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.
