Look Back in Anger ANNOTATION
A young British couple is trapped between working-class origins and a desire for the good life.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Jimmy Porter plays trumpet badly. He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England. First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
The British theater. . . had been concerned only with light entertainment suitable for a drowsy middle-class audience, but the feeble complacency of the bourgeois drame was shattered by the irruption, in 1956, of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which brought the articulate rage of the provincial working class dispossessed, newly educated by the socialists, to the appalled notice of the London bourgeoisie.
(Anthony Burgess, from One Man's Chorus)
— Anthony Burgess
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