LOOK BACK IN ANGER. To 2 September.

Bath

LOOK BACK IN ANGER
by John Osborne

Theatre Royal To 2 September 2006
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2.30pm
Audio-described 30 Aug 2.30pm
BSL Signed 2 Sept 2.30pm
Post-show talk 31 Aug
Runs 2hr 50min One interval

TICKETS: 01225 448844
www.theatreroyal.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 August

One character may talk loudest, but all have their say.
While the Royal Court's been celebrating 50 years of the English Stage Company's new plays policy with Tom Stoppard, Bath Theatre Royal's having the play which started the ESC's ball rolling in 1956, the voice of the discontented young, John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. There's been so much revisionism going on, it's hard to remember sometimes this play was a shock to the theatrical and social systems in the mid-fifties. Certainly not the kind of thing Bath's stately Theatre Royal would have seen as its remit. Apart from the Angry Young Man journo-tag linked to the play, its Midlands bedsit setting made it the par excellence 'kitchen-sink play', though it's clear from the script the Porters' flat contains everything but the kitchen sink.

The revisionism started with Osborne himself who, within a year of its opening was calling it old-fashioned (usefully thereby advertising that his next play, The Entertainer was very new in shape, though it now seems full of quarter-absorbed Brechtianisms in its staging). At least 2 of the old-fashioned qualities are strengths: Osborne's willingness to write sustained scenes and his ability to give all his characters a genuine voice.

This is clear if they're considered without the motormouth protagonist Jimmy Porter, especially when the play's as strongly performed as in Peter Gill's revival for Bath's 2006 Peter Hall Company season (where it sits adjacent to Hall's revival of the other innovative newcomer to the 1955/56 London theatre season,Waiting for Godot. The third major event in that remarkable fifties year was the Berliner Ensemble's London season, which might well have sparked Osborne's formal experiments with his next play).

Though any young man in 2006 looks curious smoking a pipe (a fogeyish habit that's the toughest thing any Jimmy must contend with), Richard Coyle provides the pain under the anger, the genuineness of feeling and naivety of this heroic anti-hero. He doesn't quite manage the sympathy to support the privilige the play gives Jimmy's feelings. People often want his upper-class, much-abused wife Alison to chuck the famous iron at him. Here you want someone to tell him they don't care about his friends any more than he does about there's. There again, their lack of such passion is the play's point. It just doesn't seem too convincing nowadays.

Richard Harrington makes a fine Cliff, just the type to spend his time in a friend's room, and catch the warmth of others' lives rather than strike out alone. Occasionally, Harrington seems in another world when some visual response is required: in Jimmy's 'pusillanimous attack on Alison, or his declaration he'd like her to have a child die. Otherwise, he is utterly convincing.

As is Ronald Pickup, as an ex-Indian army officer come to return his daughter Alsion to her suave conventional life. Though his regret is another form of defence against strong emotion Pickup gives it a solid base in Colonel Redfern's regretful realisation life has moved on.

But Gill's main success is with the women in Jimmy's life. Too often, that's all they are. Here, they become independent people. Mary Stockley's alabaster Alison, pale in skin as in temperament, an English white rose dressed in tasteful pastel colours, has feeling and intelligence but has never been taught to use them. And Rachael Stirling's contrastingly dark-hued and haired Helena is magnificent, both in her use of direct attack against Jimmy (contrasting the others' evasiveness) and close calculation of how to seduce him.

The sense of independent individuals is increased by Gill's device of emphasising key speeches as soliloquies, underscored by sustained musical notes, with other characters leaving the room. This is a vital production; let's hope someone will ensure it can be seen aftrer it's brief time in Bath.

Jimmy Porter: Richard Coyle
Cliff Lewis: Richard Harrington
Alison Porter: Mary Stockley
Helena Charles: Rachael Stirling
Colonel Redfern: Ronald Pickup

Director: Peter Gill
Designer: William Dudley
Lighting: Mark Henderson
Sound: Simon Whitehorn
Composer: Terry Davies
Assistant director: Ben Woolf

2006-08-27 18:32:55