HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Look Back in Anger closely reflects the climate in Great Britain in the mid-fifties; therefore making a study of the specific historical, political, social and cultural context proves to be extremely pertinent. Following the Second World War, British politics and society underwent a period of rapid changes.

The following timeline table shows the most important events that would change Britain:1944 Education Act – created several “red-brick universities” that broke away from the

Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge) model; for the first time in British history, university education and study grants were widely available to working-class students;

1945 the war ends; United Nations is created; Clement Atlee’s Labour Cabinet came to power and implemented the Beveridge Plan (Lord Beveridge aimed to combat Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness and therefore create a better society); the newly created Welfare State provided many social reforms: social and medical benefits for all social classes;

1946 nationalisation of the Bank of England and of the mines;Between 1947-1948

Cold War begins; the dissolution of the colonial Empire came about with India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, Egypt, and the Sudan gaining independence; the result was a loss of political and military power for Great Britain; Britain vastly diminished its size and lost plenty of resources; Railways are nationalised;

1948 The National Health Service begins; National Service Act – around 160,000 young men were called up each year to undergo basic military training and military service for a period of two years, sometimes in hot places such as Malaya and Korea; the Marshall Plan is implemented; Gandhi is assassinated;

1949 the Atlantic Pact is established;50s the culture of Britain became a youth culture: going to the theatre or the opera was

no longer popular, but to go to the cinema or watch TV; this youthful influence had a great impact on every aspect from life, from fashion to entertainment; the development of technology during the two wars increased productivity and created more jobs; many workers came to the city in search of employment and the suburbs were developed; people started to realise that the Socialism Utopia was not to be: reforms held the promise of a more democratic society, but class barriers remained firmly in place; many young intellectuals suffer from a sense of betrayal and futility, and are caught between contempt for and conflict with authority; they are alienated from society, and deflect their frustration in apathy, self-pity and sarcasm; on the one hand they lose touch with the working class, on the other hand they fail to find their niche in a new class; the black-and-white divisions of morality and politics turned into shades of grey; actions that needed to be taken turned into thoughts and political stands, and frustration inevitably followed for those who felt they needed to actively participate in shaping the world around them;

the English society of the time de-emphasised the importance of individual achievement in favour of more widespread reorganisation;

1950 The Korean war starts;1951 the Conservative Government came back to power; there wasn’t many differences

between those parties and a feeling of disillusionment with the politics set in;1952 King George VI dies;1953 Queen Elizabeth II came to throne, and the pomp and ceremony of the Coronation

momentarily created the false euphoria of a new Elizabethan Age, which quickly faded;

1954 rationing introduced in the 40s ends;1955 Churchill retires and Eden becomes Prime Minister;

Commercial television starts; the first British hydrogen bomb is tested;

1956 in Egypt, President Nassar decided to nationalise the Suez Canal and the British Government together with France and Israel opposed his decision with a military invasion – post-war peace was broken; Britain and her allies were forced to retreat from the Gulf following a United Nations ruling, a clear sign that Britain was no longer a great power; Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest (Hungary) bringing another terrible blow to world order; John Osborn’s Look Back in Anger and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning are issued;

mid-50s Britain was deprived of her former international prestige; she was in the middle of a Cold War between two World Powers, the USSR and America; international spying became widespread, especially in the field of nuclear research programmes, with famous spy cases, like that of Burgess and Maclean, hitting newspaper headlines;

1957 Macmillan becomes Prime Minister; the Treaty of Rome is signed; Bill Haley and his group toured the country – rock and roll music hit Britain and older people hated the new music;

1958 a campaign for Nuclear Disarmament begins;

THE LOSS OF THE BRITISH EMPIREAfter the First World War the German colonies of Africa, as well as Iraq and Palestine, were

added to Britain’s area of control as “mandated from the League of Nations” and Britain was supposed to help these territories towards self-government.

At its peak (20s-30s), the British Empire covered nearly one quarter of the world’s land surface and contained almost one quarter of its population. Although to some extent destabilised by the growth of nationalist movements in the non-white territories, as for instance, in India due to the mistrust and misunderstanding between British rulers and the Indian people, the empire remained of considerable economic and military significance.

After the Second World War the United Nations Charter also called for progress towards self-government. Britain had lost control of colonial possessions to Japan during that war and it was felt that the British Empire couldn’t last much longer. British rule in India could no longer continue. How far, and at what point, a majority of the British people had digested the fact that Britain was no longer a major world power is difficult to determine: probably not till the 60s, though, objectively, Suez is the watershed. In the imagery of newsreel, press, radio and television, Britain continued to be presented, along with France, as a “big” country. Undoubtedly a pervasive sentiment was “we won the war”.

Newsreels in the later forties had made something of a fuss over the granting of independence to India, quite possible because Churchill took an aggressive position on this issue (not that Britain had any choice anyway). There has been much theorising about the impact “the loss of empire” ought to have had on the British psyche; the empirical evidence is that it really had very little. The most notable consequences were felt by members of the upper and upper-middle classes who no longer had the Raj as a territory in which to exploit their natural gift of leadership. Apart from a few Victorian regrets over India the official line was one self-congratulation that Britain once more was leading the way in granting independence to former colonial peoples.

Prime Minister Clement Atlee is determined to disassemble the British Empire as a luxury, which cannot be afforded any longer, as well as of dubious moral value. However, Britain saw its empire as an important asset in the post-war period and sought to maximise its value in a number of ways: the granting of independence to India and Pakistan, leaving Hindus and Muslims fighting (1947); the British departure from Palestine/Israel, leaving Muslims and Jews to initiate the long-time Middle-East conflict (1947); the granting of independence to Burma and Ceylon (1948); fostering the emergence of the Commonwealth as a method enabling it to continue to exercise informal influence as a formal empire receded; preserving a worldwide system of naval and military bases, for example, the Suez Canal Zone, Mombassa, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong.

One by one, British colonies around the world become independent nations. The Commonwealth of Nations, founded by Britain, becomes dominated by her former colonies. By the mid-60s, the notion of Commonwealth as a world force was at an end, although the concept had succeeded in disguising the British retreat from empire.

THE MAKING OF THE POSTWAR CONSENSUS (1940-55)

Britain’s world roleIn the years between 1940 and 1955, a broad policy consensus emerged between the two

major parties. It was a joint product of the Labour Government of 1945-51, which laid the foundations of post-war policies, and of the Conservative Government of 1951-55, which in broad terms accepted Labour’s key legislation and policies. But some inter-party differences remained, with Labour, for example, more public sector-orientated and the Conservatives more sympathetic to the private sector.

Foreign policy was based on the view that Britain’s special relationship with the United States, leadership of a multiracial Commonwealth, possession of nuclear weapons and large conventional military capability gave the country a continuing leading status as a world power.

Britain’s post-war role in the world was powerfully shaped by Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He based his policies on two principles – first, that a vigorous British foreign policy was vital to world peace; and second, that Britain was still a great power with important global interests to protect. To these ends, he presided over the development of a system of treaties for the global containment of communism (in alliance with the USA); the emergence of a complex imperial policy combining the development of the empire, thee creation of the Commonwealth, and a system of global bases and strong points; and a powerful defence forces backed by a British Atomic Bomb. After the first British hydrogen bomb in 1955 a more crucial issue stole the scene. Throughout the second half of the fifties opinion polls indicated that between one quarter and one third of the British public favoured Britain’s unilaterally renouncing nuclear weapons.

