IN-YER-FACE THEATRE

Back catalogue: John Osborne

John Osborne and the Myth of Anger by Aleks Sierz (1996)

The people I should like to contact - if I knew how - aren't likely to be reading
this book anyway. If they have ever heard of me, it is only as a rather oddlooking 'angry young man'.

(John Osborne, 'They Call It Cricket')

When John Osborne died on Christmas Eve 1994, the Guardian, along with
other newspapers, reported the event on its front page. It was big news.
Under the headline 'John Osborne, Founding "Angry Young Man", Dies Aged
65', the report emphasised the two things that readers could be expected to
know about the playwright: that he was 'the original angry young man' and
that he was 'best known for Look Back in Anger, the original kitchen sink
drama'. (1) Osborne remains an iconic figure, as much a cultural symbol of
the 1950s as James Dean or Marlon Brando. Because of this, our perception
of 1956, the year Look Back in Anger was first put on, has been completely
colonised by the myth of anger: for example, few people under the age of 60
can have a first hand memory of the event, but most of us live in the shadow
of its resonances. In this way, the myth of the event is now more real to us
than the event itself.

And the myth-making started soon after the play opened. The invention, for
instance, of the Angry Young Man took mere weeks to accomplish. And, as
early as 1958, Kenneth Allsop had already rushed into print with The Angry
Decade, although a more accurate title would have been 'The Angry Eighteen
Months'. By 1969, the extent to which Osborne's first success had become a
potent symbol was underlined by critic Simon Trussler. In The Plays of John
Osborne, he opens the chapter on Look Back in Anger by saying that it is 'at
once a play and a myth'. Pointing out that 'its name and its supposed theme
are recognised instantly by many more people than have ever seen a
production or read a script', Trussler observes that 'it is not altogether
possible or even desirable to separate the resultant myth from the reality. A

good play, like any major work of art, accretes associations and spawns its
own canon of critical commonplaces'. (2)

But what does it mean to call a cultural artefact a myth? There are two ways
of looking at modern myth: the mythophobic and the mythophilic. The first
uses the debunking approach, usually seeing myth as a 'media event'. In
journalist Harry Ritchie's account, for example, the Angry Young Men were a
hype 'invented by the media', which grew as 'the great publicity of the myth
of the Angry Young Men actually created the reality the writers were
supposed to be reflecting'. For mythophobes, myth and reality don't mix.
Ritchie's strength lies in his meticulous account of what happened; his
weakness is his superficial understanding of how myth works. Much of the
fuss about anger, he claims, 'could have been avoided if Osborne had chosen
a different title for his play'. (3) But, as the title page of the manuscript
clearly shows, out of the seven titles that Osborne wrote down, six are
variations on the theme of anger: Farewell to Anger, Angry Man, Man in a
Rage, Close the Cage Behind You, My Blood Is a Mile High and Look Back in
Anger. For its author, the play's theme was anger. Remembering that the
Christian apologist Leslie Paul had used Angry Young Man as the title of his
autobiography in 1951, it is clear that the idea of anger was not Osborne's
alone - it was in the air, a sign of the times. (4)

The other way of looking at myth is mythophile, the pleasure being to tease
out meaning from cultural icons. In critic Robert Hewison's approach, for
example, 'myths are imaginative versions of truth' - cultural myth is a
'combination of historical truths and popular distortion'. What matters is not
the literal truth, but the symbolic resonance. For Hewison, 1956 was the 'first
moment of history after the Second World War about which there is anything
like a persistent myth'. But why do myths persist? Hewison sees how they
play a vital social role: in his description of the discontented intellectuals of
the mid-1950s, he says, 'What was needed was a myth, and in 1956 there
appeared the myth of the Angry Young Man'. (5) If the strength of the
mythophilic school is that it shows how myth answers a social need, its
weakness is that it tends to accept a myth's politics at face value.

And while the mythophobes point out that the opening night of Look Back in
Anger on 8 May 1956 was a rather dull evening, the myth-makers see it as a
historic moment. For example, in Anger and After, the first standard text
about the new wave in postwar British theatre, critic John Russell Taylor turns
a quiet night at the theatre into an explosive occasion: 'If ever a revolution

began with one explosion it was this.' Taylor's enthusiasm, expressed through
a insistent use of the metaphor of revolution, reminds us that myths answer
emotional needs. While those who were undoubtedly there remember the
opening night as quiet, the many hundreds who claim to have attended
describe it as a momentous occasion. (6) Yet few have asked the question:
why was the metaphor of revolution a vital ingredient in the myth of anger?

