Even in a top-notch production, Look Back In Anger would be a problematic play. Yes, 50 years ago it sent seismic tremors through English theater and English society, and historians of the former still talk of 1956 as the dividing line between the past and future. But half a century later, the play seems worse than dated — it comes off as backward and tedious.
Main character Jimmy Porter's anguished cry that there are no more noble causes doesn't much register on minds aware of the genocide in Darfur, the worldwide AIDS crisis and the threat of global warming. Jimmy's treatment of his wife Alison seems like nothing less than spousal abuse, and his equally vicious attacks on her friend Helena are inexplicable except as symptoms of deep misogyny.
His physical tussling with his friend Cliff makes both men candidates for the Peter-Pan-Won't-Grow-Up Award, and Jimmy's shock when someone actually slaps his face is the reaction of a spoiled brat who's never paid for any of his bad behavior.
As for the two women in the play, to call them masochists is almost too kind. Let's hope that a few years from now they'll read Betty Friedan, because at this point in their sorry lives, all they seem to want is to do the ironing and to mother poor Jimmy through another of his tantrums. And about those tantrums: No doubt British society in the 1950s was colorless and stifling. But where a George Bernard Shaw could turn exasperation with such a landscape into language that thrilled long after the original irritant had vanished, Anger author John Osborne's talent is of a decidedly lesser quality, leaving us bored and unconvinced even when Jimmy is in highest dudgeon. Lear on the heath this is not. There's hardly a memorable line in the whole series of tirades.
So how do the people at Hat Trick Theatre (in a co-production with Gorilla Theatre) solve these problems in their current production? They don't. They exacerbate them with faulty casting, leaving us not only conscious that we're seeing a play whose time has passed, but also that we're seeing it out of kilter, in the wrong colors.
Yes, one performance shines and one other might have worked under different circumstances, but director C. David Frankel has found the wrong actors for three important parts, and the result is an experience that feels irregular from virtually the first minute. If Look Back in Anger is a difficult play under the best circumstances, under these conditions it's hopeless. The year 1956 ain't in the building.
The plot, such as it is: Jimmy Porter is at home with his wife Alison and his best friend Cliff. And Jimmy complains. He complains about the Sunday papers; he complains about his dutiful wife; he complains about the dullness of everyone and everything. Alison absorbs the abuse with little protest; Cliff claims to be bored with it; the two men wrestle a little and then we discover that Alison is pregnant.
She hasn't told Jimmy, who coincidentally comments that he'd like to see his wife have a child and then lose it (this might shake her out of her lethargy, he reasons). Before any decision can be made — have the child or abort it — Alison is visited by her good friend Helena, an actress who seems more assertive than her doormat friend. Helena decides that Alison must escape the terrible life she's leading, and so she calls on Alison's father to whisk her away. But is Helena as helpful as she seems? Is it possible that what she really wants is to move Alison aside so that she can be Jimmy's dishrag?
Now, to make this play work, you need a Jimmy Porter who comes across as too big for his times, a Samson among Philistines. Helena says at one point that Jimmy should have lived during the French Revolution, and I think this is to be taken literally: In 1789 there would have been an outlet for Jimmy's energies, which in 1956 seem pointless and inevitably mutate into spite and vituperation.
But Chris Holcom, though a fine actor, has a stage presence opposite to what the role requires. Holcom, whom I've praised in this column many times, has a boyish charm and sweetness of temper which have no more to do with Jimmy Porter than Claire de Lune has with Beethoven's Ninth. It's bizarre to watch Holcom seethe and attack and strut and swagger — we just know deep in our hearts that this is acting and not being.
And because Holcom doesn't have the sort of stage weight Jimmy requires, Barbara Eaker's potentially impressive portrayal of wife Alison is compromised. Eaker is an uncommonly beautiful woman who could probably have any Englishman north of Brighton, so what's her Alison doing with this bratty, snitty lightweight who treats her like guano? Not believing in Holcom, we can't believe in Eaker either, which is a pity, because one can imagine circumstances — with a charismatic Jimmy — when the same performance might have come across as a revelation.
There's nothing at all wrong with Dahlia Legault as Helena, though. She sees through Jimmy from the start and never, even at her most vulnerable, becomes his prisoner. Andrew Hughey as Cliff is more a cipher than a character — even after three acts, we have no idea who he is or what he stands for, and we certainly don't believe in his English — or is it Welsh? — accent. And Greg Morgan as Alison's father plays just one note rather mournfully and never has us believing that, back in the good old days, he was a powerful military officer in colonial India.
Director Frankel does a good job of moving his actors around Megan Byrne's merely adequate set, but he never transcends the errors in his casting. Connie La Marca-Frankel's costumes are fine, however, and Beau Edwardson's lighting, though a little too conspicuous in certain fades, is generally solid.
I should mention that the production runs long — about two hours and 40 minutes. But the night I saw it, it didn't seem long; wrong, yes, but not long.
In one of the most famous — and, I think, strangest — lines in the history of modern theater criticism, Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1956, "I doubt if I could love anyone who didn't love Look Back in Anger."
At that time, this was the sort of response the play could garner — a heartfelt hallelujah, as if a whole population would define itself by its reaction to John Osborne's drama. Fifty years later, in a different country, that same drama seems sexist and middlebrow and not particularly eloquent. Its major relationships are puzzling; its treatment of women is offensive and, worst of all, the thing is boring. It's not even very revealing as a period piece.
Times change. It's what they're best at.
And some important plays just decline … into irrelevance.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.
