29 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 29 August 2006 at
12:00
The Royal Court held a gala celebration on 6 May to mark the 50th anniversary of the legendary first night of John Osborne's ground-breaking drama. But the theatre, the dramatist's alma mater, curiously declined to commemorate the play's (and its own) half century with a full production and run of Look Back in Anger. That job has been left to the Peter Hall Company which, in Bath, has mounted Peter Gill's splendid new production. Better than any revival of Look Back in Anger that I've seen, this absorbing account makes you hang in a state of rapt expectancy on every scalding or scalded word.
It does rich justice to the fact that the piece manages to be many things at the same time — a dissection of a new social phenomenon (Jimmy Porter, product of the 1944 Education Act, caught in limbo between the class he's left and the class that won't accept him); a Strindbergian marriage play; a strange kitchen-sink counterpart to Waiting for Godot (in all that frustrated hanging around and hints of time-killing music- hall routine; and a keen insight into Osborne's troubled psyche.
The production's most striking innovation is the almost dream-like subjective feel it gives to some of the sequences through lighting changes and an evocative soundscape. The moody wail of a distant jazz trumpet underscores Jimmy's lengthy tirades. The Colonel's reminiscences of India are accompanied by the ghostly bugle of his battalion band and the sound of steam trains. There's a strong sense at such moments of people trapped by nostalgia, soliloquising in their several solitudes.
This approach does not significantly detract from the drama of marital warfare. True, Mary Stockley's moving Alison could afford to emphasise more the passive-aggression in her stance behind the ironing board. But Richard Coyle is superb as Jimmy, a brooding sexy mix of bolshie mischief and angry hurt who would leave most women confused as to whether they wanted to slap, screw or mother him. As he puffs his pipe listening to Vaughan Williams, you also see sly glimpses of the reactionary buffer he'll become. And Rachael Stirling is excellent as a rather camp, mannish, unconsciously machiavellian Helena, who seems to be acting in her own interest as well as Alison's when she arranges the latter's escape with daddy.
I hope that London will get to see a production that does Osborne proud.
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27 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 27 August 2006 at
12:00
Look Back In Anger's 50th-anniversary revival by Peter Gill (for the Peter Hall Company) is set in a grey shabby bedsit with Richard Coyle's bitterly frustrated Jimmy Porter spewing verbal bile at his victimised well-born wife, Mary Stockley's placid Alison. The screwed-up misogyny of John Osborne's angry young man is still shockingly visceral, but the cross-currents of sexual attraction, with Richard Harrington and Rachael Stirling as Cliff and Helena, aren't fully explored. Gill's deliberate breaching of the fourth wall for the play's long speeches about Edwardian England — creating soliloquies accompanied by archaic echoing trumpets — exposes the play's vein of nostalgia. It foregrounds the theatrical, attention-seeking side of Jimmy too, making him a clear precursor of The Entertainer. But in the long run all this just accentuates the play's creakiness.
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Posted by Bonnie on 27 August 2006 at
12:00
Jimmy Porter has a love-hate relationship with looking backwards in Look Back in Anger. He is tempted, he says, to manufacture nostalgia for an era (Edwardian) that he never experienced, yet he sneers at his wife, Alison, for 'looking forward to the past'. Alison thinks Jimmy is living in the wrong time. Living in the present seems to be beyond both of them. This year, Look Back in Anger is 50 years old and there is no temptation to feel nostalgic about it. Its emotions have not dated.
If it were set today, the ironing board might not be allowed to be a central character — Jimmy would be doing his shouting in crushed clothes — but Peter Gill's fresh, bracing production reminds us this is as much psychological as social drama — and it remains a complicated, self-critical self-portrait of John Osborne.
Richard Coyle's wonderful Jimmy exudes the quality he furiously misses in others: enthusiasm. This Jimmy has a smiling, good-looking glee, an attractiveness even at his most insanely destructive. Mary Stockley's Alison is more vivid than usual, too. She knows the uses of silence.
Rachael Stirling as Helena is a pleasingly worldly contrast, dressed in executive black and white. Her good manners acquire an ever more aggressive edge. But it is, I fear, only wishful thinking to imagine that a modern-day Helena might have reformed Jimmy instead of being seduced by him. Richard Harrington's sympathetic Cliff is a hider-behind-newspapers, a nice chap — a blunt knife in a dangerous kitchen. Ronald Pickup's Colonel Redfern is a nicely judged mixture of pomposity and remorse.