Origins of the myth

Whether mythophobe or mythophile, all commentators look back to the first

production of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court, the cauldron in which
the myth of anger was cooked up. From the brash imperative of its title to the
symbolism of its ironing board and jazz trumpet, it is a play teeming with
ingredients for myth-making. What holds them all together is the play's
emotionality. Categorised at the time by Allsop as an 'Emotionalist', Osborne
not only explored feelings: he flung them at the audience. Lord Harewood, a
member of the Royal Court board, remembers lending the play's text to a
friend who protested: 'People wont stand for being shouted at like that, it's
not what they go to the theatre for.' While perfectly true of Aunt Edna
audiences, the English Stage Company's George Devine was counting on a
different public, one for whom Jimmy Porter's in-your-face emotionality struck
an immediate chord.

On the first night, Observer critic Kenneth Tynan recognised in the play's
leading character a representative of all those who 'deplore the tyranny of
"good taste" and refuse to accept "emotional" as a term of abuse'. By January
1957, Osborne made the link between emotion and protest explicit when he
mocked the 'emotion snobs who believe that protest is vulgar'. (7) Although
derided by some critics as incoherent, Jimmy's emotionality was one of the
play's strengths. In terms of myth, it sent a signal from the stage to the
gallery. And emotionality in Look Back in Anger is mainly expressed through
Jimmy's tirades. In 'language riding on a high emotional charge', Osborne
created a myth of authentic feeling. Undergraduate in style, aggressively
witty, revelling in wordiness, repetition and exaggeration, Jimmy's
fulminations are symbolic of the wider cultural conflict between idealised
passion and repressive conformity. Often on 'the point of breaking into a
public rhetorical speech', his eloquence also represents a fiction of the
authentic spoken vernacular. But, contrary to received wisdom, it is 'the voice
of the rebel middle class for all its plebeian pretentions'. (8)

While no one in real life speaks like Jimmy does, his language works at the
level of fantasy. 'Thousands of people wanted to feel that, like Jimmy, they
were full of febrile energy and immune to endemic complacency.' To an
audience conscious of stultifying conventions, Jimmy says out loud what
Everyman secretly longs to tell his wife or mother-in-law. Osborne's often
quoted intention of giving 'lessons in feeling' relies on the therapeutic device
of wish-fulfilment. An apocryphal story emphasises the point: 'A young
Australian painter brought up in a remote mining community tells me that
Porter's sardonic quotations from the Sunday papers at the start of the play
gripped his attention instantly, because they expressed feelings which he had
long been disturbed by himself [] What he found in Osborne was a kind of
safety valve.' Allsop goes further. Because many of us secretly share Jimmy's
sadism, self-righteousness and sentimentality, 'it was a great consciencespree to see them acted out before our eyes in the most tearaway fashion
imaginable [] With Jimmy up there on stage saying and doing it all for us, we
all came away feeling winged-ankled, purged of a great ballast of guilt.' (9)
What enables the myth of anger to come alive is the audience's profound
need for it.

Hero and anti-hero

It is the job of the cult anti-hero not only to express social anxieties, but to
cure them at the level of fiction. So while Osborne claimed that his play was
not a vehicle for a message, it is clear that Jimmy is the message. What
spectators take away from the play is not its literary allusions, but the image
of Jimmy, whether ranting or reading, playing the fool or stricken with pain.
Those that identified with him, loved the play; those that didn't, hated it.
Compared to theatrical heroes such as Terence Rattigan's tight-lipped Freddy,
John Whiting's Rupert Forster or T. S. Eliot's spiritually challenged Lord
Monchensey, Jimmy is down to earth, angry and alienated. Central to his
persona is the 'unexamined assumption that working-class people are more
real than others because they suffer more'. Though capable of flights of
eloquence, it was Jimmy who first 'broke up the death mask of loftiness with
which previous writers had attempted to disguise their emotions'. (10)

Whether Jimmy he is labelled a hero, anti-hero or folk hero doesn't matter.

What is important for the growth of myth is not just that Jimmy mirrors what
his audiences were, but that he suggests so forcefully what they might wish

to become. Myth not only expresses needs - it also articulates aspirations.

The myths inside the play

Most good plays embody more than one myth. Though Jimmy's alienation his feeling of being out of place, his idealising of the past, his use of memory
as a defence against meaninglessness - drives the play along, none of this
happens in a vacuum. What gives Osborne's portrait of the individual its
power is that it also portrays a national malaise. Jimmy's personal way of
looking back is congruent with his country's way of looking back. Both share
assumptions about explaining current woes by contrasting them with an
idealised past. And not only is the play's essential Englishness implicit in the
structure of its main situations, it is also explicit in its basic belief that
literature can change the world. Look Back in Anger became the most
symbolic play of its decade not because it was the profoundest, but because
it was the most English. This quality, which George Steiner called 'deliberate
parochialism', was plain to foreign critics. Harold Clurman thought Americans
might find Jimmy's anger 'a little difficult to understand', while Guy Dumur,
commenting on the 1958 French version, asked whether 'the boredom of the
English Sunday, the colonel back from India and so on - can they be
translated into French?'. If the play's themes are English, so too is its idiom especially its concern with registers of class. Clurman pointed out that the
English understand the anger 'because the jitters which rack Jimmy, though
out of proportion to the facts within the play, are in the very air the
Englishman breathes'. (11)

