I
don't think I was born too
late to appreciate John Osborne’s
debut play, Look Back in
Anger—currently a Roundabout
revival at the Laura Pels. I just don't think it holds anymore. That it
created a revolution in its native Britain is comprehensible to me only in an
academic historical context. It was a portrait of disaffected working class
young adults, in the personification of, first and foremost, Jimmy Porter (Matthew
Rhys), an articulate, educated,
well-read fellow who can't even get considered for a job that will lift him out
of his social class, despite society's promises to the contrary. This makes him
chronically caustic, bitter and even surgically mean to those who love him most
within the cramped and claustrophobic flat he occupies: his wife Alison (Sarah
Goldberg) and his live-in best
friend Cliff (Adam Driver).
Well,
due to edits in the text of the current revival, the "explanatory"
articulation of the social class struggle is mostly gone (in the questionable
belief that Americans won't relate to a British class system, this is often the
kind of thing that can get cut in US productions of certain Brit plays), so
Jimmy’s rants don’t really even make much visceral sense and—though his delivery is really
expressed in a kind of jabby, relentless nastiness—I couldn’t help but
think, in appropriately British idiom, that he’s really just a shouty little
man. It makes him—and the play—tough to take. More so the notion
that women fall all over Jimmy. Alison’s best friend Helena (Charlotte Parry) comes to rescue her, you see, and well, once
Allison is safely gone…Maybe there’s some “girls like bad boys” theme here as
well, but it all seems like the ghost of something meant to be shocking, about
which the most shocking thing is the proportion of its initial impact to its
relevant shelf-life. (It seems to have fared no better in a 1999 CSC revival I
missed—whose cast list indicates it employed the same or a similar cut
version, which also dispenses with the character of Alison’s father—and
certainly not in a 1980 prior Roundabout revival of 1980 that I did see, and remember only as disappointingly tame,
for all Jimmy’s bad tempered histrionics.)
I’m
not saying the play has become dull
with age; Osborne was a colorful enough wordsmith to at least hold your
attention. But it’s claustrophobic and oppressive in ways that I think exceed
the playwright’s intended portraiture. Magnifying this, director Sam Gold and set designer Andrew Leiberman have conspired to create a set that is essentially
a blackboard wall, with a few poverty props in front of it, that is placed so
far downstage that the action seems confined to the depth of an apartment
hallway. (In reality it’s probably about twice that—but only twice.) It’s a bold and memorable choice, but once
the “shock” of it fades (i.e. the realization that that’s the game for the
evening, that this is a world bereft of physical depth), it’s rather like Jimmy
Porter’s endless parade of screeds—just there for the sake of being
there, the physical manifestation of a literary conceit that draws attention to
itself as a contrivance.
Happily,
Gold’s cast, and the work he does with them, are much more
intriguing—ironically in a way, because the distracting set and close
quarters are the vehicle Gold uses to ramp up the pressure-cooker intimacy in
which the characters live (especially as between wife and best friend in a
manner that’s blatant and just as blatantly ignored by Jimmy). So there’s a
kind of prurient, sometimes appalled, fascination that’s elicited.
Hardly
enough, though, for the play to live up to its title. It’s more like, Look
Back in Annoyance or to be more
accurate, Look Back Annoyingly. And
I don’t think any revival is capable of changing that anymore…
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page