Look Back in Anger (Faber Drama) - Softcover

Osborne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571038484 ISBN 13: 9780571038480

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1978

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author:

John Osborne was born in London in 1929. His plays include Look Back in Anger (1956), The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). 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.

Review:

Play in three acts by John Osborne, performed in 1956 and published in 1957. A published description of Osborne as an "angry young man" was extended to apply to an entire generation of disaffected young British writers who identified with the lower classes and viewed the upper classes and the established political institutions with disdain. Although the form of the play was not revolutionary, its content was unexpected. On stage for the first time were the 20- to 30-year-olds of Great Britain who had not participated in World War II and who found its aftermath lacking in promise. The hero, Jimmy Porter, has reached an uncomfortably marginal position on the border of the middle class, from which he can see the traditional possessors of privilege holding the better jobs and threatening his upward climb. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0571038484
• ISBN 13: 9780571038480
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112