On Stage
POPKIN, HENRY
On STAGE By Henry Popkin Wit of Look Back in Anger' Camouflages Bare Plot JIMMY PORTER, hero of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, is forever making his wife Alison suffer by telling here she has...
...He is not a drug addict or an illiterate with a hot potato in his mouth...
...As Osborne says in the October Encounter: "I want to make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling...
...Jimmy keeps up a steady, ironic barrage against politics, religion, newspapers, popular culture, the upper classes, and practically everything else...
...Why the sweet-stall...
...We are at last enlightened...
...Fortunately, Osborne is too much a dramatist to keep Jimmy this side of our sympathies all the time...
...The first act shows us the angry husband, the sweet but shallow wife, and the friendly, unlearned Welshman who lives with them...
...She has been put through a wringer, and she emerges unstarched...
...By the third act, Helena is giving up and retreating into the normal world, for she has even less stamina than Alison...
...S. Eliot and Pam," describes an effeminate friend as a "female Emily Bronte...
...That is the chief issue of the play —a domestic situation, a conversion plot illustrating the need for emotionality...
...He has an independent, ironic, original mind, and this misfortune gives him cause for a more subtle, more devastating kind of anguish...
...Summarized so simply, the play must sound very pat, but Jimmy's ironic humor provides a satisfactory counterweight...
...The play has a secondary social theme, but it seems to have no economic implications at all...
...What thickens ths play is John Osborne's mordant humor...
...Most of the comedy, however, is in Jimmy's sharp tongue and in Kenneth Haigh's intelligent delivery of his lines...
...But Jimmy's problem is less tangible and more complex...
...Like the other British "angry young men," including Kingsley Amis and John Wain, Osborne has great comic skill...
...he plays the trumpet and ought to have a band of his own...
...Why isn't he on the stage...
...At just this point, Jimmy goes out to console a dying friend—fulfilling his rich emotionality offstage while his wife fulfils her poorer nature by writing a familiar sort of farewell note...
...that occupation is hideously wrong...
...Jimmy does parody songs, parody vaudeville...
...she has suffered her first great loss, the death of her child, and is now worthy of Jimmy...
...Why doesn't he have a band...
...Jimmy has Labor party posters on his wall, and Osborne professes to be an individualistic Socialist, but the play is socialistic only in its indicated sympathy for the working class...
...The large issues of the play are remarkably clear of heavily realistic detail...
...The jokes are an effective camouflage, helping to divert us from the obvious intentions of Osborne's plot...
...Look Back in Anger suggests parallels with American plays like Hatful of Rain and Streetcar Named Desire, which also show us troubled, angry husbands and frantic, pregnant wives...
...Jimmy further enforces the lesson by making Helena his mistress...
...we may be reminded that Osborne himself used to be an actor...
...The superior British company (three of the five created their roles in London) sympathetically conveys the honest misery created by Jimmy's honest anger...
...The plot becomes finally a convenience, easily enough overlooked, except as a container for the diatribe, the wit, and the moving performances which make Look Back in Anger so explosive on the stage...
...Alison is conveniently ready to return...
...We are never told...
...They can think afterwards...
...We assume that he has some vocation which society will not permit him to pursue, but the whole first act passes without enlightening us...
...In the second act, Helena pushes Alison toward a break with Jimmy...
...He is certainly an entertainer, like the title-character of Osborne's next play...
...Mary Ure as the wife is, in fact, so superior to her function in the plot that she produces more of the camouflage badly needed by the author's naked intentions...
...He calls his brotherin-law "the Platitude from Outer Space," invents a vaudeville act to be called "T...
...Stripped naked, the plot's direction is plain...
...We know he keeps a sweet-stall...
...He is often cruel, and the girl he calls cruel is a tender, wounded creature...
...We know that society has, in a general way, failed Jimmy, that the passing scene nauseates him...
...The theme is more psychological than social, although we are plainly shown that the working class is the sole repository of virtue and that the rest of society might as well consent to be atomized...
...Unlike Amis, he has little room for large-scale comic incidents...
...The main point of the play is emotional...
...One major comic situation is present in the temporary replacement of Jimmy's conventionally respectable wife by the wife's even more conventional and respectable friend Helena, who becomes Jimmy's mistress...
...She goes off and suffers, and comes back on her knees...
...His rich, full, unending emotionality has been justified, and the restrained good form of his well-mannered, upper-class wife is properly rebuked...
...Jimmy is satisfied...
...On STAGE By Henry Popkin Wit of Look Back in Anger' Camouflages Bare Plot JIMMY PORTER, hero of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, is forever making his wife Alison suffer by telling here she has not suffered...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 43
