John Osborne and the Myth of Anger

Abstract

John Osborne'sLook Back in Angeris one of a handful of plays which have attained iconic status, becoming a symbolic work which means much more than the message of the play. Aleks Sierz examinesLook Back in Angernot as a literary text or performance event but as a myth factory. After showing how the anger at the centre of the play depends on non-verbal signs such as emotionality, he goes on to show how John Osborne and his anti-hero Jimmy Porter became fused in the public mind into a symbolic figure, the Angry Young Man – a crucial ingredient in makingLook Back in Angerpart of a narrative of cultural revolution, in which a play mainly concerned with a problematic love affair turns into a political statement. He then questions the prevailing assumption, common in radical drama, that culture can be revolutionary, and asks whether radicalism in culture is a substitute for political radicalism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic forTribune.

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