Britain held back from taking part in talks which led to the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) by the Treaty of Rome 1957). Britain’s decision to show no interest in membership of the Common Market at its foundation was the result of several factors: Britain’s conception of itself as a great power with a world role; its unwillingness to compromise its national sovereignty and suspicion of the supranational, “federalist” aspirations of the founders of the EEC; its belief that its most important international relationships were with the United States and the

Commonwealth and that closer economic ties with continental Europe were not in its long-term interest.

The Welfare StateAfter the war, the British people showed they wanted a change in society. They voted for the

Labour Party instead of Churchill and the Conservatives. Labour, led by Clement Attlee, promised to set up a new “Welfare State”. The phrase Welfare State was first used during the WWII to contrast with Hitler’s “Warfare State”. Essentially means the totality of schemes and services through which the Central Government together with the local authorities assumed a major responsibility for dealing with all the different types of social problems, which harassed individual citizens.

There were some problems to be dealt by the Welfare State, but money was short. The British government had spent so much on the war that it owned £3,000 million to other countries. Roads, docks, factories and housings lay in ruins. Atlee and his Ministers borrowed another £900 million from the USA. This was used to buy new machines and built new factories. New industries, such as chemicals, car-making and electrical goods, were set up. Many older industries were nationalised. These included electricity, the railways, coal and shipbuilding.

This government set up a welfare system in which the state could help everyone, rich or poor. It also gave women many more rights. The first problem was “social security”, that is, people who were unemployed, too old, having too many children, injured, pregnant or ill would get an income. The second problem is “medical services”, that is, people who were ill needed an income, but more than that they needed treatment.

The third problem was “housing”, that is, good housing for everyone as a mark of a civilised society, because in the past sickness was many times caused bad housing. As public opinion polls revealed, housing was the issue on which people felt most strongly in 1945. People had endured crowded, low-standard housing in the 30s. During the war they had been bombed out, shunted around, doubled up. Now, couples looked forward most of all to a home of their own. I a time of serious housing shortage many couples had to begin married life in the home of one or other parent, more usually the wife’s parents. The wife’s mother, in fact, continued to have a key role. Often it was the mother who checked out the possibility of any houses becoming vacant in the locality. It was not always easy for middle-class couples to secure housing, at least until the acceleration of private building in the fifties, but they were used to the culture in which money was saved in order to acquire a mortgage.

Problem number four was “Education”, that is, if individuals were to participate in a civilised society they should also have a decent education. So, it was provided a state educational service compulsory to the age of 15 from which all fee paying had been abolished. Educational policy in the post-war era was governed by the major Act passed in 1944. The major strength of the Act was that it ensured that all pupils would, around the age of eleven or twelve, move on to a form of secondary education, which would, at least, be continued till the age of fifteen. As implemented by almost all local authorities this entailed an “eleven-plus” examination whose results would determine whether the pupil went on to grammar school or to a secondary modern school. The route to better jobs and to higher education was through the grammar schools; the secondary modern school was the route to the traditional working-class occupations. It also became apparent that middle-class children were far more likely to do well in the eleven-plus than working-class ones who came from a background where academic pursuits were not encouraged. Apart from the non-fee-paying state schools, there continued in existence an older and higher class of grammar school, charging fees, but also supported by a direct grant from Government. And the expensive and exclusive public schools remained untouched. Thus, although the potential for mobility through the educational system was greater than it had been in the 30s – rather more working-class children did now get through the eleven-plus into grammar schools – the whole system still very much

replicated the division of the social structure into working, lower-middle, upper-middle, and upper-classes.

Others problems were “unemployment”, that is, the necessity of creating new jobs, the arts, the environment in general, the care of children.

The Labour Government intended to break with the past. The biggest innovation was the nationalisation of the hospitals: private pay beds would be allowed to exist within the hospitals, and doctors would be able to carry on their own private practice if they so wished. The establishment of the National Health Service is the most significant and successful social innovation of that period.

The mixed economyThe main elements of economic policy were: a largely private enterprise economy with a

significant public sector of recently nationalised industries; government’s acceptance of the responsibility to manage the economy at a level of demand sufficient to maintain “a high and stable” rate of employment; their adoption of Keynesian methods (i.e. the manipulation of fiscal and monetary mechanisms) in order to ensure full employment, stable prices, economic growth, protection of the value of sterling, and avoidance of payment crisis; and the operation of a “corporatist” style partnership with the “peak” organisation of business and labour in order to curb inflationary pressures and contain industrial conflict.

SOCIETY

ClassThe disruption of war had not been without effect on class and relationships between

classes. The most important single development was the change in status and bargaining power of the working class. Resorting as necessary to strikes, the workers were able to exploit the very high demands for labour engendered by the necessities of war to push their real earnings up by well over 50 per cent. The much vaunted “mixing” of social classes during the war was more in spirit than substance, but undoubtedly there was a new upper-class and middle-class concern that, having played so crucial a role in a war effort, the workers should not be plunged back into the economic depression of the inter-war years. The egalitarian policies mooted during the war, in large degree, carried out by the Labour Government, after the war didn’t as many hoped (or feared), alter the basic social structure, but in general they favoured the working-class. High taxation during and after the war hit the upper-middle class hardest, lowering the barriers between it and the lower-middle class. Thus there was both disintegration of class boundaries and consolidation within classes.

Whatever party was in office, the higher civil service continued to be dominated by the upper class: of the successful candidates for open entry to the administrative class in 1942-52, 74 percent came from Oxbridge. Nationalisation changed little: in many cases the former private owners and managers simply became the managers and directors of the state enterprises; in others the directorate was filled with established figures from the army, politics, and the civil service, social revolution being represented by a handful of trade unionists.

For all that, the basic facts remained: to be working-class meant performing manual work, most usually under arduous, uncongenial, or just plain boring circumstances. Conditions of work still demanded special working clothes, and still often left definite physical marks – calloused hands, for instance. When it came to “life change” members of the working class were still at a disadvantage compared with all of the rest of society. Individual members might move upwards, but conditions within the working class, not excluding working class attitudes themselves, discouraged educational aspiration.

Class is a difficult and messy subject, but indisputably neither the upheavals of the WWII nor the programme of the Labour Government abolished it. Technological change, certainly, brought new obfuscations and nuances.

Family RolesThe position of women in society, and therefore to some degree within the family, had been

changing since the beginning of the century, and the changes had been greatly accelerated by the Second World War. However, the basic principle of a differentiation of roles as between husband and wife prevailed, with a wife’s tasks clustering round her function as homemaker and child-rearer, just as a husband’s clustered around his function as principal breadwinner. The most rigid segregation of roles was perhaps to be found in the more isolated rural areas, mining communities in particular. Violence had always featured in a proportion of marriages in all stations of life and it had been prevalent in poorer working-class areas before the First World War, where poverty, bad housing, frustration, and drink produced a vicious combination. Social surveys conducted in the early 50s found that, while, of course, traditional male attitudes persisted, there were examples in working class homes of husbands sharing in duties formerly thought of as the wife’s alone, and, above all, an acceptance that questions of family size were a matter for joint decision, not a matter of the husband’s will alone. Women were having fewer children, earlier, and then often going out to work: some husbands, at least, accepted that if their wives did go out to work then they had a responsibility to help in the home.

