Look Back in Anger

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2018

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The play Look Back in Anger exploded onto London's cultural scene in May 1956 and helped to change British theatre forever. The play by John Osborne is about a disillusioned university graduate coming to terms with his grudge against middle-class life and values. One writer described it as a cultural landmine. Actress Jane Asher starred in an early production and has been speaking to Louise Hidalgo for Witness.

Picture: Jane Asher, Victor Henry and Martin Shaw at a rehearsal for the 1968 revival of John Osborne's play Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court theatre. (Credit: Jim Gray/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:40.0	I'm Louise Adaggo and today we look back at a play that helped to change British theatre forever.
0:46.0	When Look Back in Anger by an unknown young playwright called John Osborne was first performed in May 1956, one writer described it as a cultural landmine.
0:56.0	Actress Jane Asher starred in one of the early productions. These days you may want to come back. I want to be there that day. I want to stand up in your tears and splash about in them and see.
1:15.2	It was regarded very much as a play that had broken the mould, had changed things.
1:20.2	It was no longer a question of most of the plays you would go and see were
1:23.6	anyone for tennis and somebody middle class sort of bounding through the French
1:26.8	windows. It did break all that up and of course it started the whole genre of
1:31.8	what became known as Kitchen Saint plays.
1:34.0	I want to be there on you, when your face is rubbed in the mad.
1:37.0	There's nothing else that I'm hopeful anymore.
1:40.0	The great British actor Richard Burton, playing the main protagonist Jimmy Porter in the film
1:45.2	version of Lookback and Anger that was released three years after the play took London by storm. By the time Jane Ashher played Jimmy Porter's wife, Allison, a few years later,
1:57.0	looked back in anger had become a classic.
2:00.0	As soon as I read it, I just thought this is as wonderful as its reputation.
2:05.0	And it was about so much more than just about the class system and Jimmy Porter railing against everything that that represented and the stuffy old Britain
	...

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