Look Back in Anger

by John Osborne

Overview

In 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger changed the course of English theatre.
'Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is. To have done this at all would be a significant achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of "official" attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour . . . the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned.' Kenneth Tynan, Observer, 13 May 1956
'Look Back in Anger . . . has its inarguable importance as the beginning of a revolution in the British theatre, and as the central and most immediately influential expression of the mood of its time, the mood of the "angry young man".' John Russell Taylor

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571300877
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	03/21/2013
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	761,941
File size:	141 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence(1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994.
John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994.

Table of Contents

	Time: The present
Act I
	Early Evening. April
Act II
Scene 1	Two weeks later
Scene 2	The following evening
Act III
Scene 1	Several months later
Scene 2	A few minutes later

What People are Saying About This

Anthony Burgess

The British theater. . . had been concerned only with light entertainment suitable for a drowsy middle-class audience, but the feeble complacency of the bourgeois drame was shattered by the irruption, in 1956, of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which brought the articulate rage of the provincial working class dispossessed, newly educated by the socialists, to the appalled notice of the London bourgeoisie.
(Anthony Burgess, from One Man's Chorus)