FULL ANALYSIS OF LOOK BACK IN ANGER BY JOHN KARGBO

                                                                Look Back in Anger Summary

              Look Back in Anger follows a young husband and wife, Alison and Jimmy Porter, as they attempt to navigate class conflict and deal with a deteriorating marriage in 1950s England. Alison comes from a traditional upper class background. Jimmy comes from a working class background, though he is highly educated.

The couple lives with Cliff Lewis, an affable working class man and Jimmy’s longtime friend. The scene opens on a Sunday morning in the apartment.

            Alison irons clothes while Cliff and Jimmy read the newspaper.

The play’s first act largely consists of Jimmy’s angry tirades against upper class complacency and his wife’s lack of “enthusiasm.” Jimmy thinks that suffering is the only way to experience true human emotion, and that Alison and other upper class people are therefore less “alive” than he is. He also seems to have some nostalgia for a past age in Britain when the country had more power. Jimmy’s attempts to shock his wife into some display of emotion escalate as the act progresses—he insults her family and complains that all women are out to destroy men. Cliff, attempting to cheer Jimmy up, begins to banter and roughhouse with his friend. The two fall against Alison’s ironing board, and she burns her arm. Jimmy apologizes, but she yells at him to leave, and he exits.

 

Cliff helps Alison treat the burn, and she reveals to him that she is pregnant with Jimmy’s child. She hasn’t told Jimmy yet, because she is afraid that he’ll feel trapped and angry. Cliff comforts Alison, and tells her that Jimmy loves her. He kisses her. Jimmy enters while they are kissing, but doesn’t acknowledge or object (the three live in a non-traditional set-up that would have been shocking to audiences at the time). Soon after, Cliff leaves to get some cigarettes, and Alison and Jimmy share a tender moment. 

       They play their “bear and squirrel” game, which allows them to escape into affection while pretending to be animals. Then Cliff returns and says that Helena Charles, one of Alison’s upper class friends, is on the phone. Jimmy’s mood immediately darkens. When Alison says that Helena wants to stay with them, Jimmy explodes. He says he wishes that Alison would have a baby that would die so that she could experience true suffering.

The second act begins with Helena and Alison sharing the womanly duties of the home while Jimmy plays his trumpet off stage. Alison tells Helena about her first months with Jimmy. They lived with his working class friend Hugh Tanner, and spent time going on “raids” to parties of Alison’s upper class friends. She says that she felt like “a hostage from those sections of society they had declared war on.” Helena asks why they got married, and Alison says that it seemed to be largely because Alison’s mother and her father Colonel Redfern disapproved. That made Jimmy want to marry her no matter what.

        Jimmy and Cliff come in to eat. When he hears that Helena and Alison are going to church together later that day, Jimmy also becomes convinced that Helena is out to take Alison away from him. He lets fly a series of outrageous insults against Alison’s mother. Helena tries, and fails, to reason with him, and Jimmy asks whether she has ever watched someone die. 

         He tells the story of watching his father die from wounds received fighting in the Spanish Civil war when he was ten years old, and claims that this taught him more about life than Helena and Alison know even now. Near the end of the scene, Jimmy leaves to go get the telephone. While he’s gone, Helena tells Alison that she has sent a message to Colonel Redfern asking him to come pick Alison up. Alison doesn’t protest. When Jimmy returns, he says that Hugh’s mum, the working class woman who set him up in his candy stall and for whom he harbors deep affection, is dying of a stroke. He asks Alison to come to the hospital with him. Instead, she goes to church. Jimmy is left alone on stage.

In the next scene, Colonel Redfern helps Alison pack to leave. He reveals that he thinks he and Alison’s mother reacted too strongly to her marriage with Jimmy, and that Jimmy might have been right to be angry with them. He says he thinks that Jimmy could be right that he, Redfern, is a relic of an old version of England that has ceased to exist. 

          He also says that he and Alison have a tendency to stay neutral and not take a strong stand on things. She is surprised to hear this from him, and as she finishes packing she briefly re-considers her move. Then Helena enters, and Alison decides to go. She says goodbye to Cliff. Helena stays behind because she has a work meeting the following day. Alison and Colonel Redfern exit, and Cliff, angry that Helena has disrupted their life, leaves before Jimmy comes back. Jimmy returns a few moments later, furious, having seen Alison leaving with her father on his way home. Helena gives him a letter that Alison wrote explaining her decision. 

