elements afterwards and found that each of the individual designs almost blended together. This is a positive as it was easy to recognise that all of the individual designers had the same vision in mind. In terms of the writing, I found the piece to be a bit heavy and wordy in places but within the context of the character delivering these verbose lines along with the time ion which the piece was wrote it made perfect sense. The performances I found to be throughly enjoyable. This piece of theatre calls for a performance of the everyday and mundane and maintaining that consistent energy for two hours and fifteen minutes does take quite a lot of stamina. Overall I found the piece to be quite enjoyable and quite a peculiar choice for student theatre. I felt the piece caused a dialogue between the audience and the subject matter of the drama and by the end of the piece there doesn’t seem to be conflict just life represented on stage. After I saw the UCC Dramat production I researched it some more and came across this Guardian Article explaining the significance of the piece and it’s place in British theatre history. Below you will see a YouTube video showing one of the many monologues by the central character of the piece, Jimmy Porter.