Look Back in Anger

Anyone who's never watched someone die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity. Look Back in Anger premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1956. 'John Osborne didn't contribute to British theatre: he set off a landmine called Look Back in Anger and blew most of it up.' Alan Sillitoe 'A story of youthful insecurity inflamed by lack of opportunity and the terrifying, destabilizing force of love . . . Jimmy Porter could fill an opera house with his bellowing hunger for a bigger, better life and a loyal love to share it with.' New York Times 'Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is. To have done this at all would be a signal achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour, the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned . . . I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.' Kenneth Tynan, Observer 'How bracing, and, yes, even shocking, its white-hot fury remains.' The Times This edition includes an introduction by Michael Billington and an afterword by David Hare.

John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994.