EVERYTHING INCLUDING THE KITCHEN SINK

Gabriella Józwiakcelebrates 50 years of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ´

Remarkably, during the first performances of Look Back in Anger audiences are said to have gasped with surprise when the curtain rose and revealed an ironing board on stage. Used to melodrama and safe, middle class comedies, which concealed the dissatisfaction of a post-war generation with scenes of affluent contentment, such a wearisome article was considered a radical impostor. But John Osborne’s play spoke for the ‘angry young men’ of the day, and revolutionised British theatre. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the play’s first performance on 8 May 1956, at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It is surprising that Osborne’s play was ever accepted for performance. Agents from over London rejected it immediately, one declaring, “It should be thrown into the river and washed out to sea so that it may never be seen again.” But George Devine, artistic director of the newly-formed English Stage Company at London’s Royal Court Theatre, decided to take a risk. At the time, Osborne was living in a leaky houseboat on the River Thames. So keen was Devine to contact Osborne, he rowed out to offer him £25 for the play. English stages of the 1950s were occupied with plays illustrating the comfort of post-war existence. Noel Coward and Terrence Rattigan, amongst others, dominated the West End with their tales of affluent bourgeoisie thriving in their country homes, or members of the upper middle classes in comfortable suburbia. But Osborne wanted to show the discontentment of a generation who had exchanged passion for bland materialism. The shabby attic room in a Midlands town where the play is set provoked bad feelings about the state of England, the war-time

generation, and conventional drama. Early audiences left the theatre before the play was finished. It received condemnatory reviews from all critics, except for Kenneth Tynan of the Observer. “Look Back in Angerpresents postwar youth as it really is,” he wrote. “All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage – the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of ‘official’ attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour” (13 May 1956). Without Tynan and the agreement of the BBC to screen a 25-minute extract, the play would surely have failed. But as audience numbers grew, so too did Osborne’s fame. By the time of his death in 1994, Osborne had staged 21 plays and married a further three wives, one of whom committed suicide. ‘Angry young men’ was a phrase one journalist used to describe Osborne and the subsequent playwrights Look Back in Anger inspired. Harold Pinter, John Braine, and Alan Sillitoe continued this Kitchen Sink genre of drama, as such plays came to be known. Writing in the Independent at the time of Osborne’s death, Arnold Wesker described Osborne as having ‘opened the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers’. Look Back in Anger altered British theatre immeasurably, but since the 1950s, there have been few major revivals. In a recent Guardianarticle, Mark Lawson suggests this is because the play loses impact when performed in today’s class-conscious society. But this summer, in commemoration of its 50th anniversary, the Peter Hall Company is staging a performance at the Theatre Royal Bath (16 August-2 September). On 8 May, exactly 50

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