Or in the very myths the English believe in. What Osborne typically does is to
oppose the dominant myths of his day with their repressed opposites.
Compared to Colonel Redfern's idea of two people marrying for love - which
assumes love is an altruistic emotion - Jimmy embodies the idea that
marriage is a battle between two animals - which assumes that you can only
be honest by being hurtful. Both myths are romantic. And, as in the sex war,
so in the class struggle. Look Back in Anger pits the ideal of commitment which assumes society can be changed by doing something - against the
feeling of disillusionment - which provides an alibi for doing nothing.

Two other images pervade the play: one is Alison silently ironing (she is made
to find meaning through humiliation); the other is Jimmy talking himself into a

corner (he is made to seek truth through masochism). Within a paradigm

defined by the tension between conformity and transgression, Osborne offers
no solutions. The play is fertile ground for myth because it is fuelled by this
tension between opposites. As well as thematic tensions, Look Back in Anger
also has a circularity of plot. If in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, nothing
happens twice, 'then in Look Back in Anger nothing can be said to happen
three times'. (12)

Unable to do anything about their lives, the play's characters constantly

complain about the boredom of a life in which nothing changes. Ironically, it
may be this absence of a myth of change at the heart of the play which
allowed it to be seen less as a story about a troubled marriage and more as a
play about society. The politics implied by this 'original kitchen sink drama'
centre not only on its gestures of negation, but are also implied by its
pervasive sense of powerlessness. With an ending that emphasises
irresolution and illusion, the play both reflected and legitimated the political
contradictions of its admirers.

The hero as real person

The much vaunted realism of Look Back in Anger has less to do with its set it's typical of myth that the 'original kitchen sink drama' takes place in an
attic without a sink - and more with the fact that audiences were prepared to
recognise Jimmy as a real person. The first sign of the play's escape from the
confines of fiction and into the bracing air of cultural mythology was Tynan's
Observer review. Though Harold Hobson's review in the Sunday Times was
more perceptive about the play, Tynan's was a much better myth-making
exercise. Using a barrage of rhetorical devices, Tynan gives Jimmy opinions
about flogging, lynching and colonialism - subjects that don't appear in the
play. And, after savaging those who doubted its excellence, he turns Jimmy's
ambiguities into his own point of view, praising the 'drift towards anarchy, the
instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of "official" attitudes, the
surreal sense of humour [] the casual promiscuity'. (13) There is no better
list of what liberal intellectuals wanted from a radical play in the mid-1950s.

The need to see Look Back in Anger in these terms blinded many not only to
its traditional character, but to the fact that one its main subjects is a
marriage. Instead, the play grows rapidly as a myth - mainly because

Osborne and Jimmy, author and creation, become one in the public mind. The
'sense of naked honesty that came from the identification between author
and protagonist' gave a powerful boost to the image of authenticity at the
heart of the play. (14)

This image gained further strength from its associations in English culture.
Since JO and JP are truth-tellers, they remind us of other artists of
authenticity, such as F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence. Myth thus unites an
idealised tradition with a new icon of rebellion, the Angry Young Man.

The Angry Young Man as symbol

Whether or not it was George Fearon, the Royal Court's press officer, who
coined the phrase 'Angry Young Man' in despair at publicising the play,
doesn't really matter. The significant thing is that Osborne was not only
identified with an anti-heroic persona, but was also lumped together with
other 'dissentient' writers, such as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Colin Wilson,
to form a composite character. Such apparently casual mixing produced a
compelling myth, whose most surprising asset was Osborne himself - his idea
of the authentic artist was a man who spouted aggressive opinions on every
subject under the sun. An early example of the rentaquote personality.

As a potent symbol, the figure of the Angry Young Man spoke volumes about
popular culture. Its connotations are fertile with meaning. Anger, at a time of
buttoned up emotions and stiff upper lips, means losing your cool. A very
non-U feeling, anger signified behaving badly, scandal, foreignness, threat. In
a word, otherness. As English culture's repressed other, anger was seen as
provincial rather than metropolitan, rough rather than well spoken, predatory
rather than safe - and dissatisfied rather than complacent.

