There are many other little niggling qualities about Jimmy Porter which render him irritating and contrary. He smokes a pipe simply because he knows that it annoys Cliff; both because of the smell and because it reminds him of the cigarettes the doctor has forbidden him to smoke. Jimmy makes it one degree worse for Cliff with his self-righteous scoffing: “They’re your ulcers. Go ahead, and have a bellyache if that’s what you want”. He refuses to lend Cliff his newspaper, so although he advocates education, in his own small way he deliberately impedes Cliff’s progress. He rifles through Alison’s handbag, in search of “something of me somewhere, a reference to me. I want to know if I’m being betrayed”, predatory like the bear which represents him in their lovers’ games. He storms off angrily when Alison burns herself on the iron, another symbol, a painful weapon of domesticity, the mark of the bored housewife.

By all accounts, he was no less boorish when younger. The raids made on the friends of the Redferns by Jimmy and Hugh appear not only to have been embarrassingly puerile but also calculated to indulge their greed and their desire to upset all the other guests. He even taunted Alison about her virginity when they got married. By remaining a virgin to her wedding day she remained faithful to her upbringing and class; she had done what was expected of her, and this infuriated her rebellious husband, who still reflects on his first lover, Madeline, to whom, in Alison’s words, “he owes just about everything”. When Alison leaves Jimmy in Act Two Scene Two, she has prepared a leaving note for him in a sealed envelope for Cliff to give him. Cliff seems surprised that she should tell Jimmy in this way, but, as she explains, she is “a conventional girl”.

Here is another cause of Jimmy’s antagonistic behaviour; wherever he goes he runs up against the divisive class system which he loathes. This is, of course, why he and Hugh disrupted the parties of the Arksdens, the Tarnatts and the Wains; they wanted to show they had no affiliation to the upper-middle-class. It was Hugh’s mother who ran the sweet stall, and Jimmy now carries on the trade as a mark of respect for her and what she represents; whilst at the same time scorning the more acceptable and financially viable positions occupied by the very people Jimmy abominates. Hugh’s mother’s stroke affects Jimmy very deeply, for it reminds him of how his own father suffered; both old people felt the scorn and contempt of everyone except Jimmy, and both represent old qualities of socialism which appear to have little relevance in 1956. Therefore Jimmy delivers diatribes of wrath against defenders of Edwardian England, like J. B. Priestley and Colonel Redfern, and reports the quote by the Bishop of Bromley which totally condemns that reputable clergyman: “He’s upset because someone has suggested that he supports the rich against the poor. He says he denies the difference of class distinctions. “This idea has been persistently and wickedly fostered by – the working classes!” Well!” Jimmy’s reaction is outraged but feeble – all he can add to the argument is “Well!”.

Helena, his “natural enemy”, appears to Jimmy at first as the epitome of everything squalid and contemptible about the class-ridden society. She doesn’t maintain her position in society but deliberately “slums it” by being an actress. Jimmy interprets this as her abandoning real life for playing out fantasies. This makes her the complete opposite of Jimmy, who is down-to-earth if nothing else. He forces her to threaten him with physical violence – “If you come any nearer, I will slap your face” – and then refuses to play the middle-class game of giving way to a woman who threatens to slap one’s face: “I’ve no public-school scruples about hitting girls. If you slap my face – by God, I’ll lay you out!” That’s Jimmy’s version of scrupulous fairness and equality.

However, Jimmy’s attitude to class struggles is not as straightforward as it might seem. He may condemn class distinctions, but his own class-oriented behaviour ensures that the traditions of the classes continue. He may seem bitter in his condemnation of Redfern’s Edwardian England, but he is unable to hide a certain resentment, even jealousy, of the contented idyll of something which can never be his, “still casting well-fed glances back to the Edwardian twilight from his comfortable, disenfranchised wilderness”. There is nothing intrinsically honourable about not being well-fed or comfortable; and there is a certain romance in the phrase “Edwardian twilight”, the years before the World War when the well-to-do family felt comfortably free from all responsibility to have care for others less well off. In his own way, Jimmy Porter, would also dearly love some form of capricious disenfranchisement which would free him of his burdens.

