SOURCE: Egan, Robert G. “Anger and the Actor: Another Look Back.” Modern Drama 32, no. 3 (September 1989): 413-24.

In the following essay, Egan considers the enduring appeal of Look Back in Anger, focusing on the character of Jimmy Porter.

I

If we are reluctant to let go of 1956 as a convenient watershed point in the history of British theatre, we no longer tend to regard Look Back in Anger as a one-play revolution. John Osborne himself long ago pronounced it “a formal, rather old-fashioned play,”¹ and with the virtue of hindsight we can identify its technical affinities with the earlier dramatists whose theatre it was once thought to have obliterated: the aphoristic turns of Coward, the set-piece speechifying of Shaw, even the sentimental studies of Rattigan. Yet Look Back remains a unique play. The major revivals that have occurred repeatedly over the thirty years since its première have demonstrated...