YouthThe war had given children certain freedoms: economic conditions after the war encouraged

their independence. Gangs of adolescent and even younger children were nothing new, but the post-war years provided an irregular, fragile word, with the sanctions of war removed. In the forties the grown-up generation provided the partially outsider figure who shocked the respectable and slow Government.

In the early 50s there came the first nationally recognised figure representative of youth detachment (lack of involvement, indifference) from the rest of society and also representative of the fact that for the first time working-class youth could take the initiative: The Teddy Boy. The consumer boom of the American 50s did not reach Britain until the 60s, but working class teenagers could finally afford good clothes, motorcycles, and entertainment. The name came from the Edwardian form of dress, which, actually, had been assumed by some bright young men of the upper class in the late forties. Their clothes were designed to shock their parents’ generation. They wore tight trousers, long jackets and pointed shoes. Their hair was greased and had a DA (duck arse) at the back. The Teddy Girls adopted American fashion: circle skirts, low cut tops and ponytails. They fully embraced the American Rock and Roll and their hero was the American singer Elvis Presley. Nevertheless, they were not very fond of dancing they would rather drink. The media exaggerated when mentioning the Teddy boys, mainly because they were as a gang and some had fascist tendencies and attacked the West Indians who immigrated to Britain, but that was not true for all of them. During the 70s there was even a movement called Rockabilly Rebels who jointed the British National Front and led several racial segregation acts, but the Teds didn’t support this sector. Family, and all its activities, still based in tradition, was being more affected by national influences: changing circumstances seemed to be pushing working-class families into middle-class attitudes, but working-class youth was preparing to take initiative of its own.

One particular national institution served as a fundamental influence on the lives of all young males, the National Service. Under the terms of the National Service Act of 1948 around 160,000 young men were called up to have basic military training and military service for a period of two years, in hot places such as Malaya or Korea. For most of them this was boring and a waste of time. While it is probably true that once a Teddy boy had been called up he probably would stop being that. After the military service in the British Army, they put away their finger tip drapes, their tightly fitting trousers and cut their hair, but it wasn’t the end of their culture. It is hard to say if the National Service served as a force for social control or if it was an agent of social disruption, by breaking family ties, opening new horizons. National Servicemen could take advantage of the

freedom from parental control and gain sexual experience or even visit a brothel when abroad. It was abolished in 1960.

ReligionIn absolute terms there was an expansion at all levels of society in opportunities for

entertainment, for intellectual stimulus, and for refreshment of the spirit. All of that could not continue to hasten the decline of traditional religious observance. At the beginning of the fifties under 10 per cent of the population were regular churchgoers. Within a small circle of those who were active and concerned believers there were as yet no exciting developments. The Catholic Church continued to gain adherents; the non-conformist persuasions continued to do worst. On the whole old positions were held to and sectarian rivalries continued.

JOHN OSBORNE AND THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN

THE ANGRY YOUNG MENThe phrase “Angry Young Men” is taken from the title of an auto-biography (Angry Young

Man) by Leslie Paul, initially referred to a group of young writers developing a new literary sensibility in the 50s. The group not only expressed discontent with the staid, hypocritical institutions of English society – the so-called Establishment – but betrayed disillusionment with itself and with its own achievements. These writers emphasised the concerns of lower middle-class characters while mocking the manners and pretensions of middle-class-and-upper-middle-class life. These characters have a vague, directionless anger aimed at higher classes and social conventions.

In post-war Britain, mass-produced culture from America began to supplant the indigenous type favoured by the middle-class. Britain’s cultural dominance was no longer given: it became a nation in decline, slowly losing its empire and importance. While the old social order was deteriorating, the working-class became more visible, more vocal because the Welfare State had increased educational opportunities and earning potentials. The Angry Young Men represented a new order of the “white-collar proletariat”, educated working-class men who could now vent their frustrations with a class system that had oppressed them for decades.

While some of the literary Angry Young Men sought to achieve the same material privileges as the bourgeoisie, many sought an authenticity beyond financial success. This authenticity was seen as “really living”, a being in touch with the intensities of life. Much of the anger felt by this longing for authenticity.

Very much a radical, outsider figure, the Angry Young Man appealed to youths who felt hopeless in the midst of England’s dismal post-war economy. This appeal continued beyond the 50s, and soon The Angry Young Man was cropping up in film and popular music. Mainstream exposure eventually carried the character out of Britain and established him as an icon in mass culture.

Some of the artists of this movementIn 1954 one of the poets of the Movement, stooping to what he saw as a less important form,

published a novel. Lucky Jim, by Kingley Amis, was a bestseller. A few months earlier John Wain had published Hurry on Down, which was also very successful. In 1956 the English Stage Company, with George Devine as artistic Director, was established at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In that same year it presented Look Back in Anger by John Osborn: only the enormous success of this production kept the company from going bankrupt. In 1957 came John Braine’s novel Room at the Top, set in the post-war era but cynical about the professional ideals of the then Labour Government: “the top” was to be achieved now through socialism, but by ruthless individual self-advancement. In one way or another, these works had provincial settings, but they were certainly not working-class. The press lumped their authors together as “Angry Young Men”.

All cocked a snook at the comfortable and flowery conventions of the post-war literary scene and also at the comfortable platitudes of consensus politics; they provided an interesting commentary on aspects of social change, on educational opportunity, which yet brought no real opportunity, for example. In the wider perspective they can be seen as forerunners of the cultural revolution of the sixties. In the 60s these writers turned to more individualised themes and were no longer considered a group.

David Lodge says about this movement…“I went to see it (Look Back in Anger) at the Royal Court during a weekend leave, and

remember well the delight and exhilaration its anti-establishment rhetoric afforded me, and the exactness with which it matched my own mood at the juncture in my life. (…) Though they are far from uniform, there is a kind of family resemblance between these novels (Angry Young Men Novels) made up of the following features: gritty realism, exact observation of class and regional differences in British society, a lower-middle or working-class perspective, anti-establishment attitudes, hostility to all forms of cant and pretentiousness, a fondness for first-person, confessional narrative technique. (…) What were the Angry Young Men angry about? Nothing that could be formulated in political or ideological terms, as their subsequent development has made very clear. Fundamentally, I believe, they were angry at the slow rate of change in British society. Structurally, things had altered irrevocably as a result of the “People’s War” and the institution of the Welfare State by the 1945 Labour Government. The old rigid class society, in which inherited privilege was unquestioned by the vast majority of the population, had been, or should have been, swept away by egalitarian social, economic and educational policies. (…) The rising meritocrats produced by free grammar schools and free university education were apt to find that the old-boy network, the lines of power and influence that connected London, Oxbridge and the public schools, the possession of right accent, manners and style, still protected the interests of the hereditary upper-middle class.”

JOHN OSBORNE

BiographyBorn on December 12, 1929, in London, John Osborne would eventually change the face of

British theatre. His father, an advertising copywriter, died in 1941, leaving Osborne an insurance settlement, which he used to finance a boarding school education at Belmont College in Devon. Still heartbroken, however, over his father’s death, Osborne could not focus on his studies and left after striking the headmaster.

