Review: LOOK BACK IN ANGER, Almeida Theatre

I can’t imagine what it must have been like to watch Look Back in Anger in 1956. To experience John Osborne gut the audience like a fish, all their grotesque innards splayed out in front of you is as intoxicating as it is nasty. Noël Coward supposedly walked out of the original production - understandable given that the entire piece is a middle finger to stuffy establishments.

If Roots is the demure first part of the Almeida’s “Angry and Young” season, Look Back in Anger is the explosive finale. How could it not be when the human flamethrower Jimmy Porter is the burning star at the centre of its orbit?

Everyone in the play is a walking contradiction, but Jimmy is the most polarised. Both an eternal victim and a constant perpetrator, his wife’s military family have ostracised him for marrying above his station. His response, unending cruelty, fulfils the prophecy of their savage snobbery. Couple that with lingering absence of a dead father and Jimmy becomes the working-class mouthpiece for a generation stuck in a purgatorial post war world. Nothing to live or die for. The threat of nuclear war is cathartic as much as is destructive.

Emphasising Jimmy’s animality, Billy Howle only deepens the fleeting fragments of his scorched humanity. He lurks, head hunched forward, rhino-like, ready to charge horn first and smash everything in his path, spewing acidic cruelty but framed it in lyrical poetry. His nihilism mesmerises, but his vinegary bitterness repulses. Contradictions pulling themselves apart. He is a dog chasing his tail trying to bite it off.

But Alison is no pushover. Deep scars murmur beneath Ellora Torchia’s stoic exterior. Look closer and you see them dissolving her. Eyes sagging with each glare, limbs weighted like iron only for her to float with pulsating adrenaline when she is lulled into a trance by swollen sexual desire irreconcilable with class politics.

Expressionistic sequences are added for garnish, tableaus of Jimmy and Alison reduced to their primal selves crawling, snarling, growling. They are far from in love, but confined in lust, tangoing through director Atri Banerjee’s unfussy production. Icy cool jazz loiters in the smoky background. But the real meat is the writing. Banerjee pokes the beast that is Osborne’s script and lets it roar.

I wonder who the Jimmy Porters are of today. His misogyny howls off the stage, a proto-Andrew Tate perhaps. Hmmm. To dismiss him as the first talisman of toxic masculinity would do him a disservice. It’s not so much the past that the angry and young look back at it anger. It’s the future: endless war, environmental devastation. My generation are too fatalistic to rage as he does because we sense that those injustices are inevitable. Perhaps we need Jimmy Porter now more than ever.

Jimmy would be in his eighties now. No doubt he’d still be angry. Permacrisis Britain, Brexit, Covid would be in his line of fire. But the fundamental structures he rages at remain intact. His clenched indignation is even more pathetic in 2024.

Look Back in Anger plays at the Almeida Theatre until 23 November

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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