Look Back in Anger
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 Aliso