He returned to London and lived briefly with his mother, a barmaid. He became involved in the theatre when he took a job tutoring a touring company of young actors. Osborne went on to serve as actor-manager for a string of repertory companies and soon decided to try his hand at playwriting. Osborne decided to submit one of his plays, Look Back in Anger. Not only was his play produced, but also it is considered by many critics to be the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne has been frequently associated with that group of dramatists and novelists who emerged in the 50s and were labelled the Angry Young Men.

He wrote other plays, such as The Entertainers (1957), Luthor (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1965), for example, but critics began to accuse him of not fulfilling his early potential, and audiences no longer seemed effected by Osborne’s rage. Recognizing this, Osborne described himself in his last play as a “churling, grating note, a spokesman for no one but myself, with deadening effect, cruelly abusive, unable to be coherent about my despair”.

When one seeks to re-define Osborne’s theatre it soon becomes apparent that he is not a political dramatist. He has never been actively involved in a political party or socialist organisation, and his writing reflects this lack of political commitment. While social and political matters are important in his theatre, they do not form an integral part of the action. While a moral purpose can

be detected in Look Back in Anger the action develops on a more general level. Discussing his reasons for writing Look Back in Anger, Osborne significantly remarked that he was concerned “to make people feel, to give them a lesson in feeling”, and he added there is time enough “to think afterwards”.

Osborne died as a result of complications from Diabetes on December 24, 1994, in Shropshire, England. He left behind a large body of works for the stage as well as several autobiographical works. Several of his plays were also adapted for film, including Look Back in Anger and The Entertainment. In 1963, Osborne won the Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATIONThe play is not innovative as far as dramatic structure is concerned. Osborne himself

recognised this was when he called it “a formal, rather old-fashioned play”. Look Back in Anger is divided in three acts, involving exposition, development and resolution. An exposition of the specific situation takes place in Act I, and the arrival of an outsider, Helena, serves to develop and complicate this situation in Act II. A resolution comes about in Act III, when Helena leaves and Alison and Jimmy are reunited. The play also possesses the carefully calculated tightenings, climaxes and pauses in tension, deriving from the nineteenth century model. As in the well-made play, Osborne specifies a single domestic interior, which is no longer a comfortable drawing room but a squalid attic flat. An important innovation, however, may be found in the area of dramatic language, since Jimmy’s log monologues constantly interrupt the dialogue, preventing complex interaction among the characters and development of the plot, especially in Act I. The themes and the range of language moreover break with the tradition of the well-made play.

John Osborne’s plays focus on an individual character and the sheer force of his language rather than an action. The play concerns a restless and vociferous young man of the working class who is at war with himself and society. It is seen as an expression of frustration with Britain’s post-war situation. Britain’s economy was slow to recover from war and the inadequate response of an outdated elite that still clung to ideas of empire and privilege stimulated rebellion that is given voice in Jimmy Porter. In many ways he is a rebel with a cause. Both angry and articulate, Jimmy seemed to vent his wrath in every direction. And at times, it is difficult to sympathise with him. Osborne’s protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the angry and rebellious nature of the post-war generation, a dispossessed lot who were clearly unhappy with things as they were in the decades following WWII. Jimmy Porter came to represent an entire generation of “angry young men”.

A GENERAL SUMMARYThe play concerns a group of young people living in a Midland town in the mid-50s. The

husband, Jimmy Porter, is an ex-undergraduate who has married a wife, Alison, from a class higher than his own. They share their flat with a young uneducated friend, Cliff, who helps Jimmy run a sweet-stall in which business he has been set up by the mother of a friend of his, Hugh Tanner. Most of the play is occupied by the long tirades of abuse, which Jimmy heaps on his society, its absence of values and its hypocrisy. Much of this abuse spills over sarcastic attacks on his friend and his wife. It is clear that Jimmy blames her for her origins and cannot find a way to reconcile the hatred this engenders with the love and attraction for her, which he also feels.

The arrival of Alison’s friend, Helena, causes Alison, who, without, Jimmy knowing, has become pregnant, to decide to leave him. She returns home with her father, and jimmy has a brief, unsatisfactory affair with Helena. In the meantime Alison has lost her baby and when she returns, broken and in pain, as Jimmy had hoped she would, Helena leaves to allow them to make up the threads of a relationship, which can survive only by a process of fantasising against the dreadful

reality of their situation. At the end of the play they are left clinging together in tender and resigned despair.

DETAILED SUMMARIES

Act IAct One Scene One introduces us to the characters, Jimmy Porter, his wife Alison and their

friend Cliff, who share a rented flat in small Midland town. It is Sunday afternoon and the season is spring, but here there is no atmosphere of flowers, trees and blue skies, the things usually associated with spring in English writing. Instead we are introduced to a gloomy, claustrophobic atmosphere in which boredom and dull weather combine to create a heavy, dull and stifling mood.

Alison, the wife, is ironing, and the two men are reading the Sunday newspapers. In the dialogue, which follows, we learn that Jimmy Porter has been educated at one of the new redbrick universities*, but that he has chose to earn his living by running a sweet-stall, an occupation in which he is helped by his friend Cliff, who, unlike Jimmy, has not been to university. Alison, Jimmy’s wife, is from a higher social class than Jimmy, and he clearly resents this. In addition we see that there is a great deal of personal antagonism between the two, an antagonism diminished d by the presence of Cliff who acts as a shield between them.

Very little happens during the scene in the form of direct action. Much of the dialogue is conducted in the form of monologues by Jimmy Porter and these serve to reveal the complexity of his character by the way in which they demonstrate the basic insecurity underlying his outside aggressiveness. In addition, the reactions of Cliff and Alison show that, although they are both targets for Jimmy’s abuse, they retain a great deal of affection and love for him.

Throughout the opening act Jimmy abuses Alison and Cliff for their lethargy and lack of involvement, abuse which culminates in a long speech with a demand foe an enthusiasm which he feels all of them have lost (p.10). A very strong undercurrent of almost sentimental nostalgia for the past counterpoints this abuse. This note of regret at the loss of an assured past is strongly sounded throughout, for instance when the archetypally English music of Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and the image Jimmy conjures up of the lost assurance of Edwardian England are summed up by the character in a line which encapsulates the sense of loss he feels along with his anger when he contemplates the past: “If you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s” (p.11).

Much of Jimmy’s abuse is directed at Alison’s family, and reflects the deep class divisions of England in the 50s, and Jimmy’s sense of not being able to find himself a place in society to which he can feel he belongs. Throughout this section the social attack on Alison is combined with a deep resentment, which Jimmy clearly feels for women, seen as the symbol for an acceptance of things as they are which he cannot tolerate. During the battles between Jimmy and Alison, Cliff acts as a sounding-board and a restraint on the excesses of jimmy’s outbursts. This role culminates when the mock struggle between them causes an accident in which Alison’s arm is burnt (p.21). Jimmy’s subsequent regret again underlines the real love he feels for Alison, inadequate and impractical though it is.

Towards the end of the act a new character is introduced as we learn that Helena Charles, a friend of Alison’s, is coming to stay (p. 35). This provokes the most violent attack of all from Jimmy, and the act culminates in his curse-like outburst in which he wishes that Alison might be exposed to suffering, so that she could learn how to become a “recognisable human being”. The

*The term was used originally to distinguish the new city universities from the old medieval universities such as Oxford and Cambridge.

