Anger and the Actor: Another Look Back

Anger and the Actor: Another Look Back ROBERT G. EGAN I . If we are reluctant to let go of 1956 as a convenient watershed point in the history of British theatre, we no longer tend to regard Look Back in Anger as a one-play revolution. John Osborne himself long ago pronounced it "a formal, rather old-fashioned play,'" and with the virtue of hindsight we can identify its technical affinities with the earlier dramatists whose theatre it was once thought to have obliterated: the aphoristic turns of Coward, the set-piece speechifying of Shaw, even the sentimental studies of Rattigan. Yet Look Back remains a unique play. The major revivals that have occurred repeatedly over the thirty years since its premiere have demonstrated that, removed from its early avatar as cultural rallying point, it has not lost its special energies as a theatre event. That those energies derive in large part from the play's exploitation of its looming central character has been clear from the start. But it no longer suffices, I think, to term the play, as Simon Trussler did in his excellent early study of Osborne, "a well-made problem play of considerable psychological insight" focusing on a "special case" individual.2 Jimmy Porter may well be a suitable case for treatment; yet he commands our attention in the theatre not as a case study but as a dynamic source of energy and utterance. The role is a bravura one, and to find its equivalents we must refer to other, more frankly declamatory traditions than either the well-made play or psychological realism. Hamlet and Aleeste come to mind, the former closest to Jimmy's self-image, the latter to his nature. All three plays are dramas ofthe unrealized self, all three characters inveterate self-dramatisers; and all three call forth an actor's most overtly theatrical, self-displaying capacities. Several critics have pointed out that his inherently histrionic nature has much to do with Jimmy Porter's dynamism, making Look Back in Anger, in Michael Billington's words, "every inch an actor's play."3 Certainly, although he is not 4'4 ROBERT G. EGAN an actor by trade, Jimmy is every inch a performer. It is not only difficult to picture him at work in his sweet-stall