John Osborne and Look Back in Anger (1956)

The Angry Young Men were a group of British writers who came to fame in the 1950s, especially John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. They were young males, often from working class families in post-WW2 Britain.

In once sense, this was not a good time for families who had been let down in the past by traditional British society, its education system, the economy and class structure. In another sense, the post war era (1950s) was the first time the working class had some disposable income and a degree of cultural respect. Unemployment was very low and young people could move out to a bed-sit or a shared flat, instead of living with mum and dad.

Osborne’s famous play Look Back in Anger 1956 was attracting attention to a new style of drama. He strongly expressed anger at what Britain had become post-war, deliberately provoking other people to also be dismayed about their previously proud nation. Literary works began to deal with lower class themes for the first time in ages.

My late mother, a child of the Russian Revolution and a Labour Party die-hard, admired the working class lads who became the Angry Young Men enormously. But in 1956 I was more interested in the Melbourne Olympic Games and the Christmas pantomimes than I was in the play Look Back in Anger. Now a new book caught my eye: “John Osborne: Anger is not About..” written by Peter White­brook (Oberon Books, 2015).

Why did John Osborne (1929-94) turn into an angry, insec­ure adult with an unstable career and a hopeless history of wives, girl friends and lovers? He married actress Pamela Lane in 1950, actress Mary Ure in 1957; novelist and screen writer Penelope Gil­liatt in 1963; actress Jill Bennett in 1968; and arts journalist Helen Dawson in 1978. For long periods of time, Osborne also went out with a myriad of other women including actress and writer Stella Linden, designer Jocelyn Rickards and writer Doris Lessing. He had only one child of his own, treated her abusively when she was an adolescent and never spoke to her again. In almost every relationship, he eventually treated his women with anger, hatred and punishment. Osborne’s hate knew no bounds.

John Osborne, 

Chelsea 1958

The crisis that made Osborne a subject of national scandal was learned at his mother’s knee. In his autobiography “A Better Class of Person” (1981) Osborne wrote that his mother Nellie Beatrice Osborne, was an uneducated Cockney barmaid who rained withering contempt on her son throughout their arid life together. She attacked him for his timidity, his spindly looks and his bed-wetting. His loving father, an adman with literary yearnings, died of TB when Osborne was only ten, leaving the boy alone with the grabbing, uncaring crone Nellie. A hateful mother would make anyone full of self-hatred and insecurities!

It was good (or bad) timing that Osborne became a celebrity at the start of an age of tabloid press intrusion. He showed publicly his impatience with the status quo, his refusal to be co-opted by a bankrupt society and an instinctive solidarity with the lower classes. But I still could not tell if he truly hated British society then, or if he was just using the tabloid press to whip up interest in his work.

To me his anger seemed very real. In his most important and provocative play, the working class character Jimmy Porter was indeed represented as an embodiment of the young, rebellious post-war generation that questioned the state and its treatment of the working class. But Jimmy was also brutal and abusive to his young and pregnant wife.

The author Peter Whitebrook chased every contemporary source of information. He read the playwright's own memoirs of course and those of many others in Osborne’s life back then, plus he recently held interviews with any of the playwright’s close colleagues who were still alive. Yet I realised half way through the book that Whitebrook and I were going to come to different conclusions.

Whitebrook's publishers wrote that here was a playwright from the wrong side of the tracks whose career rose very quickly and very early. Only in his mid 20s, his dazzl­ingly high-octane performance and in a succession of increasingly ambitious plays written in the late 50s/early 60s, he was able to unite a profound intelligence with a caustically honest depth of feeling. By refusing to submit to caution, he laid bare in some of the most poetic and incendiary language heard in the C20th theatre, not only his own struggles and contradictions but those of the era. Almost single-handedly, he made the theatre important again.

Mary Ure, Alan Bates, Helena Hughes and Kenneth Haigh, 

first night's performance of Look Back in Anger, 

Royal Court London 1956

But did he really revolutionise British theatre? Yes he did, but it was not overnight. Look Back In Anger was written in seventeen days while sitting in a deckchair on Morecambe pier. The legend is, of course, that Osborne’s play was an immediate success and in a flash British theatre was changed forever. Replaced by plays set in drab working class northern bed-sits, the posh drawing-room dramas from playwrights like Terrence Rattigan and Noel Coward, were seemingly banished overnight.

Unfortunately Osborne's play was generally initially dismissed by most of the critics, took in very little money and the production was seen pretty much as a miserable failure. Only when the BBC decided to broadcast a short excerpt of the play one evening did listeners like what they heard, and decided to go and see the play for themselves. Takings immediately doubled at the box office. The effect snowballed and the play eventually transferred to the West End. Not an overnight success, but Osborne had now become a very famous angry young man indeed.

Osborne’s only musical, The World of Paul Slickey (1959), was not a success. When the angry audience booed Osborne out of the theatre, they followed him down the street yelling. Osborne escaped but the following morning, he read the newspaper critics’ terrible reviews. "The ordeal lasts for 3 boring hours" and "extraordinary dullness", wrote the Manchester Guardian, The Times and Daily Telegraph. Osborne proclaimed that the critical assault was exactly what he would have expected from ignorant London theatre reviewers. Soon Osborne got out of Dodge with the show’s costume designer, the two of them running away to France.

On a personal level, Whitebrook acknowledged that few drama­tists felt compelled to reveal so much of their own flaws, anx­ieties, passions and hatreds as John Osborne did. But Whitebrook exposed Osborne as a mixture of generosity and cruelty; charm and gracelessness; organised energy and chaos; sex appeal, depression and alcoholism – and about that, I am not so sure. I did not see any generosity or charm in Osborne’s life.