John Osborne and Arnold Wesker had a lot in common. Both enjoyed early success rarely matched later on. Both were nurtured by London’s Royal Court theatre (although it was the Belgrade, Coventry, that premiered what became known as the Wesker Trilogy). Both had a combative attitude to critics. But they were also very different writers. I see Osborne as a Byronic outsider with an instinctive talent for dissent, Wesker as an impassioned, and ultimately disillusioned, socialist.
Seeing Look Back in Anger and Roots revived at the Almeida, I also couldn’t help reflecting on how these two plays were among the reasons I wanted to become a critic. As a 16-year-old Midlands schoolboy, I was obsessed with Look Back in Anger. I gave a sixth-form lecture on the phenomenon of the Angry Young Man and I made a pilgrimage to the Royal Court to see Osborne’s play when, as I’ve often recorded, I naively stood outside the theatre watching people’s faces as they came out of the Saturday matinee performance to see how their lives had been changed by the experience. I came to Roots much later but I was deeply moved by its study of female empowerment and its vision of the pupil who, as in Shaw’s Pygmalion, acquires an emotional and verbal vibrancy that outstrips that of her teacher.
But, because I am old enough to have seen both plays in the 1950s, I was more than once asked at the Almeida press night what they mean to us today. My immediate answer was that, like most first-rate plays, they are both of their time and of permanent value. Watching Roots, where Beatie Bryant initially acts as a mouthpiece for her boyfriend’s attacks on the trashiness of popular culture, I kept thinking how dated that now seems: in today’s age of cultural relativism a leftwing intellectual, like the unseen Ronnie, would be forensically analysing the pop songs and movies he once so despised. And a crucial feature of Look Back in Anger is the penitential boredom of a provincial English Sunday in the 1950s: in today’s secular, hedonistic society just about everything – except, oddly enough, the theatre – is readily available on the Sabbath.
What keeps both plays alive, especially in the dynamic revivals at the Almeida, is their autobiographical honesty and expression of eternal truths. One point Wesker makes is that the character of farm workers is partly affected by the economic disadvantages they suffer: I checked out the latest government figures and found that the average salary in London is £44,370 whereas on farms it is £18,000 for a beginner rising to £25,000 for an experienced hand. But Wesker’s much larger point is that we are all both the inevitable product of our origins – our roots – and simultaneously capable of transcending them. It is that tension, beautifully realised in Diyan Zora’s production, that makes this such a powerful, time-transcending play.
Look Back in Anger is more problematic and there is no denying that Jimmy Porter is a hectoring bully and that his behaviour to his wife, Alison, is physically abusive. But I deeply dispute the idea that this is, at heart, a misogynistic play. The scales fell from my eyes when I saw Judi Dench’s 1989 production for the Renaissance Theatre Company: one that Osborne himself enthusiastically endorsed. Kenneth Branagh played Jimmy as a man driven to madness by the emotional unresponsiveness of those around him but the revelation was Emma Thompson’s Alison: far from being a passive victim, she was a coolly watchful woman who used her silence as a deliberate provocation to her unruly husband.
I also learned a lot from Atri Banerjee’s Almeida production in which Billy Howle and Ellora Torchia are similarly locked into a love-hate Strindbergian relationship. Listening closely to the text, I was struck by how Jimmy is characterised. He is variously described as “vulnerable” and “futile” and his mistress, Helena, says “he’ll never do anything and he’ll never amount to anything”. As David Hare once pointed out, in Jimmy Porter, Archie Rice in The Entertainer and Bill Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence, Osborne painted three iconic portraits of failure; and it is that empathy with characters whose verbal inventiveness far outstrips their capacity for meaningful action that makes him a dramatist for the ages.
Look Back in Anger and Roots are at the Almeida theatre, London, until 23 November. Michael Billington joins Jessica Raine, Claire Price and Dan Rebellato on a panel discussing the plays at the Almeida on 15 October.
