Theatre in Review: Look Back in Anger (Roundabout/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Matthew Rhys and Charlotte Parry. Photo: Joan Marcus

God help the playwright whose work is described as "groundbreaking" or "revolutionary;" its initial impact may be enormous, but its shelf life is another matter altogether. A good example is Look Back in Anger, in which John Osborne took a blowtorch to the conventional British drama, leaving its tasteful drawing rooms and delicate tea services in a pile of ash, and making those former enfants terribles Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan look as trendy as the Bronte sisters. Osborne's gift of invective and his savage critique of a postwar England dressed in olive drab, trapped in an ossified class structure, and suffocating from politeness proved electrifying. (The critic Kenneth Tynan famously wrote, "I could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.") It's true that the play shook things up seismically; without Osborne, there would be no Shelagh Delaney, no Simon Gray, and, possibly, no Harold Pinter. An entire chapter of British cinema - films like The L-Shaped Room, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner - might never have been written. Without a doubt, Look Back in Anger is seminal.

But is it watchable? On that question, the jury remains deadlocked. Once Osborne made the stage safe for kitchen sinks and squalid bedsits, and other playwrights developed a taste for acidulous dialogue and random cruelty, Look Back in Anger gradually lost some of its teeth. Audiences in 1956 were shocked by the free-floating rage of the protagonist -- the original angry young man, Jimmy Porter -- and his savage treatment of Alison, his long-suffering wife. But, as younger playwrights, taking their cue from Osborne, put out works that were faster, tougher, and more barbed in their observations, Osborne's breakthrough shocker - with its stolid three-act structure and long, leisurely orations - seemed to slow down and put on weight with middle age. This is, after all, a play in which the heroine rebels against her abusive husband by going to church.

And yet Look Back in Anger never goes away. Roundabout did it previously in 1980 with Malcolm McDowell stepping into the shoes of Alan Bates, the original Jimmy. London's National Theatre did it in 1999 with Kenneth Branagh, and, more recently, David Tennant took it on in a regional UK production that was filmed for television. (There is also, of course, the film with Richard Burton.) The last New York revival, in 1999, starring Reg Rogers, left the alarming impression that the power of Osborne's writing was fading fast.

For the current revival at Roundabout's Off Broadway venue, the director, Sam Gold - himself a specialist in contemporary American works - has made a daring attempt at recovering some of Look Back in Anger's initial impact. He has cut it by a good half-hour, reducing it from three acts to two, eliminating many topical references, and downsizing the cast of characters from five to four. To prove the point that this is not business as usual, he has obtained a daring production design from his colleagues. Andrew Lieberman's setting carves out a narrow downstage strip less than 10' wide, backed by a stark, black wall. This tiny playing area is littered with papers, dirty dishes, and other debris. There's a dresser, a chair or two, and, of course, the ironing board to which Alison seems permanently attached. A mattress stands up against the wall ready to be kicked to the floor for a fast, clandestine sexual encounter. The set's epic seediness is accentuated by Mark Barton's lighting, which casts a harsh white glare on everything. (The only variation in Barton's lighting is in color temperatures; I've never seen a design less calculated to flatter the actors.)

And, God knows, much of Osborne's dialogue can still scald. "I have an idea," says Jimmy to Alison and Cliff, his best friend. "Let's play a game. Let's pretend we're human." He describes his mother-in-law as being "as rough as a night in a Bombay brothel," adding that at his wedding to Alison, the old lady sat in the front row of the church, "the noble female Rhino, pole-axed at last." The nicest thing he has to say about Alison is that she's "a girl who can twist your arm off with her silence." His fury is not merely verbal; he can casually pull a drawer out of its slot and smash it against the wall. Facing off against a female intruder determined to rescue Alison, he warns, "I don't have any public school scruples; if you slap me, by God I'll take you out."

By streamlining the action and trapping his gifted cast in claustrophobically tight quarters, Gold gets the most out of that part of Look Back in Anger that is a study in domestic savagery. Jimmy, wounded early in life, needs to hurt others to feel alive; he and Alison share a passionate bond, but it is poisoned by his hatred of her upper-middle-class status and her natural avoidance of conflict. The damage is most vividly seen in Sarah Goldberg's performance as Alison - when, exhausted by Jimmy's abuse, she bursts into sobs, or, when listening quietly to one of Jimmy's tirades, she suddenly and repeatedly slams her hands on a table in an infantile expression of rage. When asked why she puts up with Jimmy, her response ("There must be about six different answers") is riddled with misery, rage, and resignation. There's also good work from Adam Goldberg as Cliff, who, despite his casual poses and roughhousing with Jimmy, is the de facto referee of the household, and from Charlotte Parry as Alison's friend, Helena, who arrives to free her from Jimmy, then stays to take her place.

But, partly because of the way the script has been cut, it no longer seems to be an indictment of an entire society frozen into deadly passivity. Taken as a psychological study, Look Back in Anger has a certain ugly fascination, but in this version Jimmy is oddly diminished, a kind of bully without portfolio. The removal of the character of Colonel Redfern, Alison's weary feather, helps pick up the pace, but it also narrow's the play's scope. ("You're hurt because everything's changed," Alison says to her father in a line cut from this production, "and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same.") Also, making Alison and Helena the sole targets of his anger causes Jimmy to simply look like a misogynist - or, worse, a self-involved loudmouth.

All of this is accentuated by the casting of Matthew Rhys as Jimmy. He does some fine work - his eyes darting around the stage, looking for something new to rage about, erupting into physical violence without warning, and yet retaining a surprising amount of vulnerability. But his Jimmy is somehow smaller than life, an expert whinger who is surprisingly easy to dismiss. Furthermore, Gold seems unclear how to handle the psychological politics of the second half, when Helena moves in, only to drop Jimmy like a hot potato when Alison returns.

Just about everything else is fine - including David Zinn's period- and character-accurate costumes and Bray Poor's sound design, which fills the air at different times with hot jazz and a symphony by (I think) Ralph Vaughn Williams -- but this approach to Look Back in Anger, for all its initial impact, runs out of steam long before it is over. It's an interesting, and sometimes successful, attempt at revivifying a play that has withered somewhat with age. Look Back in Anger may remain a classic, but we may have to take Kenneth Tynan's word for that. --David Barbour