Chapter - 19

Question- Write a note on the popularity of the play.

Or

Do you think after reading 'Look Back in Anger' that the success of the play was the result of the hyprotizing effect of Alison's movements in her protracted spell at the ironing board ?

Answer -

In Look Back In Anger, the setting and action reflect searching irony of the hero, of a kind which forces us to see that even if John Osborne intended elements of self portrait then he did so is no uncritical mood (the comparison with Gregers Wesle, Ibsen savagely ironic self-portrait in the Wild Duck, may seem apt.) Again, if Jimmy is offered as a typical hero, he is so as Hamlet is a recognisable and recurring type, and perhpas also a permanent possibility in the make up of any sensitive person but in a mynority in any generation and in most individuals resolutely suppressed.

How, then, have the myth and the over simplified interpretation distorted him? Partly though the author's undoubted concern for the contemporary scene, and the extreme authenticity of his depiction of Jimmy's World. To the many insights about this witnessed by this case book not much can be added though my own stress would fall very much on the hydrogen bomb. Though the Bomb is mentioned only twice, one feels throughout its effect upon the moral imagination of a generation, in the limits which it sets both to personal herosim and to the future as incentives to hope and action remembering the type of participation in Spain which seemed possible to intellectuals of Jimmy's type in 1937, and the inevitable paralysis imposed on this counter parts at the time of Hungry nineteen years later, one can feel that the play is as subtly aware of the psychogical impact of the bomb on men of Jimmy's temperament as anything else in recent literature. Again consider the place of the establishment in the play. Protests against insensitivity and hypocrisy in church and state have been more or less constant features of western civilisation, atleast since those of christ himself, and Jimmy's main complaints are little different in content from those of (say). D.H. Lawrence thirty years before. But the tone is different, and distinctive at belongs to a generation which names after the second world war, after the Attle administration, and is becoming aware in this new situation of several things, the totally false euphoria of the 'New Elizabethan age' the perennial success of the middle classes against those who try to take their own ideals too seriously, and again the Bomb that factor, new to the world since the death of Lawrence, whose effect upon humanity has still to be fully understood one's final feeling is that one is hearing the age old voice of moral outrage, but hearing it authenticaly in the post-atomatic age.    - (A.E. Dyson)

There are really two plays in Look Back in Anger. One of them is ordinary and noisy, and Mr. Osborne has written it with some wit but more prolixity, the other is sketched into the margin of the first, and consist of hardly every works at all, but is controlled by a fine and sympathetic imagination, and is superbly played, in long passage of paion and silence, by miss Mary Ure. The play that, judging from the title of his work, and from the fact that one of the characters, Jimmy Porter, speaks more words than the rest of the company but together, Mr. Osborne thinks he has written us yet another of youth's accusation against the world. Jimmy porter is a young intellectual who, with his less bright witted partner, Cliff Lewis, keeps a sweet stall somewhere in the midlands. He has been to a provincial university has married Alison Redfern, a girl out of the upper middle classes, been despised and spied on by her relatives, lives in a squalid one-room flat, and reads, and comments on at enoromous length what he calls in a sort of admiring hitred, the posh sunday papers,

His part is a long, sustained screamat society, literary critics and his wife. She stands, for what seems whole days at the ironing-board, smoothing tousers shirts, ties, while he insults her in phrases of passionate bitterness edged with a frustrated love. His complaints against her are endless, she has tried to keep some of her friends, she still clutches round her rags of her old social smartness, she still writes letters to her mother, she cannot be goaded into speech, she is fighting a long delaying battle against absorption into his way of life as though she had not a tongue in her head. So the endless trade goes on, while Cliff Lewis tries ineffectively to defend the batterd,,punched, brow beaten and trampled on girl, who says nothing and does nothing in reply, but goes on ironing with a look of balanced sorrow on her face, which is white exhausted as if after a hundred sleepless nights, tormented by a hundred ceaseless headaches.     - (Harold Hobson)

The subject of the play is the despair of a generation that has only bitter memories of part betrayals of ideals. The Ran. Corous, young hero's father had faught in the Spanish civil war on the Republican side. The son, who operates a sweets stall in London, can only Look Back in Anger and toward avoid in the future. He lashes out at those who were closest, to him, especially his long suffering, upper-class wife, in a vain effort to assuage his sense of futility and stalemate. His wife leaves his atleast but with a woman's tenderness for her suffering man she returns to care for him and to try to fill the void in her own life, left by the loss of her baby.

Whatever the mertis or the writing, and they are considerable, Look Back in Anger is limited by the nihilism of its author and the crackle and sputter of fire works in a mist. For a play characterized by admirally sustained dialogue and taut, fragmentary conflicts Look Back in Anger was curiously unsatisfying. The intermissions was unique in my play going experience. Most broad way play goers were fascinated by the superb performances of Mary Ure as the wife Kenneth Haigh as the angry husband, left the theatre desolated rather than purged.

Equally symptomatic is the inconclusiveness present in the literature of protest. The energy of even so intense a work as Look Back in Anger brings to run out after the first act, and the wife's return at the end leads to no particular conclusions. John Osborne's vigorous writing cannot move ahead full steam when he presumbly believes he has now where to go. The weakening of Look Back in Anger after the first act is perhaps the most conclusive evidence we have that modern drama is in a state of crisis. Modern stage realism was the product of both anger and hope. Now only the anger provides energy, the hope; Producing mostly old problem plays and liberal tracts in dialogue, only debilitates. While Ibsen and his school led the theatre modern realism was a mark of health outraged victorian moralists characterized it as decadence then and, ironically now that our professional moralists no longer trouble themselves over the state of the theatre, they may yet be proved right.

I cannot join those who consider every sign of subsiding realism a mark of progress or those who exult over this state of affairs in the contemporary theatre. We are not yet ready to dismiss realism categorically. The fact is that Look Back in Anger begins with the jet propulsion of striped emotion and makes most flights of fancy and poetry in our theatre seem unexciting.    - (John Gassner)

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