Coming out from the original production of Look Back, I apparently said something like, “that said it,” though now I have no idea what I meant, but, though memory is faulty, I do know that Atri Banerjee’s production could not be more different.
It is paired with Wesker’s Roots in this Almeida “Angry and Young” season and shares the same set of a round, red platform and bare walls designed by Naomi Dawson which, dramatically lit by Lee Curran, provides a revolve and a central lift that facilitate striking images as characters descend into a black void or rise from it.
At the start, a barely lit figure lies staring down into the abyss. It is Jimmy Porter, but there was movement. Did someone else fall in? Then, as the lights come up, Alison Porter and her ironing board rise from the depths. Working-class plays of the '50s were dubbed “kitchen-sink” dramas, but the ironing board was the symbol of female subservience in this play, then and now—did Jimmy and their live-in friend Cliff miss doing National Service that ironing was so foreign for them?
The shock of the second appearance of that ironing board in this production matches its change of emphasis.
Billy Howle’s Jimmy Porter is certainly angry—with the world and everything in it, including himself, but especially those who think themselves higher class, and he takes it out especially on his women, except for the elderly lady whose sweet stall he helps to run.
Why upper-middle-class Alison is married to him is a bit of a mystery, perhaps in revolt against her parents and their values. We aren’t given much of a back story, though sexual attraction was important. However, though the romantic bears and squirrels games that some fifties couples copied are played out, Howle’s Jimmy doesn’t present a macho sex symbol, and any lustfulness on the part of Ellora Torchia’s Alison isn’t lasting.
This Jimmy is so full of anger, there is little room for the charismatic idealism that perhaps fuelled it, and there is little sign of the erotic appeal that still attracts Alison’s former school friend, Helena, when she visits: or is it just that sex with a working-class man (even one who reads the Manchester Guardian) must be exciting? But with marriage, Alison turned away from her family, and wives weren’t supposed to walk out, so she is stuck there, and for Iwan Davies as their gentle lodger Cliff to have been so close to both of them, it must once have worked. But from the start of the play, Ellora Torchia’s Alison seems to be distancing herself from her husband. The gap just gets wider until she is ready to return to her respectable family.
Deka Walmsley makes a very understanding father as Colonel Redfern. Osborne doesn’t presents him and touring actress Helena as upper-class villains, and Jimmy seems to be raging against not just the upper class but the whole world—and that perhaps is what produced my response back in 1956: a whole range of things from class politics to gender roles and the Bomb not usually put on stage were being paraded by a character who was much more likeable than this Jimmy and whom someone of my then age felt could represent them.