Plays 52 - Look Back In Anger by John Osborne

9. Look Back In Anger - John Osborne

'Look Back in Anger' charts the tempestuous relationship between a young man, Jimmy Porter, and his wife Alison. They live together in the Midlands in a small flat with a Welshman named Cliff. The play contrasts the genuine affection that can exist in a romantic relationship with a kind of antagonism brought about by the disapproval of Alison's parents and Jimmy's own nebulous anger.

It is established that Alison comes from quite a well-to-do family and Jimmy is from a more working class background. Cliff is essentially a mediator between the two of them, he is very fond of both Jimmy and particulary Alison. Alison reveals to Cliff that she is pregnant, and she contemplates whether it is too late to terminate it. All through the first scene, Jimmy rants and rails at just about everything, including Alison and her apparent passivity, saying that the word "pusillanimous" sums her up entirely. Yet when Cliff leaves to buy some cigarettes, Jimmy and Alison are left on their own and they begin to cosy up and a completely different side to their relationship is seen. They begin playing a little game where they refer to themselves as a bear and a squirrel, and in this game they seem to be genuinely happy.

Their game is interrupted when Cliff returns with news that Helena, a friend of Alison's, is on the phone. Helena is an actress and doesn't have a place of her own to stay whilst performing in Birmingham and so she wants to stay with the three of them. Jimmy considers Helena to be a "natural enemy", seeing her as a threat to his relationship with Alison and plays his trumpet loudly, in another room, apparently to upset them both. Throughout the play Jimmy seems to use his trumpet playing as a weapon. In a conversation with Helena, Alison recalls her and Jimmy's early day, thrust together as they were in the face of her parent's interference. They both lived with a friend of Jimmy's named Hugh, a would-be novelist whose mother helped Jimmy set up a sweet selling business. Alison and Hugh did not get on, despite Jimmy's efforts. Shocked to see what has become of Alison, Helena arranges for Alison's father to come and take her home, Alison agrees and goes to pack her things. Alison tells Helena about their bear and squirrel game, saying that it is a coping mechanism and a way of escaping the business of being human, as animals with a kind of dumb affection for each other.

Just then, Jimmy receives news that Hugh's mother has suffered a stroke and is dying. He goes to London to be with her as there doesn't seem to be anyone else to look after her. He does not do this out of a sense of duty though, he clearly has a genuine affection for her, as Alison says - because she has been poor and ignorant for all of her life, and perhaps Jimmy identifies with this. Jimmy once again rails against Alison and says that he wishes that she would lose a child and endure all the suffering that would entail, not yet knowing that she actually is pregnant. Alison makes her stand and does not go with Jimmy, and instead goes to church with Helena in a defiant stand against her husband.

Alison and her Father muse on what went wrong with their marriage and the perhaps irreconcilable conflict between them, possibly exacerbated by himself and Alison's mother. It is suggested by Alison that Jimmy married her as an act of revenge in a class war, a fact that her father cannot comprehend. Jimmy returns to find Alison gone and Helena still staying there. Jimmy notes the significance that he was almost run over by Alison's father as she sat in the passenger seat, another jibe at her supposed passivity. Helena tells him that Alison is pregnant and Jimmy responds by saying that he is merely surprised, and that he has just spent a day watching someone die. Helena responds angrily to this and slaps Jimmy. However despite the ill-feelings between them, or perhaps because of them, they have a passionate clinch.

It is several months later and Jimmy and Helena are seen to be living "in sin" together, Helena seemingly filling the void left by Alison. Cliff announces that he is going to move out, clearly not comfortable with the changes that have occurred. It is at this point that Alison returns and in an inversion of earlier events, she now persuades Helena that she should leave, despite her strong feelings for Jimmy. She reveals to Jimmy that she lost the baby and is now suffering terribly, just as he wished her to. Jimmy then tries to comfort Alison, reverting to the bear and squirrel game, saying that they must look after each other due to the "steel traps" that exist to ensnare "slightly satanic little animals". There is a sense that they will fall back into the way of life they both led at the start.