Jimmy’s university is obviously meant to be one of the newer and less well regarded of these city universities, since Alison tell Helena in Act Two Scene One that Jimmy claims his university isn’t “even red brick but white tile”, that is, it is a very recently built institution. This emphasises the fact that Jimmy is one of the new generation of post-war graduates whose education arose from the 1945 British Government’s expansion of educational opportunities through scholarships and grants – see The Welfare State

heart of this speech is his desire that Alison might conceive and lose a child, so that she should be exposed to an experience she could not dismiss or put aside.

Act Two Scene OneThe first scene of Act Two takes place two weeks later in the same setting. Helena has

arrived and is staying as a guest. The scene opens with a long conversation between her and Alison in which Alison describes to Helen, and so, obliquely, to us, the way in which she and jimmy met, the opposition of her parents to their relationship, and the subsequent events when she and Jimmy began to live together. Helena is clearly trying to understand the complex situation in which she finds herself, a situation she has never encountered before, and which appals and yet fascinates her. Thus, for example, she tries (pp. 39-40) to probe the affectionate and yet non-sexual relationship, which exists between Cliff and Alison.

The curiosity of Helena serves as a device to allow Alison to tell the audience details of her courtship with Jimmy. Thus we learn of the “raids” which Jimmy and his friend Hugh Tanner conducted on the middle-class homes of Alison’s parents, “raids” in which they gate-crashed*

parties and imposed themselves on the polite society they despised (pp.42-44). Alison describes her own complicated reaction to this process, a fascination not unlike that which Helena also clearly feels at the present time. She points out (in the long speech on p.44) that the opposition of her parents to the relationship crystallised her own strong feelings for Jimmy, and made up her mind to marry him.

The long conversation with Helena is also used to allow Alison to tell the audience about the game of squirrels and bears which she and Jimmy play to escape the intolerable strains and contradictions of their relationship (p.46). Cliff’s entry after this speech serves to link the conversation with the first encounter of jimmy and Helena that we have been shown (p.47). In the dialogue which follows Jimmy turns the attack from Alison to Helena, renewing his abuse of the middle-class in general and Alison’s family in particular, now that he has a fresh target. Jimmy’s long discourse against Helena modifies into a series of speeches (pp.58-59) in which he tells her, and us, the background to his own life. In particular he describes the relationship between his parents, and the effect on him of the experience of watching his father die as a result of the privations he had suffered in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (July 1936-May 1939).

This speech is interrupted when Jimmy becomes aware that Alison is really going to church with Helena, as she had said she was (p.51). He views this as a complete betrayal, though as yet there had been no clear sign that Alison is contemplating leaving him for good and returning to her parents. Provoked by this “betrayal, he launches into a violent attack on Alison, reminiscent of the attack at the end of the first act (p.60). It is interrupted by a telephone call, and Jimmy leaves Cliff alone with the two women. In the most significant speech he has in the play (p.61) Cliff explains to Helena and, perhaps, to Alison, too, what his role has been in the relationship. Using Alison’s confusion Helena tells her that she has sent a telegram to her father telling him to come and take Alison home. Alison, pregnant and tired, capitulates. When Jimmy returns with the news that Hugh’s mother is dying Alison is too exhausted to react and allows Helena to lead her off to church, leaving Jimmy, who wants her to go with him to Mrs. Tanner death-bed, alone and in despair.

Act Two Scene TwoThis is a short but important scene, since it deepens our understanding of the character of

Alison. It opens with Colonel Redfern, Alison’s father, having arrived to take her home. The conversation between them is interesting since it reveals that Colonel has a much deeper understanding of the situation than we might have expected. He is shown to have a sense of

* Gate-crashing is the art of arriving at a party to which one has not been invited. Jimmy and Hugh are deliberately flouting social conventions in order to shame Alison’s parents and their friends.

similarity between Alison and himself, a sense of the way in which they both have a tendency to “sit on the fence because it’s comfortable and more peaceful”. He has been unable to stand up to Alison’s mother. Alison, he implies, might have made a difference in her marriage if she had been able to give Jimmy the unqualified loyalty he demanded.

The long abstraction of the Colonel shows the same nostalgia for the past that colour some of Jimmy’s speeches (pp.69-70). There is a psychological base for the sympathy which is implied between them. Alison sums it up when she says: “You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something’s gone wrong somewhere, hasn’t it…” (p.70).

The moment of decision for Alison comes immediately after this and is rendered through action, not through dialogue. When she picks up the squirrel, looks at it, and then puts it back rather than into her suitcase, she is consciously rejecting the only possible route other than her leaving. Significantly, Helena, we learn, is staying. Her reason is clearly an excuse. With Cliff’s entry the tone shift again, and Alison clearly shows the love she still has for Jimmy by her concern for him. After Alison and Colonel leave, the conversation between Cliff and Helena clearly shows that Cliff grasps Helena’s double interest in getting Alison to leave. As he goes out he thrust the letter at her, remarking “You give it to him. He’s all yours. And I hope he rams it up your nostrils.”(p.75).

This letter is one of those devices so necessary in a naturalist play to focus the audience’s attention in dialogue which can reveal inner states only tentatively because of the need to maintain a surface illusion of “reality”. It passes from Alison, to Cliff, to Helena. And so it shows the inability of Alison or Cliff to encounter Jimmy at this time. When Helena picks up the bear and looks at it, she reinforces our sense that Cliff is right, and that she does have an interest in Jimmy herself.

When Jimmy enters he is bitter and violently angry, but also deeply hurt. Helena tells him that Alison is pregnant. The outburst which follows again stresses the vulnerability of Jimmy underneath the violence. When Helena slaps him, and drawns him to her, it is in an image in which her passion is mingled with a maternal solicitude.

Act Three Scene OneThe third act opens in a situation almost exactly parallel with the opening of Act One,

except, of course, that Helena now occupies the role that Alison played in the opening. Jimmy and Cliff bicker over the Sunday newspapers, and jimmy keeps up a running commentary, which shows his fascination with, and yet hatred of, the intellectual apparatus of the society he despises. The new element in the attack which follows is the stress on the religious observance which Helena has sustained, despite Jimmy’s influence. Failing to provoke a satisfactory response from Helena by pointing out to her that she is “living in sin”(p.81), Jimmy and Cliff begin a routine which draws heavily upon the techniques of the music-hall stage and combines these techniques with literary references. It is almost as if Jimmy is seeking to create an image of a form of art in which the two poles of his personality can meet; his deep and nostalgic attachment to the popular traditions of England, and his fragile, sophisticated twentieth-century consciousness which tells him that the world which sustained these truly popular forms has disappeared in the anonymity of the “American Age” (pp.84-86). A struggle follows between Jimmy and Cliff (pp.86-87), which parallels the struggle in Act One. Significantly, although Helena is ironing, in this act she does not get burnt. The implication is that she is not as involved as Alison, and that everything which is happening is only a pale shadow of the real event of Act One. Cliff feels this and remarks to Jimmy, comparing Helena to Alison, “It’s not the same, is it?”. Jimmy’s denial lack conviction: “No, of course it’s not the same, you idiot! It never is! Today’s meal is always different from yesterday’s and the last woman isn’t the same as the one before. If you can’t accept that, you’re going to be pretty unhappy, my boy.” (p.88). At this point Cliff announces his decision to leave. The reasons he gives are clearly to cover his real motive, which is his sense of purposelessness. Since there is no real struggle between Jimmy and Helena there is no real reason for a friend to act as intermediary. Jimmy’s response links

his sense of loss at Cliff’s leaving to his sense of there being no “good brave causes left”. And the alternative he sees is to be “butchered by the women” (p.89). The intellectual desolation Jimmy embodies has spilled over his personal life, and we become aware of the extent to which he was dependent on Alison as she was on him.