The set is classier than usual (as you might expect in Bath). This is unsqualid kitchen-sink drama with grey beams overhead and a nicer-than-average leather armchair in which Jimmy may slump or writhe. I liked the fluidity of Gill's direction: the swarming domesticity of it, the conversations to the rhythm of opening and shutting of cupboards and the brewing of countless pots of tea. And the play seemed more powerful than ever and more tragic, a reminder that angry eloquence is not the same as being able to communicate.
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24 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 24 August 2006 at
12:00
"Were you there in '56?" someone asked me as if I were a battle-scarred veteran of the theatre wars. Well no, I was at school actually. But I did catch John Osborne's groundbreaking play early on and have loved it and lived with it ever since. Watching Peter Gill's 50th anniversary revival, I am struck yet again by its infinite adaptability.
Initially, Osborne's play was seen as a social document: a record of the flaming frustration of 1950s youth. More recently, it has been treated as a Strindbergian study of marriage. Now Gill, unexpectedly for such a naturalistic director, treats it almost as an extended dream in which characters soliloquise to an atmospheric soundscape. Jimmy's tirades are accompanied by distant trumpet-wails, Alison's memories of their early social gatecrashing by tinkling cocktail-party chat, and Colonel Redfern's recollections of India by battalion bands and puffing trains.
I see Gill's purpose: to remind us that Osborne's play is an artificial construct full of competing memories. He even suggests a kinship with Beckett's Waiting for Godot, also in this Bath season: both plays are based on anxiety-ridden, time-filling yearning. But, by placing so much stress on solipsistic, private narratives, Gill underplays the marital tension.
For me, Jimmy's tirades are not arias but tactical weapons in a continuing sex-and-class war in which Alison retaliates through provocative silence. You should feel the play is a duel-to-the-death between skilled combatants rather than a series of set speeches.
Within that limitation, Richard Coyle is a first-rate Jimmy: charismatic enough to explain what attracts both Alison and her friend, Helena, but wild enough to imply a personality disorder. Coyle also handles well Jimmy's memories of his dying father which acquire new force from John Heilpern's Osborne biography. Admittedly, Mary Stockley is too passive an Alison: this, after all, is a woman who says, "I pretended not to be listening because I knew that would hurt him." But Rachael Stirling is superb as the stylishly sardonic Helena, and Richard Harrington as the dependably loyal Cliff and Ronald Pickup as the bewildered colonel lend immaculate support.
With its stress on the soliloquies, this production reminds you of Osborne's gift for an incandescent prose in which music-hall rhythms combine with moral fervour, as if Max Miller had been crossed with John Bunyan.
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Posted by Bonnie on 24 August 2006 at
12:00
Look Back in Anger may have been the title John Osborne gave to the play that brought freshness and vitality to a moribund British theatre 50 years ago, but Peter Gill's birthday revival suggests that it's insufficient and probably inaccurate. Look Back with Regret, Look Forward with Foreboding, or Look Around with Confusion and Resentment: all would have better fitted a play in which Jimmy Porter, the original Angry Young Man, isn't the only character who is displaced, alienated, baffled, lost.
Indeed, the key lines in this production come from Mary Stockley's Alison, addressing Ronald Pickup as Redfern, the ex-colonel father who has come to take her away from her husband, Richard Coyle's Jimmy: "You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?"
That resonated back in 1956, when Britain was losing an empire yet clinging to the old class divisions, and Gill does all he can to make it resonate still. A bugle, a saxophone or some medley of music is heard offstage whenever a character launches into reverie, as Redfern does when he recalls his days in the Raj, or Jimmy does when he talks of his father's death or the loss of his old friends. Never before have I been so convinced of the truth of Alison's analysis, that her difficult husband was "born out of his time".
But this doesn't quite justify what's missing in Coyle's performance, which is, simply, anger. This surprisingly likeable Jimmy is at his best when he's fidgeting, restlessly pacing or filling the near-void of his Midlands attic with fruitless chatter and comical bluster. He has more charm than most Porters and is a bit of an exhibitionist as well as a control freak, persistently complaining about others' noise when making it himself, and always seeking a reaction to his combative humour. He wants to be noticed, heard, heeded, and is upset and frustrated when he isn't — yet he hasn't the inner rage and emotional intensity of the snubbed, excluded and damaged.
This is a clear, intelligent revival which pays especial attention to the women in Jimmy's self-indulgent, thwarted life: Stockley as a passive- aggressive Alison and, even more, Rachael Stirling as her friend, Helena. This is a difficult role, since she must blaze contemptuously at Jimmy then fall dramatically into his arms when Alison leaves him. But Stirling somehow avoids staginess, giving us a tough girl with an upper-crust bray yet hinting at a susceptibility beneath the aggressive class prejudice. She, too, doesn't quite belong in her place and time: the story of the evening.
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