LOOK BACK IN ANGER

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER

World War 2 ended in 1945, and Britain faced the task of rebuilding their infrastructure,
which had been decimated by German bombs, and propping
up a struggling economy. Partly as a result of these difficulties, Britain withdrew from their
colonies in India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar in 1947. The 1956 Suez
Crisis, in which Britain invaded Egypt and eventually withdrew due to political
and economic pressure, led to a humiliating recognition that the country was
no longer a world power. Further changing the social context in the country,
the 1944 Mass Education Act in Britain had made secondary education free,
opening of the possibility of higher education to the working classes. This
created more class mobility in the post-war era than had existed before it, and economic
recovery in the 1950s furthered this trend. At the same time, British
class structure remained somewhat static, resulting in a generation of educated children
of the working class who found it difficult to put the education they
had received to good use.
 LOOM SHIRE PLAYS

In the middle of the 1950s there was a revival of the English Theatre.
In the 30s and 40s the English Drama was dominated by the Loom
shire Plays, that is a commercial play, remote from everyday life-
problems, with characters belonging to high society. The English
Theatre had then become a form of middle-class entertainment
producing only light comedies for a limited audience. It seemed to have
nothing to offer because the main plays being staged were either by
conventional authors or by foreign ones. Among the former we can
quote Terence Rattingan, who wrote plays of characters and
narrative rather than of ideas; among the latter we may quote
Ibsen, Brect, Sartre and the Italian Ugo Betti.
 NEW THEATRICAL STYLES

The new trends in opposition to the old ones were

the so-called Drama of Commitment and Social
Protest, The Kitchen Sink Drama, The Theatre
of Ideas, The Theatre of the Absurd and The
Theatre of the Angry Young Men.
 NEW THEATRICAL STYLES