This despair is clearly what motivates Jimmy in the final conversation with Helena when, empty and purposeless, or as he puts it “heartily sick of the whole campaign, tired out, hungry and dry” (p.91), he allows himself a sentimental and romantic dream “…I’ll close that damned sweet-stall, and we’ll start everything from scratch. What do you say? We’ll get away from this place” (p.92). Helena’s acquiescence, “I say that’s wonderful”, is interrupted by the entry of Alison, untidy and ill. Jimmy leaves, leaving the two women alone.

Act Three Scene TwoThis final scene follows on almost immediately from the preceding one. Throughout the

conversation between the two women Jimmy’s trumpet can be heard playing jazz very loudly in the room offstage. The difference between Alison and Helena is brought home in the conversation which follows. Helena asserts the continuity in her of a traditional moral belief, which her sexual passion for Jimmy has not altered. Alison, we learn, has lost the child she was to bear. In the conversation between the two women we see the clarity with which, each, in her own way, sees Jimmy. But Helena is clearly relieved by Alison’s return. She declares her intention of leaving, and her inability to sustain a relationship, which demands that she yield up the sanctuary of her traditional concepts, and open herself to the flux of modern experience. Alison is also shown as seeing how any single relationship will be insufficient to sustain the kind of openness Jimmy demands (p.97). Maddened by the trumpet, Helena calls Jimmy, who enters reluctantly, and tells him that she intends to leave (p.99).

Jimmy’s reaction throughout the scene is low-key. He, too, has clearly felt the loss of the child as he has earlier remarked, “It was my first child, too, you know.” (p.98). Alison’s replay, “It was mine”, clearly moves him. Thus, when Helena announces her inability to suffer further, Jimmy’s response is pitched from the earlier tone, almost dissociated from her (p.100). The church bells, which throughout the play have been symbolically countered by the now silent trumpet, start ringing again.

Helena leaves and Jimmy and Alison are alone again. It is to the image of the bear that he returns, but now it is significantly related to the experience of the play as a whole (p.101). The despair he feels is now in the open, and his final appeal to Alison is a straightforward and direct one: “I may be a last cause, but I thought if you loved me, it didn’t matter” (p.101). Her response is the most frank and total commitment she has achieved in the play. Whether for good or bad, as the result of her experience, she is no longer sitting on the fence. Unequivocally she joins him in his despair: “I don’t want to be neutral, I don’t want to be a saint. I want to be a lost cause. I want to be corrupt and futile!”(p.101).

In the long speech that follows she bares her soul for the first time, and reveals that she has finally been through the flames of suffering though the loss of the child. For better or for worse, she and Jimmy have arrived at the bottom of the pit: “Don’t you see! I’m in the mud at last!” (p.102). There is no further place for them to retreat in reality. They have joined each other in a personal hell of consciousness, and the only place for them to retreat to his the safety of the fantasy world of bears and squirrels.

At the end of the play they are together, even if they have nowhere to go.

ANALYSIS OF SOME TOPICS

The Class-WarBritish society is deeply class-conscious, and Alison and Jimmy’s marital problems partly

derived from their different social-class origins. Jimmy, who belongs to a new, socially mobile generation which reached adulthood after the Second World War finds himself, through his marriage to Alison and his university education, in a limbo between two social classes. He can still identify the old enemy of dying Imperialism in his wife, her father and Helena, but at the same time he has lost his roots in the working class. Jimmy experiences a kind of social alienation which was common to many young people at the time. While he continually insults Alison because of her upper-class background and reproaches her with not being able to feel and express her feelings, he does nothing concrete to change or improve society.

The Welfare StateJimmy’s Porter is both a product of the Welfare State and the main voice that rises against it.

He was brought up during the “social revolution” promoted by the Labour Party and benefited from its facilities: a better living standard and an easier access to education. Jimmy is one of the new generation of post-war graduates whose education arose from the 1945 British Government’s expansion of educational opportunities through scholarships and grants. Nevertheless he conveys some powerful criticism to this social and political system.

During those days, young people like Jimmy, were discontent, since the Welfare State program was not meeting their expectations. Jimmy just wanted people to have a little of human enthusiasm, to show that they are alive, that they can think for themselves: “Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm – that’s all. (…) Let’s pretend that we’re human beings, and we’re actually alive. (…) Oh, brother, it’s such a long time since I was with anyone who got enthusiasm about anything.” (Pp.8-9, Jimmy’s lines). He didn’t want people to be used to a program that gives them bad habits and takes away their individual responsibility: “Nobody can be bothered. No one can raise themselves out of their delicious sloth.” (p.8 – Jimmy’s lines).

This criticism is even mirrored throughout the opening dialogue (pp.2 and 3) when he abuses Alison and Cliff for their conformed personalities and lack of involvement and attention, not only towards him but also towards the society they live in.

The post-war youth, represented mainly by Jimmy, but also by all the other characters, presents a sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for, “there aren’t any good, brave causes left” for them. The truth is the Welfare State made them angry young men, revolted against the permissive and conforming society which developed during those days.

Looking backJimmy and Colonel Redfern are both obsessively caught up with the past. Jimmy remembers

his childhood and the suffering he experienced as he saw his father slowly dying, while Colonel recalls his days as a colonialist in India, just like Britain that, since the loss of its colonies has experienced a time of drifting apart, because it was no longer a world power. Their memories of the past, moreover, prevent both men from living positively in the present. Osborne would seem to be suggesting that only when one does not dwell unduly on the past can one live harmoniously. Cliff, who hardly mentions the past, seems to enjoy life more than the other characters and is capable of making a quick decision to change his circumstances by leaving Porter’s house. Helena, similarly, has left behind her privileged background to make a career as an actress. Alison has also – at least to a degree – put her family and childhood behind her, and is therefore able to grow as a person.

Characters

Through the figure of Jimmy Porter, Osborne destroyed the myth that heroes have to be important figures, likeable, lofty and stoical. Osborne’s anti-hero finds himself in a kind of limbo. On the one hand, he feels middle-class, due to his mother’s lower middle-class background, a

university education and his recent marriage to Alison, while, on the other, his father belonged to the working class and his own decision to run a market stall reconfirms this tradition.

Jimmy, moreover, suffers from a kind of intellectual inertia that also affects Alison and Cliff in some degree. Unlike the generation of Jimmy’s father, who were spurred on by their political idealism, for Jimmy and his contemporaries, “There aren’t any good, brave causes left” (p.89). Consequently, while Jimmy rails against everything, he does nothing to improve society.

Even if Alison is from and upper-class army family, she has accepted the traditional role of a working-class housewife. At the beginning of the play she can be seen dressed in one of Jimmy’s old shirts as she toils over the ironing, having given up the many privileges her background would have afforded her, like a nice house, domestic help and expensive clothes.

