John Osborne's Look Back in Anger by Sierz Aleks;

Author:Sierz, Aleks;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

3 Production History

This chapter is a brief history of British theatre productions of Look Back in Anger. It looks at the original Royal Court production in 1956, and at several important revivals, as well as at the two film versions of the play.

The original production

Most theatre histories tell the story not of a play, but of a play’s opening night. Usually, the whole run of a play is represented by just one performance - the one the critics wrote about. In the case of the first production of Look Back in Anger, which opened at the Royal Court on Tuesday 8 May 1956, the opening night was the first night of this new play, although there had been a public dress rehearsal on 7 May. At the time, the Royal Court did not preview new plays. Coincidentally, 8 May was also the birthday of Osborne’s deceased father.

The fact that this was the play’s first public performance accounts in part for the Shockwaves it instantly generated. To have some idea of the clash of values, you have to imagine half the audience attired - like the English Stage Company’s council - in evening dress. There were flowers in the foyer. The performance would have finished with the national anthem being played. To an older generation of theatregoers, the first shock was visual. Reviewers described the set, designed by Alan Tagg, as ‘shabby’, ‘sordid’ orsqualid’.The household squalor is a little overdone,’ opined the Financial Times (Taylor, 1968: 35-56). Production photographs show that, despite the fact that this play was later seen as the harbinger of Kitchen-Sink Drama, there is no kitchen sink. But, since the room is an attic, there is a cistern at the front of the stage. If the play’s laddishness is emphasized by a box which bears the legend ‘BEER IS BEST’, its politics of disillusionment is neatly conveyed by a newspaper poster about rising prices which is pinned to the wall: UP AGAIN: BREAD PHONES SMOKES. In this production, music was also important: ‘Each curtain went up with dead-beat traditional jazz with plenty of trumpet’ and ‘at the end of the first scene in Act Two, Bunk Johnson’s “Just a closer walk with thee” was brought in, harsh and loud’ (Osborne, 1957: n. pag.). Other mood music included Vaughan Williams’s Symphony in E. Actors Kenneth Haigh (Jimmy), Mary Ure (Alison) and Alan Bates (Cliff) performed the play, which - on the Lord Chamberlain’s insistence - had nine changes, including ‘the cutting of a “lavatory” and a “homosexual” reference and the alteration of a phrase that contained the words “excessive love-making’” (De Jongh, 2000: 182). Haigh’s style emphasized Jimmy’s declamatory rudeness, his rhetorical hectoring and his deliberate antagonism, while Ure went on ironingwith a look of blanched sorrow on her face, which is white and exhausted after a hundred sleepless nights, tormented by a hundred ceaseless headaches’ (Hobson, 1984: 190). The acting was probably quite raw, and some witnesses remembered unforgettable ‘moments of naked emotion’, such as ‘Haigh’s breathless,

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