I recently saw a fine production of John Osborne’s 1956 play ‘Look Back in Anger.’ (The Almeida, Islington until 30 November) 

There’s a riddle associated with this work. It’s celebrated for precipitating a revolution in British theatre. And yet it’s very rarely staged, and it hasn’t been performed in London for 25 years. Now I think I understand.

 Jimmy: Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm. Just another Sunday evening.

‘Look Back in Anger’ is set in Jimmy and Alison Porter’s shabby one-bedroom flat in a large Midlands town. They have been married for three years. We meet the couple on a gloomy Sunday evening. Alison, wearing an expensive but grubby skirt and one of Jimmy’s shirts, is doing the ironing. Jimmy and his old friend and lodger, the amiable Cliff, are seated in armchairs, drinking tea and reading the newspapers. Jimmy, in tired tweed jacket and flannels, smokes his pipe, while the others puff away at cigarettes.

 Jimmy: God, how I hate Sundays! It’s always so depressing, always the same. We never seem to get any further, do we? Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing. A few more hours, and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away.

Jimmy is working-class and university-educated. He practices the jazz trumpet and aspires to become a writer. Having tried a number of jobs (journalism, advertising, selling vacuum cleaners), he now runs a sweet-stall on the market. Reclining in his armchair, he offers cynical commentary on the news stories, laced with references to JB Priestley, Emily Bronte and Vaughan Williams. 

Jimmy: I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age - unless you're an American of course. 

Jimmy regards himself as intellectually superior to his friend and wife. He chides them for their lack of spirit, and rages against the inertia in modern British society.

Jimmy: Nobody can be bothered. No one can raise themselves out of their delicious sloth. You two will drive me round the bend soon …Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm – that’s all. I want to hear a warm thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I’m alive!

 Jimmy seems particularly to enjoy taunting Alison, and criticising her family for being upper-class.

Jimmy: You’ve never heard so many well-bred commonplaces come from beneath the same bowler hat. The Platitude from Outer Space – that’s brother Nigel… Nigel is just about as vague as you can get without being actually invisible…And nothing is more vague about Nigel than his knowledge. His knowledge of life and ordinary human beings is so hazy, he really deserves some decoration for it – a medal inscribed ‘For Vaguery in the Field.’

 Jimmy demands total loyalty from his partner (‘Either you’re with me or against me.’). He is also paranoid, suspicious of her motives and anticipating plots. When she leaves the room, he rifles through her handbag and reads her letters.

 Jimmy tries to goad Alison into a response. Eventually he directs his rhetorical guns straight at her.

 Jimmy: All this time, I have been married to this woman, this monument to non-attachment, and suddenly I discover that that there is actually a word that sums her up. Not just an adjective in the English language to describe her with – it’s her name! Pusillanimous!

Jimmy’s insults are getting to Alison. And yet, except for a few muttered complaints, she suffers in silence and carries on ironing. 

 Alison: All I want is a little peace. 

Jimmy is clearly a vile individual. (Alison hypothesizes that he has married her for revenge.) Aggrieved and self-pitying, he justifies his bitterness with the death of his father when he was a child. As if he uniquely understands grief.

Jimmy: Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity. For twelve months, I watched my father dying - when I was ten years old… You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry - angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about - love... betrayal... and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in your life.

 ‘Look Back in Anger’ was an early example of realist ‘kitchen-sink drama’, and Osborne and fellow writers of the time (including Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Arnold Wesker) were referred to as ‘the angry young men.’

Jimmy: The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!

 The play is famous for sweeping away the sophisticated society dramas of Terrence Rattigan and Noel Coward. Where theatregoers had been accustomed to seeing polite comedies of manners, acted out in elegant middle-class homes and hotels, this work featured genuine working-class characters, facing contemporary problems and articulating raw emotions. 

Jimmy: I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. ...There aren't any good, brave causes left.

‘Look Back in Anger’ was rooted in late ‘50s Britain; in the spirit of lost Empire, economic decline and rising class-consciousness.

It gained its power from its context. In the same way that the radical impact of Impressionism can only be properly understood when set against the stifling conservatism of the Paris Salon; that Pop Art can be viewed as a response to the intellectual purity of Abstract Expressionism; and that Punk can be better appreciated as the antithesis of self-indulgent Prog Rock. The work is the product, not just of an individual’s imagination, but also of the environment.

Context shapes content.

The male critics of the era lionised Jimmy as the voice of disaffected youth, without properly recognising his malice and misogyny. Perhaps class struggle was just more compelling to them than gender equality. Watching ‘Look Back in Anger’ today, the audience does not cheer his sedition. Rather it recoils at his self-absorption and cruelty. The play stands as a striking study in toxic masculinity. And that makes it still relevant.

Helena: Why do you try so hard to be unpleasant?... Do you have to be so offensive?

 In the second act Alison is visited by her father, a retired Colonel who spent much of his life serving in India. He confesses to not really comprehending Jimmy at all. 

 Colonel: Perhaps Jimmy is right. Perhaps I am a – what is it? an old plant left over from the Edwardian Wilderness. And I can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.

Alison observes that her father and Jimmy just have different perspectives on the same world. 

Alison: You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. 

Alison’s point here resonated with me. When I was younger, I felt that society was stuck in its ways; too conservative and conventional; too slow to adopt new ideas. Now I’m older, I worry that everything has moved too quickly; that technology is out of control; that we have lost too much in the upheaval. (And I rather like the plays of Rattigan and Coward.)

 Again, context shapes content. 

 We all need to be mindful that our views are rooted in particular eras; that we regard the world through the prism of our own experience; that our judgements are filtered through our individual assumptions and biases.

 Towards the end of the play, Alison’s friend Helen contends that, far from being a thoroughly contemporary character, Jimmy is a man out of time. I wish that were true.

Helena: Do you know – I have discovered what is wrong with Jimmy? It’s very simple really. He was born out of his time…There’s no place for people like that any longer – in sex, or politics, or anything. That’s why he’s so futile…He doesn’t know where he is, or where he’s going. He’ll never do anything, and he’ll never amount to anything.

'People try to put us d-down, 
Just because we get around. 
Things they do look awful c-c-cold.
I hope I die before I get old. 
This is my generation,
This is my generation, baby.
Why don't you all f-fade away. 
And don't try dig what we all s-s-say.
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation.
I'm just talking about my g-g-generation.
My generation,
This is my generation, baby.’

The Who, ‘My Generation’ (P Townshend)

No. 495