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In April 1956, the English Stage Company began its first season at the Royal Court and had an immediate impact upon the course of British theatre. The success of the first season was the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, an unknown play by a then unknown writer, which lent the tone of crusading radicalism, often bitter and angry but never lazy or complacent, to the Royal Court’s programmes. —Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre, 1996 The company changed the course of British theatre almost overnight when it staged John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.—Philip Barnes, 1986 With extreme precariousness, through one touch-and-go crisis after another, the Royal Court has survived uniquely as a writers’ theatre ever since the ESC’s first discovery, John Osborne, changed the course of theatrical history with Look Back in Anger, staged five weeks after the opening production in 1956.—Richard Findlater, 1981 laying out the questions One thing emerges consistently in any study of British theatre in the 1950s: the English Stage Company’s unique role in inaugurating a new era in British theatre. This perception is closely bound up with the claim that the third play performed by this company, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, marked a turning point in the evolution of British theatre, a judgment which explains the metaphors that are so frequently invoked to describe the event: watershed, landmark, ground-breaking intervention , turnabout or turning point, renaissance, key-date. But despite this apparent critical consensus regarding the singular role of the play, many critics also agree that it is rather conventional in nature. The discrepancy between critical assessments of Look Back in Anger as a formally conventional play, and its remarkable historical reception and impact, presents ConvergentForces 1 The English Stage Company and Look Back in Anger 16 convergent forces itself as something of a conundrum. Equally puzzling is the centrality that Osborne’s play has been given in the historical assessment of the company that performed it—the link established between company and play, manifested in the breakthrough narrative that has come to be associated with this production, a link which provokes still more questions. The assessment of a theatre company draws, more often than not, on its repertoire of plays, or the playwrights associated with it, as well as on factors such as ideology, policy, actors, and work methods. The English Stage Company (ESC) came to fame as a writers’ theatre, and its reputation was based on its policy of presenting new and innovative plays. The repertoire of the ESC included several works by new playwrights widely conceded five decades later to have surpassed Osborne’s play in their innovation . Look Back in Anger was neither the first play performed by the ESC nor the one seen over time as the most innovative of the company’s productions, yet it is Osborne’s play that is prominently held to account for the company’s revolutionary role. The influential position of the English Stage Company during the postwar era in Britain and the role attributed to this company in contemporary British theatre have retained a legendary status into the twenty-first century. In recent years, however, revisionist histories query the revolutionary role ascribed to this company. Studies by Lacey (1995), Rebellato (1999), and Shellard (1999 and 2006), and essays by Baz Kershaw and Derek Paget in The Cambridge History of British Theatre (2004), question either the overnight transformation associated with the ESC production of Look Back in Anger or the uniquely radical nature of this company compared with other companies during the postwar era. These studies and essays suggest other agents that contributed to the changes in the British theatre and also argue that various plays performed by other companies, before or during the same years as the ESC’s appearance on the theatrical map, were at least as radical as those performed by the ESC. The question of the significance attributed to Osborne’s play is thus further entangled with the question of the revolutionary contribution ascribed to the ESC. In view of these concerns, one might ask what accounts for the emergence and robustness of the historical judgments surrounding Osborne’s play and the ESC, judgments that have left such an indelible imprint on cultural-historical memory. My primary aim here is to reveal the major role of the mediating processes both in making the ESC production of Look Back in Anger a celebrated event and...

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