Look Back in Anger

by John Osborne

Overview

Jimmy Porter, frustrated and bitter in his drab flat, lives with his middle-class wife, Alison. Also sharing the flat is Cliff who keeps things tenuously together. Alison's friend Helen arrives and persuades her to leave Jimmy only to fall for him herself. When Alison becomes pregnant, Helen leaves the couple. This play originally opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 and has since proved to be a milestone in the history of theater.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140481754
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/18/1982
Series:	Penguin Plays
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Osborne (1929-1994) was a British playwright whose 1956 drama Look Back in Anger helped change the face of British theater in the 1950s. In the 1990s, the Writer's Guild of Great Britain awarded Osborne a lifetime achievement award. Osborne’s other successful stage works include The Entertainer, the Tony award-winning Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, and A Patriot for Me.

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)