Look Back in Anger is by far the most famous of John Osborne's plays. It was the foundational work of the genre for which the term “kitchen-sink drama” was coined. The gritty realism of its setting represented a revolution in the British theatre, one which gave to the play when it was first produced a political and cultural significance.

Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre On May 8, 1956. The press release for the play called the twenty-six-year-old Osborne "an angry young man"; when the play became a hit, the phrase stuck as a label for an under-thirty, post-war generation which felt disillusioned and disenfranchised. It also came to exemplify a reaction to the affected drawing-room comedies of Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and others, which dominated the West End stage in the early 1950s.
The impact Osborne had on theatre is incalculable.

Now, exactly 50 years to the month later we present this drama as an historical time capsule of the first totally original play of a new generation. That angry and rebellious postwar generation, a dispossessed lot who were clearly unhappy with things as they were in the decades following World War II.

Let us - Look Back in Wonder.

by Ole W.Wiebkin
Ironically, all around us, the subtleties of our visual sensibilities have been dulled by an absolute surfeit of heightened colour. Huge, high-definition advertising hoardings regale our urban streets. Newspaper stories are illustrated with garish full-spectrum images and the sub-liminal flicker of back-lit digital display units compete for other visual cues. By way of contrast, in this world of vibrant colour, the pivotal reminder of the drab mid-nineteen fifties is offered by Geoff Brittain in his entirely new production of John Osborne’s monochromatic play, Look Back in Anger. Indeed, in setting his themes in the midst of domestic squalor, Osborne was not interested in colour. Rather, he said that he wanted to… “make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling”.

Working at the same time as Osborne, a group of young British painters from the Royal School of Art, London, the Beaux Arts Quartet, had defined a new recognisable cultural movement by their portrayal of the banality of domestic realism. Their expressive style also gave lessons in feeling, albeit their feelings focussed on the unheroic scenes of post-second World War austerity - including the deliberately unglamorous views across cluttered kitchen tables to the kitchen sink. The term, Kitchen Sink Art, dubbed by the critic David Sylvester to describe this genre, soon spread to categorise novels, film, TV and the theatre, especially to Osborne’s plays. Of course, his play no longer shocks audiences today. Rather, it evokes the relegation of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan to the historical classics. Of more importance, it reminds us of the emergence, through the social realism of the kitchen sink, of the acceptance by British audiences of the plays of Arnold Wesker, N.F Simpson, Edward Bond and Harold Pinter. Before George Devine took it on, Look Back in Anger had been rejected by a score of managers and agents.

Concurrently, the corpus of kitchen sink art was being furiously produced by the Beaux Arts Quartet. Among these works were the mural-like canvases of John Bratby on which the paint was applied directly from the tube or by palette knife. The confusion of his globs of pure bold tones is blended by the observer’s excited eye. The visual cortex becomes exhausted. But hearing and feeling remain sensitive. While consistent with the kitchen sink realism of the mid 1950s, the current setting has been drawn from this broad mural style. Overall, it has been chromatically understated to avoid competing with the message in the writing; “…a lesson in feeling”. And in deference to the current audiences, attempts to provide some connection between our current insatiable fashion for colour and the actual provision within the kitchen sink genre as expressed by John Bratby, is unapologetic.

In the context of Brittain’s production of Look Back in Anger, the Bratby style of visual stimulus as a fundamental for the set provides an energetic device against which Jimmy and Alison Porter can play out their existential angst. The beautifully studied elegance by the costume designer, GiGi (Giovina D’Angelo), and sharp scheming personality of Helena Charles contrasts with the organic forms of the impasto paint surfaces while the softer humanity of Cliff Lewis and the gentility of Alison’s ex-regimental father complement the chromatics.

website link: http://www.modernbritishartists.co.uk/bratby_index.htm