What does the Young in AYM connote? At a time when sociology was coming
up with new ways of discussing the youth question, the AYM became a potent
metaphor for youth. Just as critics were divided on Jimmy's character - who
personified either deviance or hope - so what you felt about the AYM
depended on what you felt about youth. In the 1950s, the quarrel between
generations was widely seen as newly nihilistic. In Professor George Steiner's
words: 'The mumble of the drop-out, the "fuck-off" of the beatnik, the silence

of the teenager in the enemy house of his parents, are meant to destroy.'
Newly visible, the teenager was both a problem and a market opportunity anything that was sold as 'new' had to be dressed up as 'young'. By 1959,
author Colin MacInnes glimpsed a changed social landscape: 'The "two
nations" of our society may perhaps no longer be those of the "rich" and the
"poor" (or, to use old-fashioned terms, the "upper" and "working" classes),
but those of teenagers on the one hand and, on the other, all those who have
assumed the burdens of adult responsibility.' (15)

Though no longer teenagers, the Jimmy Porters and Lucky Jims were symbols
of negative youth. Often, they were equated with the teddy boys. Typical of
such assumptions was Tynan's equation of youth and radicalism - he believed
that everyone between the ages of 20 and 30 would like Look Back in Anger.

What does the Man in AYM connote? At a time when women, and Alison is a
good example, were often metaphors for suffering and symbols of
victimisation, men were imagined as active subjects - even if the activity lead
nowhere. Masculinity equalled freedom, and mobility. For men, sex meant
aggressive conquest rather than pleasurable langour. It was also a method of
social climbing: Look Back in Anger is typical of its decade in that the class
war was fought in the bedroom - an example of what Anthony Burgess called
'hypergamy', meaning marriage by a man into a social class higher than his
own. It is also significant that the play's classic 'There aren't any good, brave
causes left' speech begins: 'Why, why, why, why do we let these women
bleed us to death?' First seen as an attack on society, the play's plot is
actually based on the degradation of women. As far as Osborne is concerned,
his bad boy image at the time of Suez had less to do with politics than with
misogyny - in the Daily Mail, for example, he blustered: 'What's gone wrong
with WOMEN?' (16)

Whether Osborne's misogyny was due to homosexual ambivalence or to a

wider anxiety about maleness in a society where roles were starting to be
questioned, is immaterial. Anger remained a man's business. Although the
Angry Young Man was partly a media hype, he was mainly a much-needed
myth that both summed up a problematic present and suggested ways of
dealing with it. He could both attack society and prove that you could
succeed in it. He was both English and anti-English. As the 'educated thug',
he had to resolve the tension between the image of success held out to the
majority and the actual attainment of success by a mere minority - he had to
personify not only the scholarship boy, but other youth as well.

Allegedly the result of the 1944 Education Act, the AYM exemplified the
growing vogue for sociological explanation. Vaguely lower class, he
represented social mobility; vaguely lefty, he promised change. A rebel
without a cause, he implied that to be politically aware meant being
politically disengaged. More than the sum of his parts, the AYM gave the
impression that individuals could be part of a movement for change simply by
being honest. It was the job of the myth of anger to resolve such
contradictions.

The metaphor of revolution

Because myth answers contradictory needs, it is rarely coherent. While the

Angry Young Man was rather apolitical, he has become associated in our
cultural memory with changes that were highly politicised. He was both an
icon of nihilism and part of a project of constructive reform. As such, he
needed the metaphor of revolution. John Russell Taylor may have described
the new wave drama as a revolution more insistently than others, but his was
by no means a lone voice. In January 1957, Tynan claimed he that he had
heard 'the distinct sound of barricades' being erected at the Royal Court. In
1958, Allsop called Osborne, Amis and Wilson 'The Three Musketeers of the
revolutionary army'. A year later, while director Lindsay Anderson agreed with
Osborne that a 'revolution' in drama had taken place, Hobson was equally
hyperbolic: Look Back in Anger was 'praised as a call to something like
revolution, and the overthrow of all accepted values'. Even those who, like
the sceptical Christopher Booker, looked askance at the changes, agreed they
were a 'revolution'. (17)

Of course, the idea of revolution takes many shapes. Often, it is in the eye of
the beholder. For academic Martin Banham, Look Back in Anger, the 'first
manifestation of a dramatic revolution', was 'not a revolution in form but
rather one of content'. Like Taylor, critic Ronald Hayman notes that, though
sudden, 'it obviously wasn't a revolution that happened overnight'. For
Booker, there was irony in the fact that 'the "revolution" for which Tynan,
Anderson and so many of the New Oxford Group had eagerly been waiting,
was now taking place almost faster than they could take in'. (18)

