The “angry young man” has not aged so well. At least, not John Osborne’s pugilistic sweet-stall seller in Look Back in Anger (★★☆☆☆). Having erupted on to the stage in 1956, he looks like a charmless, self-pitying tyrant here who weaponises his working-class chip against his wife.
Director Atri Banerjee leans into the version of Jimmy Porter (Billy Howle) as coercive controller and while it is an instinctive interpretation for our day, forensically rendered, it butts up against the play’s shining legacy as a cri de coeur of class consciousness.
Jimmy is a B-rate version of Pinter’s fulminating men, though louder and more impotent, or like Tennessee Williams’ brutish Stanley Kowalski but without the sex appeal. Women are all “cows” and “bitches” and his marriage to middle-class Alison (Ellora Torchia) a battleground. Jimmy’s brand of toxic masculinity entwines class anger with misogyny so thoroughly that it is hard to see him as anything other than odious.
Was he really a hero, or even anti-hero, back then? Osborne’s play inspired a movement of angry young men on stage and hailed the advent of a new social realism in British theatre but watching it now is a curiously cold anthropological experience.
Alison, for her part, has class privilege but does not realise her power. Silence is her weapon against Jimmy’s barrage of bullying words, but it is incredibly anodyne. Like Jimmy, she feels very much a historical woman, calculating a future life either under the dubious protection of Jimmy, or the security of her establishment father.
The production itself is sleek and Naomi Dawson’s set design cleverly inverts the kitchen-sink realism of the genre to make it more expressionistic as the play goes on. But it does not feel quite potent enough in its balance between passion and rage. You feel twinges of tenderness in Jimmy and Alison’s few moments of intimacy but not the more electric love between them which is better conveyed in the 1959 film, in which Richard Burton plays an equally unpleasant Jimmy, but you glimpse his dark charm and vulnerability, which you do not here. Perhaps that is the point but it makes it a prolonged kind of torture to sit through – as if watching this abusive relationship play out in all its period detail from under a theatrical bell jar.
When Alison’s assertive friend Helena (Morfydd Clark), begins a relationship with Jimmy, there is no sense of attraction or passion. She falls into an identical domestic setup but without the erotic charge displayed between them, their partnership is entirely unconvincing.
The angry young woman has fared far better in Arnold Wesker’s Roots (★★★★☆), written in 1958, which comes as part of the Almeida’s Angry and Young season. Directed by Diyan Zora, this time the focus is on Beatie (also played by Clark), a woman returning home from London to her farming family in Norfolk. They are organising a welcome party for her beau, Ronnie, another working-class hero, in absentia, who has taught Beatie socialism.
It could be an early prototype for Educating Rita – the drama has the same sense of a woman’s eyes being opened by a man; she sees her family differently and looks on their simple yet tough lives with voluble disdain, although this turns poignantly into shame and self-judgment.
It is a static play but there are masterful subtleties around class and interplay of characters built into its pace, alongside humour. The rhythms of working-class life are intricately caught too, from the cooking to the noting of buses passing the house by Beatie’s mother (Sophie Stanton).
Neither play is preachy but they are certainly talky – characters are often cooking, eating or sitting as they deliver tranches of monologue. But there is a slowly building momentum in Roots, with a painful mother-daughter confrontation and a deeply moving payoff that feels more eternally relevant in its coming-of-age realisations.
The cast, doubling between both plays, is strong, especially Clark as Beatie, while Torchia exudes quiet anguish as Alison. In both dramas you can see a blueprint for the TV soaps of our times, and trace a line from the likes of Osborne, Wesker and Shelagh Delaney to James Graham, Beth Steel and Gary Owen. It makes for a valuable experience as a whole and you see, paradoxically, how much has changed around gender on stage and how much has stayed the same around class. Who, you wonder, are the inheritors of Jimmy and Beatie today?
At the Almeida theatre, London, until 23 November
