John Osbourne’s classic Look Back in Anger is one of those plays which should probably come with a health warning for people with high blood pressure and a family history of heart attacks. It’d be a pretty good idea, anyway, for the rather nerve-shredding version by Macaroons Production currently showing at Greenside. The cast ably whisks us through Osbourne’s exploration of love, misogyny and domestic violence as Alison (Artemis Fitzalan Howarth) and Jimmy (Tom Hilton) oscillate between bitter, violent fights and moments of marital bliss helped along by their Welsh lodger Cliff (Conor Kennedy). Things reach breaking point when Alison’s friend Helena (Lara McIvor) appears, driving husband and wife further and further apart.
As you’d expect from the original, the overriding emotion in this production is anger. The unfortunate thing is that there’s just a bit too much of it, particularly from Hilton’s Jimmy. His numerous vicious diatribes against Alison and Helena, like the outburst where he expresses a prophetic wish that his wife might become pregnant and lose the child, tend to end with Hilton charging about the stage shouting unnecessarily loudly. Hilton does a good job of capturing Jimmy’s turbulent character and his capacity to swing from relative calm to passionate fury, but he overdoes the anger and the production suffers for it.
There is a bit more to the production than just the anger, though. Particularly touching is the scene when Cliff comforts Alison after she burns her hand on the oven and she confides in him she is pregnant. Howarth is convincingly torn between her fear of Jimmy’s reaction and her defiant love for him, while Kennedy’s performance subtly conveys his impossible position as Jimmy’s friend. Most of the best moments in the production are like this, quieter and tender. It’s just a shame they’re overshadowed by all that anger.