Although the metaphor of revolution is a figure of speech and thus not to be

taken literally, it also powerfully conditions the way we think about what
happened in 1956. Calling Look Back in Anger a revolution implies it was a
sudden overnight success that changed everything. As John Russell Taylor
announced: 'Then, on 8 May 1956 came the revolution...' (19) Actually, the
play took months to become a success. This doesn't mean that a cultural
revolution didn't happen, but it does show how a metaphor both expresses
wishful thinking and smuggles in often unwarranted assumptions under the
cloak of the self-evident. And when the metaphor of revolution is linked with
natural phenomena such as an eruption, earthquake, explosion or new wave,
a social event is legitimated by being characterised as natural. To call a
cultural event a revolution is to give it various moral connotations.
Psychologically, revolution implies decisive rupture, a point of no return. By
assuming that revolutionaries are better people and have a truer picture of
reality, it suggests that good triumphs over evil. Politically, a just revolution is
left-wing, with the assumption that what went before was a corrupt ancien
regime which could not be reformed but which had to be swept away. When
revolutions are seen as natural, they are not only good but necessary: in
Crane Brinton's classic study - which incidentally mentions Colin Wilson's The
Outsider in its preface - revolution is a 'fever' which 'burns up wicked germs'.
(20)

The myth of cultural revolution thus both expresses a longing for a moral
utopia and obscures the messy reality of what actually happened. Perhaps
the most confusing illusion in the myth of anger was the claim that changes
in theatre had working class support. For Tynan, Jimmy was 'a working-class
hero'. In 1969, Hayman imagined that 'the working-classes that had been
banging at the door [of British theatre] for so long have been let in'. Being
working class was assumed to guarantee personal authenticity and artistic
integrity. 'Osborne,' observed American novelist Mary McCarthy, 'is a socialist
who prefers working-class people to people who have never seen a flat with
an outside toilet' because 'they are more real'. (21) For reasons that are
unclear, middle-class people are thus unreal.

Often patronising, such commonplaces gave a moral value to being 'working

class' which obscured the true nature of cultural change. Using strong
metaphors, such as revolution, may have resulted from the justifiable desire
to equate what happens in culture with what happens in politics, but it
sometimes confused the Royal Court with the Winter Palace: they are simply
not the same thing.

The narrative of revolution

Just as the rhetoric of 1956 involves necessary simplifications - by means of

which the winners in a cultural struggle colonised our perception of events so the metaphor of revolution was usually embedded in a narrative which
gave a structure to the myth of anger. Three of these stories are worth
considering. The first is the narrative of the three-pronged attack. Here the
much-derided Loamshire play comes under assault from three directions:
from Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Brecht's
Berliner Ensemble (a necessary Continental ally, but a calculated snub to
Joan Littlewood). When the dust settles, good theatre is seen as composed of
three camps: Angry (young working-class rebels finding their voices in
naturalistic settings); Absurd (underdog characters in empty landscapes
making sense of a Godless world); and Brechtian (didactic dramas which used
alienation effects to teach us how to take sides). Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter
and John Arden are conscripted into these categories; then David Mercer, Tom
Stoppard and Edward Bond. In some versions, the 'three pronged suburban
assault' is geographic rather than stylistic, coming from the west (Royal
Court), the City (Mermaid) and the east (Theatre Workshop Stratford East Littlewood acknowledged). (22)

The second narrative is that of the revolution betrayed. Exiled by the Stalins
of subsidy, the Trotskys represent the true radicals. Here Joan Littlewood's
Theatre Workshop is cast as the socialists who stayed in touch with the
people. Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney and the group project Oh What a
Lovely War! re-write the theatrical agenda. Marginalised by a compromised
mainstream, this camp is swelled by renegades such as Arden and John
McGrath. Though starved of resources, the true revolutionaries retain a purity
of practice.

The third narrative is that of the revolution recuperated. This claims that very
little was changed by the revolt. Most people found out about kitchen-sink
dramas and characters living in dustbins by hearsay, through cartoons and
cliches in the media. For this mass audience, what mattered was the ability of
'middle-class' domestic comedy to absorb elements of radical theatre. Alan
Ayckbourn, Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn acclimatised mainstream
audiences to new ideas. Anger comes to mean star actors wrestling with their
consciences (Albert Finney in Osborne's Luther); alienation effects turn into
ironic narrators (Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons) and epic theatre into
lavish spectacle (Peter Shaffe's The Royal Hunt of the Sun); and what 'finally

managed to make sense of all that Beckettian dustbin business' was

Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (23)

None of these narratives is wrong, but each is a myth which depends on all
sorts of unarticulated assumptions. They are important not only because they
condense many meanings into a memorable story, but also because they
express a profound desire for change. Since changes in British theatre were
neither as rapid nor as complete as many radicals wanted, it was often easier
to elaborate on the myth rather than to alter the theatre system further.