Like many people from the British upper class, Alison is not used to expressing emotion and is extremely reserved, characteristics which caused friction between her and Jimmy. While she has given herself to Jimmy physically, she has not fully embraced his ideals. She fell in love with him because he seemed to be “a knight in shining armour”, but, at the same time, she realises he frail underneath. Yet the differences in their background and education have proved too great and Alison remained attached, as Jimmy accuses her, to the security of “well-bread indifference”. Financially, too, she has not committed herself totally, having put her savings and property in trust, to make sure that she would not have to share them with Jimmy if their marriage fails.

Cliff, a working-class Welshman, is a pleasant person, who establishes an easy relationship with both women. He represents goodness itself. Sensitive and a good listener, Cliff shoes none of the neurotic egotism displayed by Jimmy.

Helena, like Alison, is from the upper class. She is an actress and a career woman who does not question her social role, or the conventional values of her class. She is sure of her identity and does not allow Jimmy to get close enough to be able to attack her values.

Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, served in the British Imperial Army in India till 1947 when he was forced to return to Britain. Osborne says of him: “Forty years of being a soldier sometimes conceals the essentially gentle, kindly man underneath.”(Act II, Scene II, p.65). On the one hand, the Colonel dwells on the past and the privileges he enjoyed in India:” Those long, cool evenings up in the hills, everything purple and golden.” (p.70). On the other hand, he tries to move with the times and to understand his daughter’s way of living. He even takes Jimmy’s side against Alison when he accuses her of liking “to sit on the fence” (p.68), as she has continued her relationship wither family even though she knows they do not approve of Jimmy

Jimmy’s characterisationOsborne appears to be inviting us here to consider the character of Jimmy in a complex way.

There is a stress on the weakness and unsureness of Jimmy, a strong hint that the verbal force and energy is the product of a nervous tension within the character, and is in contradiction to his physical appearance. He does not have a strong physical appearance: he is “a tall, thin young man”. He smokes a pipe, which he uses as a device to assert a masculinity and assurance that perhaps, in reality, he does not possess. He is a character, the description suggests, who has a strong need to compensate on the surface for weaknesses within himself, weaknesses which he perceives, but not well or too completely. As a result, there is a feeling behind the description that there are possibilities latent in Jimmy for the capturing of the audience’s sympathy if they perceive the real figure behind the mask, the unsure, tender and honest young man behind the blustering, cruel and arrogant surface.

In addition, despite Jimmy’s nagging aggression, there are subtle indications to the audience that Jimmy’s cruelty is part of a complex defence mechanism which hides his own basic insecurity. Notice how careful he is to sprinkle his attacks on the “posh Sundays” with enough intellectual references and word games to prove his right and ability to be critical of them: “the English Novel”;

“the White Woman’s Burden”; and, in an ironic allusion to T.S. Elliot’s Mrs. Porter (in The Waste Land) “And Mrs. Porter gets them all going with the first yawn.”.

On the surface Cliff’s tenderness towards Alison may appear to emphasise Jimmy’s aggression and cruelty. But Cliff shows affection and understanding towards Jimmy too.

In response to the play’s opening it would be easy, ignoring such signs, to dismiss Jimmy Porter as just another “Rebel Without A Cause”, a self-indulgent young man who doesn’t know what he wants and screams and shouts because he can’t get it. Much of his behaviour conforms with this child pattern, for instance his screaming at Alison to make tea, and then his sudden announcement that he doesn’t want any. Jimmy Porter does behave through much of the opening act, where the audience is experiencing his character for the first time, like a spoilt child. He wants the moon. But beneath the self-indulgence, the small hints in the text are sufficient for an actor with skill to indicate that this is a symptom rather than the root of his character. Restless, selfish and egoistic as his responses are, they are nevertheless rooted in a legitimate anger against the world where people make no demands, but are content to accept what they are offered. His anger is directed at those who come close enough to be struck, but his dissatisfaction is with himself, and with his inability to change the world. At his best in this scene he does not escape his own denunciation: “Oh, heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm…” (pp.8-9). Although the attack here is directed dramatically towards Alison, the shifts from first person singular to first person plural indicates that Jimmy is including himself in his condemnation.

The fact that Jimmy Porter’s protest is mingled with nauseous self-pity and self-indulgence ought not to swamp our awareness that he is crying out in genuine anguish, and that the source of this anguish is in his awareness that he too is finally passionless, convictionless and adrift, unable to act because of his own sloth (the bad habit of being lazy and unwilling to work) and inadequacy: “Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm. Just another Sunday evening.” (p.10).

It is, of course, still legitimate to ask what it is that Jimmy wants, and to direct critical attention to the fact that he himself has no really clear idea of what that is. In fact he has no really positive future aim at all. In the present his cry is always for something to happen, anything. If happiness, love, certitude and moral security seem unattainable, then he will settle for opposition, argument, hatred and mutual destruction. Jimmy abhors a vacuum, since in nothingness he is faced with an image of his own emptiness and desolation. Jimmy’s response to Webster makes this demand clear. Webster stands for everything Jimmy hates, in an abstract way, but he is a worthy opponent, and as Jimmy says, “When he comes here, I begin to feel exhilarated. He doesn’t like me, but he gives me something, which is more than I get from most people.” (p.12). In the absence of an enemy, what is left except to tear to pieces the people you love, and ultimately yourself?

Is Jimmy more obsessed with the past than concerned with the future?The essential point about Jimmy’s character and his role in the play is his relationship with

the past. The title, Look Back in Anger, contains the essential contradiction which the character of Jimmy explores. He is angry when he looks back at a past which he longs to be contained, but which he cannot ever quite accept. This is not because he has a better ideal or dream to offer, but because he cannot accept the dreams of the past except by a process of sentimentalising them. Osborne’s theme would seem to be that Jimmy is trapped between a past from which he cannot escape and a future which he cannot accept. At the heart of the character seems to be an anger at being cast off and excluded. And in this mood he is as capable of sentimental idealism as the others in the play. There is a strongly nostalgic quality in much of his response. His vision of the future is becoming dominated by a soulless, technological vision, an era he categorises as “the American Age”. This leads to a certain confusion in Jimmy’s response. Thus, he castigates Alison in Act Two Scene One for refusing to face up to “the ugly problems of the twentieth century” and retreating into a vision of an idyllic rural past, and yet he too would often appear to be guilty of a similar

retreat. His escapist fantasy with Alison reflects just this process, as does his obsession with the romanticised visions of working class solidarity that he associates with the inter-war period and the quixotic knight errantry of the Spanish Civil War.

It is not surprising therefore that he should have a kind of grudging respect for Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern. Like Redfern, Jimmy survives by idealising the past and by creating defensive pockets of memory to which he can retire when the emptiness of his present and the desolation of his future become too much to bear. The two are linked closely together in Alison’s comment when she says: “You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something’s gone wrong somewhere, hasn’t it? (p.70). The point, perhaps, is that Jimmy regrets is the moral certainty which Colonel Redfern recalls. But it is certainly which, as Alison clearly sees, has been lost in their own times.

Each of his past relationships is treated in this fashion, that with Madeline for instance. Jimmy’s account of Madeline is clearly presented as a rejection of the present in terms of the past. People are transformed by his half-digested education into mythical roles in a personal history idealised in the face of his present sense of meaningless. What is focused here is Jimmy’s failure to separate a true understanding of his own past from his continual tendency to idealise and place on pedestals of memory all those figures with which he associates that past.

