Look Back In Anger Essay

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Discuss the character of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger explaining how you feel about him as we move through the main action of the play. Have your ideas changed about him by the time we reach the play’s final scene? Look Back in Anger changed the scene for British drama. It was one of the most controversial plays written in its time and split the critics views. The Daily Mirror wrote that it was ‘an angry play written by an angry author’ (Taylor J,R 1962) while the financial times wrote that it was ‘arresting, painful and sometimes astonishing’ (Taylor J,R 1962). The public had never before seen such scenes of violence or reality in a play before and as John Barber wrote from the Daily Mail it was ‘young, young, young’. Although its success with the younger generation it took Kenneth Tynan’s enthusiasm in the Observer and a review from Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times to make the Look Back in Anger a respected and valued play of modern society. The opening scene to the play establishes the setting very quickly. The furniture is old and shabby; the room which the three characters are in is a large, simple attic room. Although when I first read the scene setting, it did not strike me as anything significant but as I read through the story the irony of the dull, lacklustre, non-changing set seems to mirror Jimmy’s life. Jimmy is described to be ‘full of pride (Osborne 1996) but with ‘cheerful malice’ (Osborne 1996) and from first impressions this is a normal couple going about day to day life. I first thought of Jimmy as a quite intellectual man, the fact he would get bored of reading the same articles and reviews each week in the paper, lead me to believe his mind needed to be stimulated. Then his first acts of mental cruelty immerge, he torments his wife Alison by saying she is boring and would ‘get ‘em all going on the first yawn’ (Osborne
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