Confrontation and Escape in Two Social Dramas

CONFRONTATION AND ESCAPE IN TWO SOCIAL DRAMAS IN THE FIRST ACT OF A Doll's HOU.fe, eating forbidden macaroons in the company of her confidante, Mrs. Linde, and her admirer, Dr. Rank, Ibsen's Nora remarks, "Oh dear, I am so happy! There's just one thing in all the world that would give me the greatest pleasure." "What's that?" enquires Dr. Rank. Nora explains that there's something she longs to say in front of Torvald but she doesn't dare: "it isn't nice." Her friends, treating her as the child she is, assure her that she can say whatever she wishes to them. NORA. I'd so love to say "Damn!-damn!-damn it all!,'1 John Osborne's Jimmy Porter needs no such elaborate context for his swearing. In the opening scene of Look Back in Anger, surrounded by Sunday papers, contemplating his ironing wife, Jimmy gradually works himself into a rage. This is only its beginning: JIMMY. God, how I hate Sundays! It's always so depressing, always the same. . . . Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing• . . . Our youth is slipping away. Do you know that? CLIFF. (throws down p'aper). What's that? JIMMY. (casually). Oh, nothing, nothing. Damn you,damn both of you, damn them all. CLIFF. Let's go to the pictures.2 Jimmy Porter, of course, is vividly conscious of his alienation from the society which surrounds him; Nora, as Ibsen makes painfully clear, lacks even a concept of what society is. Despite the great differences in their degree of awareness, however, both feel deeper frustration than they are capable of understanding or clearly expressing. Nora's professed happiness includes consciousness of restriction, of her ultimate lack of freedom; Jimmy's resentment at his friend's apparent unconcern expands readily into anger at "them," the others, the forces of restriction in society at large. Nora is more unhappy than at l"A Doll's House," in Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, tr. Eva Le Gallienne (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 21. All future page references to this play are to this edition. 2 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (New York: Criterion Books, 1957), pp. 14-15. Subsequent page references are to this editJion. 61 62 MODERN DRAMA May this point in the play she realizes; Jimmy has more causes for unhappiness than he can easily define. But Nora progresses through the play's action to a state of heightened awareness; Jimmy's psychic condition at the end of Look Back in Anger is not far removed from his condition in this early scene. Ultimately both plays, with different sorts of emphasis, suggest similar counsels of despair. Like Ibsen in A D'Oll's House (1870), John Osborne in Look Back in Anger (first produced in 1956) offered a "revolutionary" play, one destined to create not only a literary sensation but social excitement as well. Both plays seem to have filled similar places in the literary history of their times; both were taken as manifestoes of significant new ways of thinking and feeling. The specific social situations they reflect are, of course, radically different, and the sensation Osborne created was minor in comparison to Ibsen's-partly, one assumes, because by the mid-twentieth century the world had become thoroughly accustomed to sensations; partly, certainly, because Look Back in Anger is a far less successful piece of dramaturgy than the earlier play. The relative weakness of Osborne's play seems (rather surprisingly, considering the drama's superficial tone of loud assurance) a result of the playwright's fundamental lack of clarity about his characters and their meanings. The central action of Look Back in Anger takes an opposite direction to that of A Doll's House; the opposition may reflect the difference between acceptable "radical" attitudes in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. But Osborne's "reply" to Ibsen is weak both ideologically and dramatically; its dramatic technique , superficially similar to Ibsen's, focuses attention on its inadequacies of conception. The issues characters face are fundamentally similar in the two plays; no character is able to face them with complete success. Ibsen manipulates his cast to reveal this...