Exactly the same process of idealising and falsifying memory obscures each of the figures to whom Jimmy refers, and through whom he is shown to be bound inescapably to a past from which he cannot free himself: Hugh; Mrs. Tanner; and above all, his father. “My mother was all for being associated with minorities, provided they were smart fashionable ones.”(p.58). Behind this speech is a hint that his father’s attachment to the “good, brave cause” of the working classes in Spain was a highly self-conscious rejection of a different origin. Note the economic and class implications of the comment that “the family sent him a cheque every month, and hoped he’d get on with it quietly, without too much fuss.”(pp.58-59). Through this net of qualifying comments the image of the father he hero-worshipped dissolves into a figure of horror for the small boy, the recipient of a heritage of bitterness and failure which fascinates him and which he tries to understand and idealise in vain: “All that that feverish failure of a man had to listen to him was a small frightened boy…of a dying man…” (p.59).

What follows is the moment of acknowledgement of defeat in everything but a mutual destruction. And the appeal he makes now to Alison frankly accepts the false and broken nature of his escape into the past: “Doesn’t it matter to you what people do to me? What are you trying to do to me? I’ve given you just everything. Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”(p. 59).

It is not that the action has drawn us into sympathy with Jimmy, but that it has allowed for the first time the real and genuine nature of the personal dilemma from which his anguish stems to be made clear.

Jimmy is trapped between his sense of a past which he idealises, and from which he is, of course, excluded, since it is a falsified one, and the absence in the world in which he has to live of any ideals that can replace his idealised version of that past. The energy which memories alone can release has nowhere to go and turns into a blind fury of provocation, lashing out indiscriminately at anything and everything around him. As the opening act makes clear the destructive impulse is often sought in the smallest event, but it is not necessarily a cold and deliberately calculated act. We are fooled by Jimmy’s ability to give expression to passions and feelings which in most of us stay safely and obscurely behind the gate of our teeth, so that we believe that he is in control of the processes which move him. Yet as the play goes on we are forced to see that his control is illusory, and that the real image is that which ends Act Two, when he flings the bear down-stage and it mechanically grinds out an involuntary, stifled groan.

Jimmy fails to make any very clear comment on how the future might be changed. It is this which Helena comments on in Act Three when she accuses him of being essentially “futile”. Yet is

there not a legitimate purpose in drawing attention to the feeling of loss and purposelessness which characterised so much of the response of the post-war period?

The fantasy world of Jimmy and AlisonThis world of squirrels and bears has been the only refuge to which they have always been

able to retreat. These scenes (p.32) are difficult to reconcile at first with the angry, swinging cruelty of the opening of Act One and yet the psychology is clearly delineated. The childish, insistent demands of Jimmy, the need to eat for comfort, to which Cliff draws attention (p.4), the strongly asserted dependence on characters from the past, all point in the same direction, and it is a direction which naturally leads to this defensive world of imaginary furry little animals. The make-believe game of bears and squirrels is more than a retreat from an intolerable situation in their marriage. It is an expression of a mutual dependence, a dependence which stems in Jimmy’s case from his failure to relate to his father. In Alison’s case, although the action buries the implication deeper than in Jimmy’s a similar point is underlined. In Act Two Scene Two, for example, when Alison’s father has arrived to take her home, a clear indication of the identical roles they have played in their respective marriages is brought out: “Perhaps you and I were the ones most to blame (Colonel).” (p.68).

The game of bears and squirrels is the substitute for the real “human enthusiasm” that Jimmy has demanded from all of them.

Jimmy’s social alienationJimmy’s education has forced him out of one world, and yet simultaneously barred him from

accepting the alternative world of Alison’s mother and her brother Nigel, «the Platitude from Outer Space» and a Conservative Member of Parliament. Jimmy Porter has the prototypical modern mind, sharp and sentimental, witty and overemotional by turns, a wheel spinning fruitlessly in the mud, flinging it purposelessly in the face of anyone who comes near and then crying out in terror at the thought of being left alone in the dark. Characteristically Jimmy hates both the society people, Mummy, brother Nigel… and the “intellectuals”, whom he identifies with the “posh” Sunday papers. The former betray his educated loyalty to the truth and to ideas, but the latter betray his sentimental longing for a lost world of ideals and emotional unity in a cause which he identifies as “working-class” unity.

The sentimental idealism of JimmyJimmy’s account of his father’s death which follows is moving and revelatory but it is not

offered by Osborne as a full explanation of Jimmy’s position. We are not meant to take Jimmy’s statements at their simple face value. By this time in the play the complex interaction of character and event has provided us with a means of viewing Jimmy’s rhetoric through alternative eyes. Despite his assertions we are well aware by this time that what excluded Jimmy Porter is not Helena, nor Alison, nor even their mothers and fathers, but rather his own disillusionment with the causes for which his father bled. He looks back in anger because he cannot find his way back, except by a process of sentimental idealising, to a world where beliefs can be simply accepted and acted upon. He is crucified on the pin of his own intellect. All the complicated information he gleans from the “posh” Sundays serves only to make the possibility of any significant choice of action recede farther and farther away. what Jimmy Porter longs to do is to be able to see less clearly so that he could content himself with the half-truths of either his father’s world, or that of brother Nigel, but he cannot rest easy with either.

It is the moral passion, the demand for a belief that one can wholeheartedly adopt that is the root of Jimmy’s despair. What he is searching for is not a role, not a position in life, but a belief, a compelling and complete conviction quite inseparable from his being. It is his tragedy – and the tragedy of the times which the play explores – that such beliefs are no longer possible.

Jimmy Porter as a representative figureBecause Jimmy’s character is so complex, it is insufficient to dismiss him, as many critics

have, as merely “a spokesman for his generation”. There is certainly strong connection between the individual and psychological problems he faces, and the problems of a whole generation of people in the early 1950s. The spread of educational opportunities, which on the surface might have been seen as only desirable, had an unfortunate side effect. Jimmy is an example of those people who, born into the working-class, were educated out of it, but were unable to find an acceptable role in the complexities of the English class system. In the inconsistent world of post-war England, these people had no place to go. As a result, Jimmy Porter sentimentalises the working-class because he is no longer part of it. The sweet stall at which he works is a means of making concrete this romantic quality in Jimmy’s response to the working-class. Cliff, who is genuinely working-class and has remained so, knows how inadequate the gesture is – playing at being proletarian by a man who has been dispossessed by his education: “The sweet stall’s all right, but I think I’d like to try something else. You’re highly educated, and it suits you, but I need something a bit better.”(p.88). Jimmy belongs to no world. There is no route back for him into the working-class world of his childhood, and he thinks even this is suspect since his father and mother are clearly working-class elite. The alternative, the world of middle/upper classes, is also impossible; that world can provide no refuge for him either. It can produce enemies, and so a struggle, but he cannot belong here.

Osborne has succeeded in creating a very complex individual character whose personal failures and obsessions express many of the predominant concerns of his time. Thus, Jimmy’s demand for a virile moral idealism is symptomatic of his awareness that the traditional structures and institutions have failed, and nothing beyond a pragmatic and opportunistic vision has replaced them. The essentially pessimistic note on which the play ends is worth stressing, too, since it seems to indicate that Osborne identifies with Jimmy’s sense of disillusion, and wishes to draw attention to the difficulties that the collapse of assured values has brought for the new young group of educated British who emerged in the post-war period.