If the revival of Arnold Wesker’s Roots that forms the other half of the Almeida’s Angry and Young ’50s rep season suffers from under-direction, then Atri Banerjee’s take on Look Back In Anger probably has the opposite issue.
John Osborne’s landmark 1956 play was the first to put working-class rage on the British stage. But antihero Jimmy Porter’s abusive treatment of his upper middle class wife Alison is deeply problematic. It was doubtless meant to be so at the time as well, but it was written in an age with a different attitude towards domestic violence, and I think the passage of years has made Jimmy an increasingly repulsive, harder to emphasise with character.
Banerjee doesn’t necessarily make this go away. But key to the original impact of Look Back In Anger was its kitchen-sink naturalism, the sense that Osborne and director Tony Richardson were showing people the world as it really was. This production jettisons that for an atmosphere redolent of Harold Pinter – a contemporary of Osborne’s, but his cryptic masterpieces have never been accused of naturalism.
Taking place in an inky void chased with dry ice, ominous drones, and nocturnal jazz, what Banerjee’s stylised production really has going for it is contextualising Billy Howle’s Jimmy in a novel and interesting fashion. Twitching and licking his lips in a manner reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s Joker, his long, misanthropic rants feel more like dadaist performance than radical honesty. Ellora Torcha’s elegant Alison seems more troubled by his sickness than made a victim of it. The pairing with Roots is fascinating because where in Wesker’s play heroine Beatie yearns wholesomely for a new world to be born, here Jimmy craves it almost nihilistically. Part anarchist, part pub bore, part caged tiger, his rants – even at their most vicious or self pitying – feel less born out of antipathy towards Alison than society as whole, one he’d like to tear down utterly. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
For what it’s worth, I think in recasting Jimmy as an anarchic clown, Banerjee largely styles out the question of the play’s misogyny - he was always an antihero, but here he’s so out there I don’t think we sympathise with him to the extent we do in, say, the Richard Burton film. It’s also astute of Banerjee to note that the surrealistic aspects of Look Back in Anger lend themselves well to a production that is virtually the aesthetic opposite of kitchen sink. But does it really ‘work’? At the end of the day a Pinteresque take on Osborne neither conveys the shattering impact of Look Back in Anger’s original incarnation nor, crucially, can it out-Pinter Pinter. Look Back in Anger is never going to be better at being The Homecoming than The Homecoming is. Still, it’s an alluring and ambitious take.
Both of the Angry and Young productions speak of a struggle to keep the plays as fresh as they were in the ‘50s. Ultimately while Roots essentially works for the reasons Roots has always worked, this felt like an interesting alternate take on Look Back in Anger rather than a convincing reinvention. Individuality both plays feel bound to the ’50s. Together they’re potent as works about youth and the primal desire to change, to throw off the old order and dream the world up anew.