It would be wrong to assume that the myth of a revolution in drama went

completely unchallenged. In 1960, playwright Ronald Duncan wrote, 'It is true
that proletarian drama is now more fashionable, but a change in fashion
should not be confused with a revolution in taste.' Looking back on 1958,
Charles Marowitz says, 'I accepted the fictitious "war situation" between the
Angries and the Establishment and didn't realise until much later that each
was as unreal as the other'. In Encore magazine 'readers were constantly
being urged to run to the barricades, store up ammunition, invade enemy
territory'. For some, such symbolic images have exerted their spell for almost
40 years: Keith Baxter still remembers how in the late 1950s, 'British theatre
was in revolution. If critic Kenneth Tynan was its bugle, the centre of
operations was in Sloane Square where director George Devine was
summoning up the tumbrels.' (24)

An audience for myth

Revolutions need manifestos, and the nearest thing to a manifesto for anger
was Declaration, which was published in 1957 and includes essays by
Osborne, Tynan and Anderson. Within three months, it sold 25,000 copies.
Clearly a new audience was buying into the myth of anger. And what was
important about them was not their youth, class nor education - what
distinguished them was their style consciousness. The first beneficiaries of
the postwar boom, they began to assert their identity not only through what
they wore (beatnik clothes) but through the culture they consumed. Theatre
in the late 1950s became important because it offered such social groups a
series of exciting images of revolt.

In fact, the success of Look Back in Anger owed everything to a new

audience, one which hadn't heard about the play by reading Tynan's ecstatic
review, but which bought tickets only after an extract had been broadcast on
television. Anecdotal evidence of these changes includes writer Michael
Halifax's memory of the Royal Court's 'completely new audience': 'After the
TV extract, all these people started arriving. People you never see in
theatres.' Other observers offer glimpses of their cultural style. Derek
Granger saw them as 'fisher-sweatered noctambules from Espresso-land',
while George Melly remembers 'Fair Isle-jerseyed suburbanites and battledressed art students'. In warmer weather, they struck Tynan as 'young people
in flimsy dresses and open-necked shirts' who spoke 'a vivid vernacular made
up of Hollywood, space fiction and local dialect'. (25)

Class, culture and politics

Just as style is an outer badge of identity, so myth is a inner token of esteem.

Whatever its intellectual inconsistencies, the myth of anger helped place all
who believed in it. First, it located them in their decade. 'Not one of us,' says
Jeff Nuttall, 'had any serious political preoccupation', but all had a 'crackling
certainty of Now'. (26) After the misery of postwar austerity, the idea of anger
offered the excitement of risk. In a Now where the new heaven of consumer
pleasure clashed with the new hell of atomic warfare, English angst stressed
both fear and anger. Of the two, anger helped establish identity - it made
people take sides. In class terms, anger appealed less to secure social groups
and more to the newly mobilised lower-middle class, unsure of its bearings.

Osborne's autobiography is a good example of the uncertainties experienced

in an age of rapid social change. Upward mobility needed cultural lodestars.
Anger focused resentment not on class society as such but on some of its
'phoney' values. Attacks on old-fashioned mores could go hand-in-hand with
sympathy for upper-middle-class individuals (such as Look Back in Anger's
very own Colonel Redfern). Osborne's nostalgia for the Edwardian age arose
because the past represents stability, while the 1950s felt insecure.

Like the Movement poets before them, the angries suffered 'an uneasy
combination of class-consciousness and acceptance of class division'. For
some, 'the anger of the Fifties was as often a rage of frustration at the lack of
access to a limited number of privileges, as passionate moral outrage at the

caution and spiritlessness of the age'. Wesker puts it more strongly: 'I was
never an angry young man [] We were all very happy young men and
women [] Discovered, paid, applauded, made internationally famous
overnight!' (27)

In cultural terms, anger offered an alternative to modernism, which was often

seen as elitist, foreign, difficult, amoral. Despite the strong presence of
Continental drama on the margins, it was anger - expressed through the
aesthetic of naturalism - that won the mainstream. For audiences, one way of
developing a secure identity was to value 'kitchen sink' realism and to reject
upper-class aloofness, avant-garde modernism and homosexual sensibility.
Not only was naturalism populist, it also allowed a minority interest - theatre to join hands with television, films and novels. One result was the pose of the
'intellectual teddy boy', deliberately philistine, provincial, provocative. Could
Osborne's misogyny be interpreted as an aspect of this anti-Establishment
posture? (28)

In political terms, anger was negative, but represented more a coming to

terms with the Butskellite era than a coherent project of change. The
'dissentience' of the 1950s wanted 'not so much to rebel against the old order
of authority and standards, but to refuse to vote for it'. If the myth of anger
expressed the moment between the conformism of the early 1950s and the
commitment of the late 1950s, it was a time when the absence of 'good,
brave causes' didn't prevent you being self-righteous. As David Marquand
records, '"Look Back in Anger", one prominent University left-winger shouted
at me recently, his voice almost shaking with passion, "is a more important
political document than anything the Labour Party has said since 1951."' (29)
But what made anger so memorable was that gradual cultural change
collided with two unexpected events that suddenly aroused political passions:
Suez and Hungary.

