John Osborne, a 25-year-old actor-turned-playwright, wrote Look Back in Anger in a month. When it opened in 1956, it gave a jolt to the British theater such as had not been seen since Bernard Shaw more than a half century earlier. Osborne and the play's anti-hero, Jimmy Porter, were quickly tagged with the moniker Angry Young Men. The dramatist Sir David Hare recently stated that Osborne here "wrote a play whose social impact was as profound as its artistic effect. He's the gatekeeper. Everyone else comes piling through after."
Structurally the work was quite conventional; but what came out of Jimmy's mouth was unprecedented. More than four decades later, the play still packs a wallop in its current National Theatre revival. Jimmy is a lower-class graduate of an unprestigious college. He's been married for several years to Alison, who comes from a higher class that he resents. He manages a candy shop with his inseparable buddy Cliff, whom he treats as a doormat -- just as he does his wife. He rants and rails against the Establishment and practically everything else. Utterly self-centered, he behaves boorishly. He insults Alison as "Lady Pusillanimous" and tells her that her mother "is an old bitch and should be dead." When Alison's actress friend Helena turns up, Jimmy calls her "a cow," but shortly (and unconvincingly as Osborne fashions it) installs her in Alison's place as a mistress.
Shortly before his death, Osborne nonsensically asserted that the play is a comedy and that Alison is the chief bully. If this is a comedy, then so is Othello. As Jimmy, Michael Sheen gives a galvanic performance that eclipses that of Kenneth Haigh, who originated the role. Sheen quite properly turns Jimmy into one of the most repulsive characters ever to inhabit a stage. No wonder Helena asks him, "Why do you try so hard to be unpleasant? ...Do you have to be so offensive?" Emma Fielding is appealing as the put-upon wife, and heartbreaking when she says, "All I want is a little peace." Jason Hughes deserves better as the kind and lovable Cliff. William Gaunt is admirable in his one scene as Alison's father.
The only disappointment is Matilda Ziegler, whose Helena is strangely pallid for a character who is supposed to be a professional actress. Robert Jones has designed the large and suitably messy, one-room attic apartment where the Porters live. In 1991, Osborne wrote Deja vu, a sequel that dealt with the same group of characters 35 years later. This was quite a letdown. But there is no denying the unforgettable power of the original milestone -- and in this production, for all Jimmy's bluster, the look of terror in Sheen's eyes at the final curtain.