They were completely different from the previous plays

and illustrated mans solitude in a hostile world, his
sense of isolation from other human beings, his
frustration and rage at the contemporary conditions
of the world and at the general disorganization of
society. For what they expressed in their plays, they
were considered as authors with leftist ideology by
contemporary reviewers.
The plays which were considered a turning point in the British modern
Drama were Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Look Back in
Anger by John Osborne. They belonged respectively to The Theatre of the
Absurd and to The Theatre of the Angry Man. They had an
immense success and started the restoration of the English Theatre. A
crucial role in promoting the new drama of the late 1950s was the
emergence of a new kind of audience: men in their thirties, with a
cultural and political background. They were the children of the early
television age and used to identify themselves with the characters and
plots of TV drama.Look Back in Anger had immense popularity also
because it was shown on television.
THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
Between 1952 and 1962, some playwrights who
had met in Paris, wrote a series of
plays that are generally labelled as Absur-dist
Plays. They were the Irishman Samuel Beckett,
the Rumanian Eugene Jonesco,
the Russian Arthur Adamov and the Spani-sh
Fernando Arrabal.
they had in common the same vision of life and of man
trapped in a hostile universe, without any
chance of happiness and hope for the future. Their
works reflected the anxieties and the troubles of
their contemporaries who believed that man could not
find any essential purpose in his actions. They did not
regard themselves as a school and they did not found a
movement.
The Theatre of the Absurd, is an
individual who regards himself as a lone
outsider, cut off and isolated in his private
world .. with his own personal approach
both to subject matter and to form, with
his own roots, sources and background.
Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose .. cut
off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental
roots man is lost: all his actions become senseless,
absurd, useless. Camus in the Myth of Sisyphus (1942) wrote: In
a universe that is suddenly deprived of
illusions and of light, man feels a stranger deprived of
memories of a lost homeland, he lacks the hope of
a promised land to come. This divorce between man
and his life .. constitutes the feeling of absurdity
Sisyphus, for ever rolling a stone up a hill,
for ever aware that it will never reach the
top, is the perfect type-figure of the
absurdity of mans destiny. He explains the
sense of anguish at the absurdity of human
condition which is the central theme of the
absurdist plays.
To express it, the plays are generally characteri-zed by the
absence of plot; they often have
neither a beginning nor an end, neither action nor
developments of events; the setting is red-uced to the
minimal elements and the charact-ers are presented with
no individuality and
without psychological insight; the language,
too, is absurd: to stress the failure to commun-icate of
contemporary man they are full with
verbal nonsense, repetitive statements, very
short speeches and silent pauses.
 Angry Young Man
In the late 1950s a number of young writers,
among whom we can mention A. Wesker,
Kinsley Amis and above all John Osborne,
had an immense success in Britain. They were grouped
under the label of Angry Young
Men. They gave voice to the young generate-on who,
dissatisfied with the world they lived
in, wanted to create their own way of living.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGRY YOUNG MAN
The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were
mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin.
Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at
the states expense, though a few were from Oxford. They
shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system,
its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist
Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally
uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare
state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and
frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspi-
rations for genuine change.
The literature of this age chiefly represented a rebellious and
critical attitude towards the postwar British society. The angry
young men comprised a group of English novelists and
playwrights, mostly having lower-middle or working-class, and
university background. The label angry young men is
assumed to have borrowed from Leslie Pauls autobiographic-al
book Angry Young Man (1951). After critical acclamation of
Osborns play Look Back in Anger, the British Newspapers
employed the label to encapsulate the mode and temperam-
ent of this group of writes.
The Second World War left a tumultuous impact on the civiliza-
tion. The post-World War II era was essentially characterized
by depression and anxiety as the postwar reforms failed to
meet exalted aspirations for genuine change. This very desolate
prospect is also evident in the literature of the 20th century.
These adverse impacts of World War II helped to create several
new traditions in literature. One such movement made its way
in the early 1950s. This radically new age was labelled as the
Angry Young Men Movement.
They struggled against the Establishment and some of its values:
family, patriotism, the Established
Church and culture. They began to cry out against conventions,
tradition and authoritarianism. They
felt cheated as the promises of the Welfare State
had revealed to be empty: society fed them well,
educated them well, but still kept them trapped in a
class system that opened the doors to the rich public
school members of the upper-middle class and kept
them closed in the faces of the members of the
working class.
The Angry Mens works were politically commi-tted
and dealt with contemporary themes.
They took as subject matter the middle and
the working class and depicted in realistic
terms their typical habitat, generally a gloomy and
shabby room; they were torn between the hope
provided by their ideals and the depress-ed reality
which shattered all hopes of a better future.
The major characteristics of the Angry Young Men Movement are as
follows:
Revolt against Social Inequality: A major concern in Angry
Young Men Movement writings is the dissatisfaction of the lower-
class towards the established socio-political system which inequi-
tably valued the middle and the upper classes.
Criticism of Mannerism: Literature of this age fiercely criticises
the hypocrisy of the middle and the upper classes.
Portrayal of Social Status of Youth: Another frequent subject in this
age is the depiction of abject position of the youth in
society. The writers often portrayed the central hero being disill-
usioned with the life and dissatisfied with their job and a society
where he is unfit and deprived of normal rights.
Revolt against conventionality: Angry Young Men literature
strongly revolted against all the accepted norms and ideals.
Unconventional Hero: Typically the hero is a rootless, lower-
middle or working-class male psyche with a university degree. He
expresses his dissatisfaction towards social ills with excessi-ve
anger and sardonic humour. He often indulges into adulte-ry and
inebriation to escape from complexities of life. In fine, he is the
very epitome of a frustrated post-World War II gener-ation.
 REALISM
Theatrical realism was a general movement in 19th-century theatre
from the time period of 1870-1960 that developed a set of dramatic
and theatrical conventions with the aim
of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and perfor-mances.
Part of a broader artistic movement, it shared
many stylistic choices with naturalism, including a focus on everyday
(middle-class) drama, ordinary speech, and dull
settings. Realism and naturalism diverge chiefly on the
degree of choice that characters have: while naturalism
believes in the overall strength of external forces over
internal decisions, realism asserts the power of the
individual to choose (see A Dolls House).
The Theatre of Anger and
John Osborne (1929-1994)