The Almeida’s Angry and Young season has opened with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger that heralded the mid 1950s revolution in drama and gave birth to the Angry Young Man genre. And anger dominates this play, personified in the character of Jimmy Porter. Billy Howle is unrelenting and constantly energised in his powerful portrayal of this destructive emotion. Was Jimmy just born with a chip on his shoulder or was it the childhood experience of sitting on his father’s deathbed that set him against the world? As he says, “You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless. And I can never forget it.” Social injustice has not helped nor the humility of an educated albeit working calss man running a market sweet stall and the disapproval of his wife’s well-to-do and moneyed family. But it hardly explains the extent of his rage nor the venomous abuse he hurls at the woman he married.
Billy Howle is unrelenting and constantly energised in his powerful portrayal
Alison Porter (Ellora Torchia) has learned to listen to and largely ignore her husband's rants as has their lodger, Jimmy’s friend, Cliff Lewis (Iwan Davies), who has an affectionate relationship with Alison that Jimmy strangely consents to. Davies successfully plays this awkward role of wanting to remain faithful to both parties, remaining silent for long periods as the tension builds up but also feeling the need to interject and at times console when the situation becomes more heated than usual.
Torchia conveys Alison’s sense of being reconciled to her lot in life, but increasingly shows that no one can be expected to suffer Jimmy’s vituperative outbursts indefinitely. When her actress friend Helena Charles (Morfydd Clark) arrives to stay, matters are brought to a head. Clark turns on all the poshness that Jimmy despises and Helena too becomes the subject of his aggression. She takes matters into her own hands and summons Colonel Redfern (Deka Walmsley) to take his daughter Alison away. Walmsley personifies the bygone age Jimmy so despises, but shows the Colonel to be a well-meaning and sympathetic parent. The plot goes through various twists thereafter raising questions about the attraction people have towards loathsome individuals.
The play’s revival is intended to be ‘angled towards 2024’ which comes across in the modern style of direction deployed by Atri Banerjee and the contribution of the other creatives: set by Naomi Dawson, lighting by Lee Curran and sound by Peter Rice. The sunken drum at the centre of the revolve provides an open pit which Jimmy symbolically gazes into.
But Look Back in Anger remains entrenched in the period even if we can see now how it examines themes that have become the subject of so much more modern drama.