Above all, it is the way that Osborne has created the character of Colonel Redfern that proves Jimmy’s reports of him are false. Far from being an unreasonable, dogmatic, overpowering character, he is mild, kind and very understanding indeed. Alison cannot really accept it when Redfern believes that some of the communication-gap between the two parties was his own fault. One might expect Redfern to be far more infuriated with his foolish daughter than he is. He even agrees with Jimmy’s description of him: “one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more”. Rather than representing the past, or arch-Conservatism, or class hatred, or any of the things to which Jimmy is obviously opposed, Redfern is a family man who represents basic decency, and never considers himself infallible. He is quite prepared to try to learn the lesson of the young; he accepts that the amount of time that he spent abroad meant he missed out on trends in Britain. Above all, he is not proud and does not set himself up as Jimmy’s chief opponent. As a result, Jimmy’s heroism looks like just petulance.

Redfern perhaps represents society which refuses to change with the world. Alison tries to sum up the basic difference between her father and her husband: “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?” Both men have experienced change; Jimmy has come through the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War as a child, and, indeed, Redfern served in India between 1914 and 1947. Redfern has not been at home in Britain for as long as Jimmy and this causes the rift between them. Nevertheless, Jimmy is also a static character, whereas Redfern is strangely progressive. The play begins with Jimmy complaining that every Sunday they go through the same ritual of reading all the newspapers, no matter what happens, as Alison does her ironing: “Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s”. The play is, in fact, largely static because even though Jimmy’s lover changes, the new one is still seen doing the Sunday afternoon ironing. Alison seems to use this ironing as a coping mechanism; she pretends to be so involved with her task that she cannot tear herself away from it to answer Jimmy’s irritating questions. This is particularly noticeable after his recriminations against Alison’s brother Nigel in Act One.

The major change in Alison is caused by Helena’s arrival, making her see sense as far as her marriage is concerned. The turning point for her is the moment she announces that she is going to church. Jimmy can only retaliate with some inarticulate bluster, but does not really know how to cope with the situation. Religion is an anathema to Jimmy and is to be treated with the utmost derision. When he thinks of Alison going to church, he calls to mind the story of the Earl’s Court evangelist and the article by the Bishop of Bromley; but more than that, just like her pre-marital virginity, going to church on a Sunday is one of the last bastions of middle-class life which he so despises. So Jimmy sees this as a step back on Alison’s part, heavily influenced by Helena.

John Osborne

Thanks for sticking with me through this week of Look Back in Anger! In my next blog post, I’ll move on to Osborne’s next significant play, The Entertainer.

Another myth that grew at this time was that of the “angry young man”. Today Jimmy Porter and that phrase are synonymous despite the fact that the phrase was first used by the Anglo-Irish writer Leslie Paul in 1951 as the title of his autobiography. The critic John Russell Taylor adapted the phrase to suit his purposes when he published his book Anger and After in 1962. “Angry young man” sums up a good deal of Jimmy Porter’s outward personality, and is, of course, an easy and memorable epithet.

The myth even extends to the period. 1956 was a notorious year. It was the year of the Suez crisis, when Britain decided to join forces with France to invade Egypt after Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Protests against the Suez invasion lead to the eventual establishment of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. 1956 was also the year of the Hungarian Revolution, when Hungarian dissidents were strongly supressed by the Russian communists. Amid this turmoil arrived Jimmy, a man, whether he be spokesman or individual, who cared for his country and his people and who turned his anger on the politicians and moralists of the day because they had moulded the national situation into its current, dismal shape.

However, this was not the first period of turmoil that Britain had experienced in the twentieth century. If the creation of a character like Jimmy Porter is a natural reaction to the horrors of war, why didn’t an equivalent character arrive on the scene shortly after the First World War, which was far more horrendous and cost many more lives? For me, it was the antagonism between the United States and (what was) the Soviet Union that created the perfect environment for Jimmy Porter. In a most self-conscious attempt at flippancy, Jimmy says: “we get our cooking from Paris…our politics from Moscow, and our morals from Port Said” – a world of fine dining, Russian expansionism and corruption! He is concerned at what he considers to be the threat to British individualism from foreign powers, and continues to maintain a sneaking regard for Colonel Redfern (Alison’s stiff-upper-lip father) and his Edwardian England. However, his socialism causes him to side more with the USSR than with America; he is disgusted with the Bishop of Bromley’s appeal “to all Christians to do what they can to assist in the manufacture of the H-Bomb” because it naturally assumes that the USA are the good guys and that Russia is the enemy. He cannot believe that it can be Christian and, above all, right, to kill off the Russians. There’s no doubt that he’s portrayed as a CND pioneer.

