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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Look Back in Anger
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