Almeida Theatre

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

Arnold Wesker’s Roots and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger are assured of their place in history. They are to British theatre what Never Mind the Bollocks and The Clash were to British pop music - angry anti-establishment dramas that gave voice to the working class, ending the genteel cultural stranglehold of the likes of Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. They are, however, pretty damn old. Released closer to the Boer War than to today, both have been subject to fitful revivals over the years, but their positioning together in an Almeida rep season, headed by a brace of up-and-coming directors feels like an interrogation as much as an affirmation. If Look Back in Anger was still an undeniable classic, surely you’d give it a splashy solo run with a fancy-pants director?  More on that elsewhere. Wesker’s 1959 classic Roots is far less contentious than Look Back in Anger, and relatively less well known. What I think Diyan Zora’s stripped back production makes clear is that a play that was once of-the-now has become a period piece. Following young Beatie Bryant (Morfydd Clark) as she returns to her family in rural Norfolk after a spell in London, Tomás Palmer’s costumes and Naomi Dawson’s props are scrupulously period accurate. As, I think, is the divide between the countryside and big city – I’m not an authority on rural matters, but I don’t think in our connected age the disconnect between urban and rural life is anything like so extreme as the one depicted in Roots. The real

Almedia associate director Rebecca Frecknall made her name with a revival of Tennessee Williams obscurity ‘Summer and Smoke’ and scored a walloping hit two Christmases back with her production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. Now she moves on to her third major Williams revival with a fresh take on 1955 classic ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, which follows a wealthy but disintegrating Southern cotton family who have gathered on the occasion of bullying patriarch Big Daddy’s birthday. He, however, is the only one there unaware of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Frecknall directs Lennie James as Big Daddy, Kingsley Ben-Adir as his sensitive alcoholic son Brick, and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Brick’s troubled wife Maggie. Guy Burgess, Clare Burt, Seb Carrington, Derek Hagen, Ukweli Roach and Ria Zmitrowicz make up the rest of the cast.  Tickets go on sale Seprtember 27.