LOOK BACK IN ANGER: John Osborne

The movie Look Back in Anger was released in New York on 15 September 1959 three weeks before I joined the Baha’i Faith in Ontario. The movie was based on a play written by John Osborne(1929-1994), a play which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956. It was a strongly autobiographical piece by a man who had five marriages in his lifetime---and it caused a revolution in British theatre, a revolution which Osborne felt was only on the surface. His work was part of “an unparalleled, mid-century period of dramatic brilliance.”1

My interest in Osborne has been due to several factors not the least of which were/are his two volumes of autobiography: A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991). David Hare, English playwright and theatre and film director, said in his 1995 memorial address: “John Osborne devoted his life to trying to forge some sort of connection between the acuteness of his mind and the extraordinary power of his heart.” This connection between heart and mind is critical for any aspiring writer and poet, indeed, any human being.

I was just finishing grade 6 at the time Look Back in Anger hit the stage in London and looking forward to a summer of baseball as the homerun king in the peewee league of this small town of Burlington in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. In the early 1990s, by the time Osborne was finishing his 40 year long career as a playwright, I was setting my eye on finishing my 40 year long working life as a teacher among many other roles. -Ron Price with thanks to 1David Hare, “A lifelong satirist of prigs and puritans,” Memorial Service Speech for John Osborne in June 1995.

I watched this movie this weekend.
I may have been working marquee
at the Roxy theatre in Burlington
when this movie came out in 1959.

I would not have wanted your life,
John, for all your popularity, fame,
and wealth. I had a tough enough
time with those slings and arrows..

That world of false values depicted
in your plays, John, is still with us.
I’m going to look into those two
autobiographies--especially after
watching this weekend that turning-
point in post-war British theatre……
Look Back in Anger and its portrayal
of a generation of angry young men.

I had anger, too, back in the early ‘60s,
John, but it was dissipated, reoriented,
and channelled due to my espousal of a
new religion which had begun to grow in
the heart of a deeply conservative country,
a country which had been my home for 2
decades by the time that anger came to the
surface and needed working in & through.

Ron Price
23 January 2011

Plays that appear in "kitchen sink drama" stream aren't just to my liking so much. I remember when I was reading "Look Back in Anger" i was a bit perplexed, I don't know why...I would understand it during reading of Beckett's plays (I wasn't indeed, that's why I have strong prediloction for Beckett's work :) ). On the other hand, as far as Pinter's plays are concerned I do love it! Taking into consideration that he is attributed to Comedy of Menace that is composed of elements from Kitchen sink drama and the The Theatre of The Absurd, it makes him hold an attraction for me :)

To appreciate the extent of Osbourne's revolution, I think you have to look at the kind of plays then popular in British Theatre - try anything by, for example, Terence Rattigan. Also consider British society - this was a country still recovering from the near-bankruptcy of WWII, struggling with spiritual exhaustion as well as financial straights. Immediate post-war society tried to reinstate the status quo but it was not until the mid-fifties, the time Osbourne began to write, that the younger generation began to assert that the old state of the nation could not and should not be recreated and began to chaff against the restrictions imposed on them in their efforts to move the country forward into the second half of the twentieth century and bring about a realisation of the nature of society in a post-Imperialist Britain.

A Taste of Honey is another good example of kitchen-sink drama.

Not only in Drama. Novels with working class heroes were also being produced by Alan Sillitoe, Ken Barstow, Kingsley Amis, William Cowper and others. These Angry Young Men were seen as left leaning in their youth but many of them, particularly Osborne and Amis became virulently right wing in middle and late age, And were fiercely hostile to the Women's Movement.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seasider

Not only in Drama. Novels with working class heroes were also being produced by Alan Sillitoe, Ken Barstow, Kingsley Amis, William Cowper and others. These Angry Young Men were seen as left leaning in their youth but many of them, particularly Osborne and Amis became virulently right wing in middle and late age, And were fiercely hostile to the Women's Movement.

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Yes, it makes me laugh when I think of how keen they were to kick away the props of post-war society, only to complain when the roof fell in on them.
Osborne was particularly obnoxious in this respect and, having played his part in the creation of our current less than civilised society, he had the temerity to write:

"This is a letter of hate. It is for you, my countrymen… I cannot even address you as 'Dear', for that word alone would sin against my hatred. And this, my hatred for you, and those who tolerate you, is about all I have left and all the petty dignity my death may keep… Till then, damn you, England.”

50s and early 60s. I enjoyed the movies and where I lived, one had to scour the art theatres to find them. The thing I remember most about Look Back in Anger is the amazing performance of Richard Burton, long before his notoriety with Elizabeth Taylor.

I am no connoisseur of the world of theatre, although I taught English Literature for years and took an interest in aspects of the theatre to help me in my classroom work. I've always been an academic generalist knowing a little about many things of which the theatre is but one. I did find 'the theatre of the absurd' and its major writers fascinating and I will post some thoughts from one of its great playwrights and a personal piece I wrote on this subject below.-Ron Price, Australia
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Samuel Beckett said that in the end only two things decisively shaped his life: memory and self. As I turned the corner into late adulthood at the age of 60, I put both memory and self on paper as best I could. I felt the autobiographical imperative intensely.
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What I have tried to do in my autobiography with its poetry, notes, journal and essays is to do what Samuel Beckett did with his plays. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots, and these specifications are preserved in his remarkable series of notebooks published by Faber and Faber. Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. In some ways my autobiography is an entire theatrical event. As this theatrical event approaches some 2500 pages of narrative and 1000s of pages in other genres, this comparison of my approach to Beckett’s is, I think, apt.
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THE HOUR HAD COME

Twenty days after the Centenary of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith, Baha’u’llah’s, release(15/12/52) from oppressive imprisonment in the Siyah-Chal, Tihran, and synchronizing with the termination of the epoch-making, two month period associated with the Birth of His Revelation, unsurpassed, with the sole exception of the Declaration of His mission, by any episode in the world’s spiritual history—Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett’s tragi-comedy in two-acts, opened in Paris. Three months later, in April-May 1953, the Mother Temple of the West was dedicated and a World Spiritual Crusade was launched. The world premier of Waiting For Godot was timely, prophetic.-Ron Price with appreciation to Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Baha’i World, Wilmette, 1958, p.46.

You’d(1) been writing for the entire
Formative Age with your war on
words and the silence behind them,
the last of those second-generation
modernists who arrived in the 20s
and 30s, turning toward a dark, acrid
and mocking world with its forelorn
hope, bitter regret, emptiness, need
unresolved and everywhere obscurity,
inexorable decline--with your desolate
monologues---realizing how little one
could really understand or explain,
on the edge of that last whimper
with your portrait of boredom, sorrow,
nothingness and futility—the jig was up
with solitude resonating all around you.

We’ve been waiting: He came and went
and a great festival was taking place
in the Realm above.(2) The Day of great
rejoicing had arrived to deliver them all
from the fire of remoteness, but so few
knew and fewer understood that the verses
had been sent down and the hour had come.

1 Samuel Beckett
2 Baha’u’llah, The Perspicuous Verses
-Ron Price March 8th 2006