       Jimmy is angry at her polite, restrained language. Helena tells him that Alison is going to have a baby. He says that he is not overcome with emotion at this news, and insults Helena, who slaps him. This causes Jimmy to collapse in despair. Then Helena “kisses him passionately,” and the act ends.

The scene opens several months later, looking very similar to the beginning of Act 1, except that it is now Helena who is ironing. Jimmy and Cliff joke and discuss newspaper articles. 

        They roughhouse, and Cliff dirties his shirt. Helena leaves to clean it, and while she is off stage, Cliff tells Jimmy that he is moving out. Jimmy wonders why he always chooses women over male friendship, even though he value’s Cliff’s company more highly than he values Helena’s. Helena comes back with the shirt, and Cliff leaves to dry it in his room. Helena tells Jimmy that she loves him, and he asks her desperately to never leave him. Then Alison appears at the door, looking sick and disheveled.

The next scene opens a few minutes later, with Jimmy playing his trumpet off stage. Alison tells Helena that she is not angry with her, and is not trying to break up the new couple. Helena, however, says that Alison’s presence has reminded her that what she is doing is wrong. Alison has also had a miscarriage, and Helena considers this a “judgment” on her relationship. She calls Jimmy back, and tells him that she is leaving. Jimmy says that he always knew Helena wasn’t strong enough for true love, which requires “muscle and guts.” Helena leaves.

Alison apologizes, and Jimmy says that she should have sent flowers to Hugh’s mum, and remembers his first meeting with her, when he thought that she had a “wonderful relaxation of spirit.” This turned out to be just complacency, he says. Alison lets out a cry, and tells him that the loss of their child has made her understand the depth of emotion that he wanted her to have all this time. She tells him that she wants to be “corrupt and futile,” and collapses at his feet. Jimmy can’t bear to see her this way, and kneels to help her. Then, “with a kind of mocking, tender irony,” he launches into their bear and squirrel imaginary game. “Poor squirrels,” he says to Alison, and she responds, “poor, poor, bears.”

 

                                                                 Summary   Analysis

       The play is set in a one-room apartment at the top of an old Victorian house. When the curtain rises, we see Jimmy Porter and Cliff Lewis, seated on opposite sides of he stage and reading newspapers. There are others beside them and between them, forming “a jungle of newspapers and weeklies.” Jimmy is smoking a pipe. A tattered stuffed bear and squirrel sit on a chest of drawers at the end of a double bed, which takes up most of the back wall. The furniture is simple and somewhat shabby.

The shabby furnishings mark this apartment as a working class space. The newspapers, which represent Jimmy’s attempt to live like a member of the well-educated elite, as does his pipe smoking, nevertheless make the apartment seem less civilized, as they form an indoor “jungle.” The bear and the squirrel, which return in the couple’s more affectionate moments but whose significance is not clear at this point in the play, add some whimsy to the scene.

      In the first stage direction, Osborne describes Jimmy as “a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice” and says, “to be as vehement as he is to be almost non-committal.” He describes Cliff as much more gentle—Jimmy tends to push people away, while Cliff draws them to him. Jimmy’s wife Alison Porter stands ironing clothes on the left side of the stage, near Cliff. She is wearing Jimmy’s shirt, and looks elegant in this working class apartment.

Right away, we sense that Jimmy has a strong, but unfocused, energy. His vehemence is self-defeating, turning it into something “non-committal.” Alison’s high-class background is evident, even though she wears Jimmy’s clothes. She can’t hide the status that she was born into.

 

       Jimmy complains that the Sunday papers are boring, and also that they make him “feel ignorant.” He taunts Cliff for not being smarter, then taunts Alison, asking her if the papers make her feel stupid, too, even though she’s not a “peasant” like Cliff. Alison says that she hasn’t read them. Cliff tells Jimmy to leave Alison alone while she works. Jimmy asks if “The White Woman’s Burden” makes it too hard for Alison to speak. He complains that his talk seems to bore them, and tells Alison to “go back to sleep.” Alison, still at her ironing board, finally snaps that she “can’t think,” and Jimmy says that she “hasn’t had a thought for years.”

      Jimmy claims his status as a well-educated man by saying that the papers are too boring for him, but then immediately rejects that status, saying that they’re also too difficult. This points to the way that mass education has made class boundaries more difficult to define. The idea of the “white man’s burden” was used to justify British imperialism and exploitation of non-white people, but here Jimmy twists it to insult Alison and her privilege, suggesting that Alison has a destructive power, as the British empire used to.

