November 7, 2007
‘Kitchen sink realism’ began with Look Back in Anger: first staged in 1956, it can be crudely summarised as a series of cruel, soul-destroying confrontations between lovers and friends, confined to a cramped bed-sit. Jimmy Porter, the central protagonist, is the original ‘angry young man’: angry at his friend, angry at his upper-class wife, angry at her parents and friends, angry at the world for not living up to his expectations; his voluminous rage gradually destroys everyone around him.
Arguably, there are good reasons to stage Look Back in Anger today: Jimmy’s rants against the apathy and indifference that surround him, the fact that ‘no one can raise themselves out of their delicious sloth’, obviously resonates in an age shorn of serious political contestation. Yet it is also very much a period piece: Jimmy is the aspirant, working-class son of a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War, married to the daughter of a colonel of the British Raj, and the backdrop is the 1950s post-war economic boom that brought the relative prosperity and political quiescence against which Jimmy rages. Indeed, Jimmy’s anger is fully comprehensible only within this context: otherwise it appears merely as sadism. But it is a difficult context to communicate to a modern audience, and the director, Piers Barclay, appears not to try, choosing instead to focus on the ‘personal struggles’ of each character.
In Tom Palmer, making his Oxford debut, the production found a powerful lead who strives to express both Jimmy’s cruelty and his wounded nobility. Yet Jimmy so dominates the first act that the ‘personal struggles’ of his wife, Alison (Beth Williams), and their Welsh friend, Cliff (Nick Budd), are seriously overshadowed. Individually, each cast member has moments where their talent is clear enough, but the direction let them down: Jimmy’s dominance means that the relations between the characters are as (or more) crucial than each individual’s ‘personal struggle’. Budd’s Cliff is simply too camp to be a threatening sexual presence in the marriage, too happy-go-lucky to be a believable ‘no-man’s-land’ dourly soaking up the tension in their constant arguments. All too often, there is simply no tension – Palmer just rants and raves and his various indictments of the world, his in-laws and his wife’s friend, Alice (Alev Scott) seem to be played for laughs, rather than building up an atmosphere of pending doom which is then climaxed by Osbourne’s device of ending each scene with a dramatic twist.
These problems become particularly important in the second act, where many of Jimmy’s curses and desires are supposed to come back to haunt him, and where the cast seemed rather to lose heart. The absence of any preceding sexual tension between Jimmy and Alice make the transformation of their relationship simply baffling, while the power of Jimmy’s invective rebounding on him has already been undercut by having already had the audience laugh so easily at it. It’s not that the cast isn’t talented, but that the symmetries and relationships that are meant to emerge in the second act haven’t been set up in the first – which is really a conceptual failure. A compelling moment from Beth Williams – the most powerful of the night, gripping in its sheer intensity – is almost immediately swallowed up by an uncharacteristically wooden reaction from Palmer that ends the performance on a bum note. Better direction should have harnessed the talents of this cast – and made them speak up: a good third or more of the dialogue was inaudible beyond the fourth row.
Arguably, there are good reasons to stage Look Back in Anger today: Jimmy’s rants against the apathy and indifference that surround him, the fact that ‘no one can raise themselves out of their delicious sloth’, obviously resonates in an age shorn of serious political contestation. Yet it is also very much a period piece: Jimmy is the aspirant, working-class son of a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War, married to the daughter of a colonel of the British Raj, and the backdrop is the 1950s post-war economic boom that brought the relative prosperity and political quiescence against which Jimmy rages. Indeed, Jimmy’s anger is fully comprehensible only within this context: otherwise it appears merely as sadism. But it is a difficult context to communicate to a modern audience, and the director, Piers Barclay, appears not to try, choosing instead to focus on the ‘personal struggles’ of each character.
In Tom Palmer, making his Oxford debut, the production found a powerful lead who strives to express both Jimmy’s cruelty and his wounded nobility. Yet Jimmy so dominates the first act that the ‘personal struggles’ of his wife, Alison (Beth Williams), and their Welsh friend, Cliff (Nick Budd), are seriously overshadowed. Individually, each cast member has moments where their talent is clear enough, but the direction let them down: Jimmy’s dominance means that the relations between the characters are as (or more) crucial than each individual’s ‘personal struggle’. Budd’s Cliff is simply too camp to be a threatening sexual presence in the marriage, too happy-go-lucky to be a believable ‘no-man’s-land’ dourly soaking up the tension in their constant arguments. All too often, there is simply no tension – Palmer just rants and raves and his various indictments of the world, his in-laws and his wife’s friend, Alice (Alev Scott) seem to be played for laughs, rather than building up an atmosphere of pending doom which is then climaxed by Osbourne’s device of ending each scene with a dramatic twist.
These problems become particularly important in the second act, where many of Jimmy’s curses and desires are supposed to come back to haunt him, and where the cast seemed rather to lose heart. The absence of any preceding sexual tension between Jimmy and Alice make the transformation of their relationship simply baffling, while the power of Jimmy’s invective rebounding on him has already been undercut by having already had the audience laugh so easily at it. It’s not that the cast isn’t talented, but that the symmetries and relationships that are meant to emerge in the second act haven’t been set up in the first – which is really a conceptual failure. A compelling moment from Beth Williams – the most powerful of the night, gripping in its sheer intensity – is almost immediately swallowed up by an uncharacteristically wooden reaction from Palmer that ends the performance on a bum note. Better direction should have harnessed the talents of this cast – and made them speak up: a good third or more of the dialogue was inaudible beyond the fourth row.