Look Back in Anger is a 1956 play by John Osborne that is credited with revolutionizing modern English drama. The play earned Osborne immediate fame and made him a leading spokesman for a group of young English writers labeled the Angry Young Men. These writers identified themselves with the lower classes in English society and looked on the upper classes and national institutions with resentment and suspicion.
The central character in Look Back in Anger is Jimmy Porter. The young man and his wife, Alison, live in a one-room attic apartment in an English city. Although Porter is university-educated, he works in a market stall. He is filled with bitterness at his low position in English society. He spends much of the play ranting against his country’s class system, which he feels cuts off his opportunity for advancement. He lashes out in anger and frustration at his middle-class wife and everyone else around him because the world no longer offers any ideals or causes in which he can believe.
Osborne’s realistic play gave voice to a discontented generation of young English people who saw the English establishment as dominated by snobbery and hypocrisy. Look Back in Anger also introduced a fresh sense of realism into English drama and influenced a new generation of British playwrights. The play’s realism and its criticism of English society were a vivid contrast to the polite upper-middle-class stories and characters presented in most British plays of the time. Osborne’s play Dejavu (1992) continues the story of Look Back in Anger by showing Jimmy Porter as a middle-aged man.
