John Osborne's Backward Half-Way Look

JOHN OSBORNE'S BACKWARD HALF-WAY LOOK Look Back in Anger is truly a disturbing play. It does not disconcert, however, because, as critics like Mary McCarthy have argued, it brings to the theater a fresh and long-needed challenge to ossified social ideas. No matter how influential Osborne's role has been in staking out a path of social protest for other dramatists and novelists to follow, in this, his first play, he rails to give a dramatic context to such themes. In fact, the situation in which the play's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, is involved not only fails to motivate or support this character's social iconoclasms but weakens their validity by revealing his energies to be annoyingly infantile and psychologically aberrant. This is a more immediate source of uneasiness than Osborne's seemingly relentless war on conservatism and Philistinism. At first we might naIvely imagine that the object of Jimmy's anger is, as he himself implies, the snobbish materialism of a middle class whose organization of Society has left no niche for his intelligence, talent, and imagination, and has forced him instead into the humiliating role of shopkeeper. But the play fails to underscore this theme dramatically, in spite of Jimmy's carping allusions to it. If one wishes to argue that Jimmy's justified anger is focused and dramatized in his making of Alison a scapegoat for the middle-class smugness of her parents, he must explain not only what the playwright adds by duplicating Alison's degradation in Helena, a similar product of middle-class morality, but why he lets Jimmy weaken this effect with verbal abuse of his friend Cliff, who stands far outside these circles. The enemy is everywhere railed at by the protagonist and with more than enough wit to make him a worthy challenger; but the battle never really takes place, for Jimmy's "antagonists" never appear-or when they do, they come entirely unarmed. They belong either to the "offstage" group imaged for us in Jimmy's game of dropping names (like those of T. S. Eliot, the Bishop of Bromley, and "Aunty" Wordsworth), or to the "onstage" group who doggedly arouse our sympathy solely by being misrepresented as the enemy and persecuted for it. We may laugh at Jimmy's comic description of. Alison's father as "a plant left over from the Edwardian wilderness" and understand at once the way of life being criticized. Yet when 20 1963 OSBORNE'S BACKWARD HALF-WAY LOOK 21 "militant. Daddy" later appears, he merely awakens our sympathy for the honesty of hh self-examination, for he is genuinely sensitive to the possibility of his failure as an understanding parent and father-in-law. Alison's only "crimes" are that she happened to be a virgin when she married her husband and that she cannot bring herself-until the end of the play-to crawl in self-abnegation. Helena's hauteur before Jimmy is not smugness but justified indignation at his persecution of Alison. It soon dissolves, anyway, into complete physical, and to a certain extent spiritual, submission to him_ And Cliff's only fault is that he wants to spend Sunday afternoons reading Sunday morning papers. "If a play doesn't deal with recognizable human beings," says Osborne in his foreword, "it is nothing and has no place on the stage. You must," he tells the reader, "work out the social, moral and political implications for yourself."l Quite the contrary, this playwright has been only too willing to let his protagonist articulate for him these aspects of the problem and has given us in lieu of "recognizable human beings"-in the sense of people with universal attributes with which we can identify-a set of abnormal case studies. For whether Osborne is conscious of it or not, the theme of Look Back in Anger is not the frustration of a healthy intellectual by a social force. It is a morbid picture of the deteriorating effects of sadomasochism . And whether he intends it or not he makes his every character, and almost all his imagery, re-enforce this theme. A considerable amount of the play's dialogue, as well as...