 

      Jimmy decides that he’s hungry, to which Cliff replies that he’ll get fat. Jimmy denies this: “people like me don’t get fat,” he says, “we just burn everything up.”

Jimmy’s angry energy is again self-defeating—it burns him up, rather than giving him life.

 

        Cliff reaches up to grab Alison’s hand (she is still at her ironing board beside him). He says that she should sit down and join them. Alison smiles, and says she still has work to do. Cliff “kisses her hand and puts her fingers in his mouth.” He tells Jimmy that Alison is a beautiful girl. Jimmy responds, “that’s what they all tell me,” and his eyes meet his wife’s across the stage. Cliff says that he is going to bite off Alison’s “lovely, delicious paw.” Alison says not to—she’ll burn the shirt she’s ironing. Jimmy tells Cliff to “give her her finger back, and don’t be so sickening.” Then he asks more about what Cliff’s reading in the paper.

     Cliff, unlike Jimmy, is kind and gentle with Alison. His affection for her is not destructive, though he, like Jimmy comes from a different class background than she does. Cliff’s flirtation, which takes place in front of Alison’s husband, shows that traditional gender and family roles are fluid in this play. Jimmy and Alison share a charged moment in the midst of Cliff’s come-ons—the competition seems to add to their attraction to each other.

 

                                                                          THEMES

Class and Education

Look Back in Anger was published in the post World War II period in England, in 1956. In 1944, The British Mass Education Act had made secondary education free for everyone in the country. This meant that whole new swaths of British society were now equipped to write about their lives. John Osborne was one of these. His play broke into a world of British theater that had previously been a polite, upper class environment…

 

Suffering and Anger vs. Complacency

Suffering and anger are highly associated with lower class-ness in the play, and complacency with upper class-ness. Jimmy believes that lower class people, who have suffered as he has, have an insight on the world that upper class people lack. He berates Alison for lacking “enthusiasm” and “curiosity.” He suggests that her complacency makes her less human, less connected to life than he is. He sees this suffering and anger as an important part of…

 

Disillusionment and Nostalgia

Look Back in Anger is the archetypical play of the “angry young men” movement in British theater, which was marked by working class authors writing plays about their disillusionment with British society. In Osborne’s play, we see this in Jimmy’s sense of political emptiness. Jimmy complains that, in the Britain of the 1950s, “there aren’t any good, brave causes left.” Helena observes that he was born in the wrong time—“he thinks he’s still in…

                                                                   CHARACTERS    ANALYSIS

  

     JIMMY PORTER

        Jimmy is the “angry young man” of the play, usually found spouting tirades against the complacency of the British upper classes, and especially against his wife Alison and then his lover Helena. Born working class but highly educated, like his friend and roommate Cliff, but has an ambivalent relationship with his educated status, seeing himself mostly as a working class man and yet frustrated that his education can do nothing to affect his class status. “He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty.” Jimmy “alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike,” and his “blistering honesty, or apparent honesty…makes few friends.” Jimmy is a frustrated character, railing against his feelings of alienation and uselessness in post-war England.

       Alison Porter

         A woman from an upper class background, and Jimmy’s wife. She is drawn to Jimmy’s energy, but also exhausted by their constant fighting. Jimmy accuses her of being too complacent and lacking “enthusiasm,” and her own father, Colonel Redfern, agrees that she has a tendency towards too much neutrality. She feels stuck between her upper class upbringing and the working class world of her husband. Alison eventually leaves Jimmy, but returns to him later in the play after she loses their child to a miscarriage. This suffering changes her, and causes her to commit more fully to the intense emotion inherent in Jimmy’s world.

    Cliff Lewis

        A kind man of working class background, and a good friend and roommate to both Jimmy and Alison. He lives with the couple, and helps to keep them together. Cliff is “easy and relaxed, almost to lethargy, with the rather sad, natural intelligence of the self-taught.” He and Alison have an affectionate relationship that borders on a sexual one, but both of them are content with comfortable fondness rather than burning passion. Cliff eventually decides to leave to pursue his own life, rather than staying in Jimmy’s apartment.

      Helena Charles

Alison’s upper class friend, who comes to stay with the couple while acting in a play, and ends up having an affair with Jimmy after Alison leaves him. She is described as having a “sense of matriarchal authority” that “makes most men who meet her anxious.” Helena has a strong code of middle class morals that eventually force her to leave Jimmy.