Furthermore, he is revealed as anti-American in most respects. His story about the American evangelist at Earl’s Court, where a woman was badly injured under the weight of enthusiastic Christians who were so carried away by their keenness to get to the front that they did not notice she had been trampled underfoot, is used to demonstrate both the impracticality and horror of organised religion and what he sees as the self-centredness of American influence. It’s no surprise that critical reaction to the play in the USSR was most favourable. Reuters reported on 5th August 1957 that the TASS drama critic had written that “one of the most attractive features of the work is its faith in everything that is good and radiant in the soul”. This radiance is presumably the opposite of the tedium that Jimmy envisages in the future; “I must say it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age – unless you’re an American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans. That’s a thought, isn’t it?” It is a thought, and it’s a shame he doesn’t develop it further.

This kind of behaviour – bringing up an important idea and then not drawing any conclusions from it – is symptomatic of both his fear for the future and his laziness. C. W. E. Bigsby commented in his 1981 essay The Language of Crisis in British Theatre: “Education had given [him] articulateness but nothing to be articulate about”; but that’s not entirely the same thing. Jimmy is clearly an educated man, to set him apart from the other major characters of the play. Colonel Redfern cannot understand why Jimmy has not achieved more than just running a sweet stall in a market, but doubtless the personal contact involved and the more leisurely pace offer him a greater quality of life than the cut-throat worlds of, say, journalism or advertising, two of the careers which Alison says he has tried. At the beginning of the play, education and intelligence appear to be Jimmy’s main preoccupations, as he spends most of his time shaming and bullying house-mate Cliff into admitting that he is ignorant and uneducated. At the beginning of the second act we hear Jimmy playing his jazz trumpet; evidence of eloquence and talent, but wasted as there is no audience. Certainly, Alison and Helena would wish he would keep his trumpet quiet. In fact, Helena’s slight paranoia comes to the fore as she imagines him killing her with it. Does that take the symbolism of the trumpet too far? It is more revealing that she enjoys the danger – she finds him “horrifying and oddly exciting”; her eventual relationship with Jimmy will not come as quite such a surprise.

It is that kind of stifling of Jimmy’s activities and responses which make Jimmy associate himself with the unborn foetus at the end of Act One. Something which does not experience life but has the promise of it; something so protected and untouchable, that it is virtually a prisoner, suffocating in silence; Jimmy believes that he and the foetus share the same plight. A cruel extension of this idea is his wish that Alison should have a miscarriage; ostensibly, Jimmy simply wants to generate a reaction from Alison, a spark of individualism which would prove life and the power of communication. At the same time the death of the foetus would represent the end of Jimmy’s own suffocation.

Jimmy’s use of the foetus as a symbol for his own condition is a good example of his being his own worst enemy. In his efforts to express himself and to provoke reactions, Jimmy manages to be cruel and antagonistic. It’s brutal to wish that a pregnant woman should lose her child. Osborne emphasises Alison’s reaction to his cruelty: “She moves away, stunned… Alison’s head goes back as if she were about to make some sound. But her mouth remains open and trembling…” Normally she takes all Jimmy’s petty cruelties in her stride, but this demand for an elimination of life and love is too shocking for her. She moves as if to speak – which would be her natural reaction – but she does not, because this would signify that Jimmy’s cruelty had hit its target. Therefore, she hovers between the expressive and the insensible and refuses to yield to his violence.

In my next blog post, I’ll conclude this appreciation of Look Back in Anger.

On reflection, one of the most surprising facts about 20th century British theatre is that the play which has been most widely regarded as being the watershed in modern drama, John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger (1956), with its reputation for anger, generation-gap protest, bald domesticity, and bloody-mindedness, does not fall foul of any of the categories agreed by the Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship) in 1909, and did not receive much attention from the Lord Chamberlain’s office.

