Look Back in Anger

Look Back in Anger was hailed as “the best young play of its decade” in 1956. Set in the 1950’s in England, John Osborne’s play about class injustice concerns Jimmy and Alison Porter, an unhappy young couple in Midlands, England. Jimmy, educated but from a working class background, resents his upper class wife’s stodgy, hypocritical family background. He spends his days behind a sweet stall and returns home to berate his wife for her English, upper-crust apathy and lack of passion. In the middle of this fray is Cliff, Jimmy’s simple but kind friend, and Helena, Alison’s snobby actress friend who urges her to leave the barbarian she is married to.

This revival, done nearly fifty years after the play’s first production in London, shows that Osborne’s themes of seething anger of helpless working classes towards their wealthy oppressors are not only timely, but extremely relevant here in the States where many have found the American Dream to be nothing more than that: a dream. Portia Krieger directs.

Appropriate For Ages: 13+