The consequences of anger

Despite the mythophobes, 'May 1956 has become a moment of mythic

significance'. (30) What Osborne's writing expressed about the 1950s was the
decade's contradictory mix of discontent and nostalgia. Happy to promote
the image of the angry young artist, he became one of the first literary pop
stars - and, despite his disclaimers about media hype, he loved it. With a

talent to accuse and arouse, he pushed theatre into the spotlight of cultural
myth-making.

Seen today, Look Back in Anger seems more long-winded and less radical
than its reputation suggests. More than ever prone to be a one-man show,
the irony is that the more charismatic the lead actor, the more unbalanced
the play. Another irony is that having successfully changed public taste,
Osborne's Jimmy is today more than ever likely to appear self-indulgent and
melodramatic. A further consequence of the success of the myth of anger
was that it narrowed the options for the actor playing the lead. In a note to
his Dejavu (a 1991 play that revisits in true postmodern fashion the original
Look Back in Anger), Osborne complained that incarnations of Jimmy were
'often strident and frequently dull'. Only Kenneth Branagh's mild delivery
satisfied his requirement that Jimmy be a 'comic character' with an
'inescapable melancholy'. (31)

Revolt into style

The closer you look at the class politics of the myth of anger, the shakier its
underlying assumptions are. Already in 1957, David Watt saw through the
prole cred of Look Back in Anger: 'The ordinary working man was just as likely
to want to take a strap to Jimmy Porter as any retired Brigadier.' Osborne,
realised Allsop, tended to be 'romantic and sentimental about Ordinary
People'. At worst, says playwright John McGrath, the new drama was 'no more
than the elaboration of a theatrical technique for turning authentic workingclass experience into satisfying thrills for the bourgeoisie' - he notes that in a
competitive profession people used any means, even 'pretending to be more
working class than they really were', to get to the top. Above all, Wesker
questions a central tenet of received wisdom about anger: 'I remember
writing fairly early on articles saying that this was not a theatrical revolution.'
(32)

Perhaps the most damning criticism of all appeared in the Parisian magazine
Internationale Situationniste in 1958. Just as Allsop was describing how the
'old class system' was simply 'under new management', the situationists
pointed out that English culture was 30 years behind the times, condemning
the Angry Young Men as 'particularly reactionary in their attribution of a
privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature'. (33) Thus the

French radicals attacked one of the central assumptions on which the myth of
anger thrived - that culture could be as radical as politics.

The audience for the new drama is usually characterised as young, lowermiddle-class and left-liberal. For this group, the myth of anger offered a
radical identity which helped them cope with the insecurity of rapid social
change. It glamorised the politics of the negation and provided a role model.
It united on a symbolic level what reality kept apart: left-liberals might never
meet a teddy boy, but a myth could bring them together on the level of
fiction. The myth of anger offered both the hope of change and the
consolations of a secure identity. Myth explained chaotic events, gave heart
to confrontation and legitimated new feelings. Its function was partly to
acclimatise people to social change and partly to push for more. But the most
insidious trap for radical theatre was 'a tendency to attract likeminded
audiences, who instead of being challenged were able to congratulate
themselves'. While Stuart Hall and Wesker debated whether the 'new spirit' of
commitment after Suez was just a 'literary and aesthetic experience', a fad, it
remained easier to change cultural style than to alter social conditions. (34)

Audiences might flatter themselves by thinking that 'working class' drama

could help change society, but all it did was change drama. Cultural images
of the working class were a place where the middle class worked out its
ideas. On the other side of town, working-class life followed completely
different agendas. If we cannot avoid using myth when we look at the past,
we can at least be conscious of what a myth means - and what its hidden
assumptions are. The myth of anger is now central to the way we remember
the 1950s not only because it gives a vivid image of the origins of postwar
culture but also because it provides a blueprint for change. If, in the end,
such change was mainly a matter of style, then perhaps style too has a role
to play in altering social conditions.

Notes and references

1. Lawrence Donegan in the Guardian, 27 December 1994, p. 1.

2. Simon Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne: An Assessment (Gollancz,

1969), p. 40.

3. Harry Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England 195059 (Faber, 1988), pp. 207-8, 205, 211, see also pp. 31-2.

4. Kenneth Allsop makes a similar point: 'It would have been surprising if such
an obvious grouping of ordinary words had not been used before May 8,
1956', The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the 1950s (Peter
Owen, 1958), p. 11. For the play's title page see John Osborne, Almost a
Gentleman: An Autobiography Vol II, 1955-66 (Faber, 1991), illustration 2.

5. Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War (Methuen, 1988), pp.
151, 148, xv-xvi. The mid-1950s were a good time for mythographers: Claude
Levi-Strauss' essay on 'The Structural Study of Myth' was published in 1955
and Roland Barthes' Mythologies in 1956.

6. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama
(Eyre Methuen, 1969), pp. 9, 14, 17, 28, 33; Ritchie, Success Stories, p. 126;
Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, p. 20.

7. Harewood in Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (Eyre Methuen,

1978), p. 180; Kenneth Tynan, A View of the English Stage 1944-65 (Methuen,
1975); p.178; Osborne in Martin Banham, Osborne (Oliver and Boyd, 1969),
p.8.

8. Laurence Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama (Faber, 1962), p. 30; Gareth Lloyd

Evans, The Language of Modern Drama (Dent, 1977), pp. 106-7; Jeff Nuttall,
Bomb Culture (Paladin, 1970), p. 43.

9. Ronald Hayman, British Theatre since 1955: A Reassessment (Oxford

University Press, 1979), p. 10; John Osborne, 'Some Call It Cricket' in Tom
Maschler (ed) Declaration (MacGibbon & Kee), 1957), p. 65; Kitchin, MidCentury Drama, p. 101; Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 111.

10. Gamini Salgado, English Drama: A Critical Introduction (Edward Arnold,

1980), p. 193; John Elsom, Post-War British Theatre (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1979), pp. 74, 80.

11. Quoted in John Russell Taylor (ed) John Osborne 'Look Back in Anger': A
Casebook (Macmillan, 1968), pp. 186, 47, 169-70, 174.

12. John Bull, Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary
Mainstream Theatre (Macmillan, 1994), p. 50.

13. Tynan, View, pp.178, 199, 271.

14. Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge

University Press, 1992), p.103.

15. Steiner in notes to Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim: With an Introduction by the
Author (Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), p. 225; Colin MacInnes, 'A Taste of
Reality', Encounter no 67 (April 1959), p. 66.

16. Burgess in Amis, Lucky Jim, p.218; Osborne in Ritchie, Success Stories, p.
128.

17. Tynan, View, p. 199; Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 8; Anderson in Kitchin, MidCentury Drama, p. 176; Harold Hobson, Theatre in Britain: A Personal View
(Phaidon, 1984), p. 188; Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: The Revolution
in English Life in the 50s and 60s (Pimlico, 1992), pp. 43, 80 and passim.

18. Banham, Osborne, pp. 1, 10, 104; Ronald Hayman, John Osborne
(Heineman, 1969), p.3; Booker, Neophiliacs, pp. 122, 98.

19. Taylor, Anger and After, p. 28.

20. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (Vintage, 1965, preface 1956),
pp. 16-20.

21. Tynan, View, p. 271; Hayman, Osborne, p. 1; Mary McCarthy, Sights and
Spectacles 1937-58 (Heineman, 1959), p. 196.

22. Martin Priestman, 'A Critical Stage: Drama in the 1960s' in Bart MooreGilbert and John Seed (eds) Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in
the 1960s (Routledge, 1992), pp. 118-20; Tynan, View, pp. 252, 255-6.

23. Priestman, 'Critical Stage', p.120.

24. Duncan in Taylor, Osborne Casebook, p. 192; Charles Marowitz,

Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: A London Theatre Notebook 1958-71 (Eyre
Methuen, 1973), p. 45; Charles Marowitz et al (eds) The Encore Reader: A
Chronicle of the New Drama (Methuen, 1965), p. 39; Baxter in the Daily
Telegraph, 29 October 1994.

25. Halifax in Wardle, Devine, p. 185; Granger in Hewison, In Anger, p. 170;

George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in the 50s and 60s (Oxford,
1989), p. 31; Tynan, View, p. 272 and in Maschler, Declaration, p. 128.

26. Nuttall, Bomb Culture, p. 24.

27. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s
(Methuen, 1980), pp. 74-5; Hewison, In Anger, p. xi; Arnold Wesker, As Much
As I Dare: An Autobiography 1932-59 (Century, 1994), p. 7.

28. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Blackwell,
1989), p. 81.

29. Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 9; Marquand in Michael Kenny, The First New
Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), p. 99.

30. Bernard Bergonzi, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and Its
Background 1939-60 (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 153.

31. Lloyd-Evans, Language, pp. 108-9; John Osborne, Dejavu (Faber, 1991), p.
vii.

32. Watt in Encore Reader, p. 59; Allsop, Angry Decade, p. 99; John McGrath,
A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre - Audience, Class and Form (Methuen,
1981), pp. 1-13; Wesker in The Big Issue, 30 Jan-5 Feb 1995.

33. Internationale Situationniste 1953-69 (Champs Libre, Paris, reprint 1975),

p. 5.

34. Alan Sinfield, 'Theatre and Its Audiences' in his Society and Literature
1945-70 (Holmes & Meier, 1983), p. 181; Sinfield, Literature, Politics and
Culture, pp. 260, 153, 81;