There was some bartering over a few words and phrases, some of which Osborne agreed to change, some on which the censor relented. My favourite example of horse-trading getting this play licensed was the censor’s insistence on removing the song title “There’s a Smokescreen in my Pubic Hair”, which Osborne changed to “You can quit hanging round my counter, Mildred, cos you’ll find my position is closed.” Go figure. Bizarrely, the thing that upset the censor the most was Osborne’s imagery of a python devouring its prey as a metaphor for Alison’s sexual hunger. Eventually they agreed on a milder description of the act; maintaining the metaphor but just toning down the language a little. It all seems so petty nowadays.

The play takes war, arguably the most offensive and indecent act in the world, as the starting-point for its anger. Jimmy Porter tells Helena: “I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless… I knew more about love, betrayal… and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know all your life.” This desperation was caused by the young Jimmy’s concern for his dying father. The rest of his family did not care about him because he had been wounded fighting for the cause of socialism in the Spanish Civil War; this was an embarrassment to them as they preferred to belong to the “smart and fashionable” set. Jimmy’s disgust at this mother, whose only thought was “that she allied herself to a man who seemed to be on the wrong side in all things” went on to cause an obsession with mother-figures; recognisable in both his utter hatred of his girlfriend Alison’s mother, and his unconditional love for his mate Hugh’s mother.

Jimmy’s war-scarred upbringing, then, converted him into a socialist because of his admiration for the supreme sacrifice made by his father. However, rather than trying to be an upbeat promoter of his cause, he tries to inflict the misery which he experienced on others in the hope that, via suffering, they might reach the same conclusions as him. Unsurprisingly, this is not a successful tactic. At best his motives are misunderstood and at worst he’s the epitome of boorish insensitivity. He’s the archetypal “own worst enemy”.

This boorishness and insensitivity led to a critical misunderstanding of the significance of the character of Jimmy Porter. Consider, if you will, the difference of opinion between these short statements: “Jimmy Porter is being offered as a spokesman for a disaffected generation… contrived to express the misgivings, the grievances and the impatience of almost everyone who resented the power and the corruption” (Ronald Hayman, in British Theatre since 1955 – A Reassessment); “there is absolutely no indication in the play that Osborne ever intended Jimmy’s remarks to be taken as a general condemnation of society. Jimmy is an extremely unusual young man and anything but representative of the young men of our time” (George A. Wellwarth’s essay, John Osborne – Angry Young Man?) Fifteen years elapsed between the two comments – Hayman’s was made in 1979, Wellwarth’s in 1964 – and certainly the more recent comment reflects the attitude most widely held nowadays.

Today aficionados of Jimmy Porter and his play would criticise Wellwarth’s opinion, believing that at the time he was too close to the situation to understand its truth – basically, he couldn’t see the wood for the trees – and that the added years have enabled us to see the play in greater perspective. Jimmy fans may well also believe that he was too realistic and accurate a creation to be easily acceptable. Nevertheless, Wellwarth’s comment was delivered eight years after the play, and, as the play itself clearly states, society is continually changing, so I think it is unlikely that he was too involved in the situation to have a clear vision of what was taking place. Supporters of Wellwarth’s argument might well agree that Jimmy is a psychotic individual with an individual tale to tell. Certainly, in performance, the audience is more interested in discovering how the love affairs of Jimmy, Alison and Helena will work out, rather than relating the whole story to Britain in 1956. Perhaps Ronald Hayman’s quote suggests that he succumbed to the easy mistake of considering the myth more than the play itself.

George Devine

Despite the enormous variety of critical responses, it was not a box-office success until a scene from it was shown on television. Public awareness of the play suddenly grew, as did the audiences, and the season was extended. Also, despite their reactions to the play itself, the critics were almost unanimous when they considered Osborne’s skill as a writer. Cecil Wilson, in the Daily Mail, also on 9th May 1956, hit the nail on the head as far as many commentators were concerned, when he said: “we can perceive what a brilliant play this young man will write when he has got this one out of his system and let a little sunshine into his soul.”

In my next blog post, I’ll delve a bit deeper into the character of Jimmy Porter.