1. look back in anger By john osbOrne

2. Key facts about Look Back In Anger
Full Title: Look Back in Anger
• When Written: 1955
• Where Written: Osborne wrote much of the play in the beach town of Morcambe in Lancashire, England. He was living in London at the time.
• When Published: The play premiered on May 8, 1956 at the Royal Court Theater in London. It was first published in 1957 by Faber and Faber.
• Literary Period: Theatrical realism. The play kicked off British theater’s “Angry Young Men” movement.
• Genre: Dramatic stage play
• Setting: A working class apartment in the Midlands, a region in the center of Britain sometime during the early 1950s.
• Climax: Alison loses her baby to a miscarriage and returns to her husband, Jimmy.
• Antagonist: Both Jimmy and Alison can be considered antagonists, as they fight with and antagonize each other. A broader thematic antagonist is post-war malaise in Britain.

3. Plot: Look Back in Anger
Jimmy Porter, the angry young Osborne protagonist, is introduced with his wife Alison at the "the ironing board" and his friend Cliff, both Jimmy and Cliff reading the Sunday newspapers. Jimmy is loud, rude and verbally abusive to his wife, Alison. Alison comes from an upper class family that Jimmy abhors and he berates.
Alison for being too reserved and unfeeling. Jimmy is a university graduate, but works with Cliff, operating a candy stall. The opening situation introduces us to the three main characters and refers to many others who are absentee characters : Alison's parents, her brother Nigel, Jimmy's former girl-friend Madeline, his former friend Hugh and Hugh's mom. Jimmy's aggression towards Alison who belongs to the upper class reaches a flashpoint when Jimmy pushes Alison while she is at the ironing board, and she is burned.
Alison confides to Cliff that she is pregnant. She is frightened of Jimmy's reaction to this news, and has not told him. Alison receives a phone-call to know that her actress friend, Helena Charles, is coming to stay at the flat. This typical device to indicate the entry of a new character through a phone-call is quite common in "well-made" plays. In his anger, he curses Alison for her cool demeanour, and wishes that she would have a child and that the child would die so that she could suffer and break her cool demeanour. This serves as a significant pointer in the development of the plot for Alison really suffers a miscarriage to return to her husband in the end to mark the circumambulation of the plot.

4. Helena arrives, and when Helena has had enough of Jimmy's bitterness toward Alison, she convinces Alison that she should allow her to call Alison's father to take her to the family home. Jimmy receives a phone-call to know that his patroness, Hugh's mom, has had a stroke.
Jimmy begs Alison to come with him to see her but Alison goes with Helena to church. Jimmy visits Hugh's mom in the hospital and she dies. Again this is a death of a person he loves just as he, in his boyhood had seen the slow death of his father injured in the Spanish Civil War.
Alison's father arrives and leaves with Alison. Helena stays back to initiate a new phase of relationship which contrasts with the Jimmy-Alison relationship .

5. Several months have passed, and it is another Sunday evening
Several months have passed, and it is another Sunday evening. Helena has stayed back, and Jimmy and Cliff are up to their usual discussion of the Sunday papers.
Helena, wearing Jimmy's red shirt and standing by the same ironing board shows a parallelism typical of the plot of a "well-made play". Cliff who has so long served as a buffer between the two opponents, Jimmy and Alison, is now redundant. Cliff leaves Jimmy.
The plot of Osborne's play comes to a rather trite end with the sudden return of Alison some months after her most tragic experience of miscarriage. Helena immediately withdraws leaving Jimmy for his wife, and Jimmy too takes Alison in his embrace to go back to the fantasy world of the bear and the squirrel.

6. "The plot of Osborne's play thus shows the regular 'well-made' structure having complications with parallelisms/contrasts, and a circumambulatory finish to satisfy the expectations of the spectators."

7. Information of the text
Look Back in Anger is considered one of the most important plays in the modern British theatre. It was the first well-known example of "Kitchen Sink drama," a style of theatre that explored the emotion and drama beneath the surface of ordinary domestic life. Jimmy Porter, the play's main character, became the model for the "Angry Young Man," a nickname given to an entire generation of artists and working class young men in post-World War II British society.

8. John Osborne's background
John Osborne was born on December the 12th in 1929, to an advertising writer and a Cockney barmaid. After his father died, when John was a young boy, he attended Belmont College in Devon, but he hated public school. Trying first journalism, then acting, Osborne joined Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company and collaborated with him on two plays.

9. Influences
Max Miller ^
Osborne was a great fan of Max Miller and saw parallels between them.
He stated that "I love him, because he embodied a kind of theatre I admire most. Mary from the Dairy was an overture to the danger that Max might go too far. Whenever anyone tells me that a scene or a line in a play of mine goes too far in some way then I know my instinct has been functioning as it should. When such people tell you that a particular passage makes the audience uneasy or restless, then they seem to me as cautious and absurd as landladies and girls-who-won't."

10. Contextual Information
Look Back in Anger was written in seventeen days in a deckchair on Morecambe pier where he was performing in a creaky rep show called Seagulls over Sorrento. It was largely autobiographical, based on his time living, and arguing, with Pamela Lane (Osborne's first wife) in cramped accommodation in Derby while she cheated on him with a local dentist. It was submitted to agents all over London and returned with great rapidity.

11. Critical reactions to Look Back in Anger
The first production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in provoked a major controversy. There were those, like the Observer newspaper's influential critic Kenneth Tynan, who saw it as the first totally original play of a new generation. There were others who hated both it and the world that Osborne was showing them. But even these critics acknowledged that the play, written in just one month, marked a new voice on the British stage.
Howard Brenton, writing in the Independent newspaper at the time of Osborne's death in 1994, said, “When somebody breaks the mould so comprehensively it's difficult to describe what it feels like”. In the same paper, Arnold Wesker described Osborne as having “opened the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers”.

12. Central Themes “The Angry Young Man”:
Osborne's play was the first to explore the theme of the "Angry Young Man." This term describes a generation of post-World War II artists and working class men who generally ascribed to leftist, sometimes anarchist, politics and social views. According to cultural critics, these young men were not a part of any organized movement but were, instead, individuals angry at a post-Victorian Britain that refused to acknowledge their social and class alienation.
Jimmy Porter is often considered to be literature's seminal example of the angry young man. Jimmy is angry at the social and political structures that he believes has kept him from achieving his dreams and aspirations. He directs this anger towards his friends and, most notably, his wife Alison.
The Kitchen Sink Drama:
Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social relations. Realism, in British theatre, was first experimented with in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw. This genre attempted to capture the lives of the British upper class in a way that realistically reflected the ordinary drama of ruling class British society.
According to many critics, by the mid-twentieth century the genre of realism had become tired and unimaginative. Osborne's play returned imagination to the Realist genre by capturing the anger and immediacy of post-war youth culture and the alienation that resulted in the British working classes. Look Back in Anger was able to comment on a range of domestic social dilemmas in this time period. Most importantly, it was able to capture, through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of this generation that festered just below the surface of elite British culture.

13. Links to A Doll's House
Similar to A Doll’s House, the story focuses on a realistic setting to further relate to the audience within the time period. A Doll's house could debatably be a Kitchen Sink Drama as both of the texts are social dramas set in ordinary working class homes which deal with contemporary social class issues. Additionally, Look Back in Anger also represents a negative relationship in marriage, which is also portrayed in A Doll’s House through Nora and Critical.
Both texts also question morality as Osborne presents Jimmy with a one sided morality on behalf of the working men who abuses his wife while Ibsen presents Nora in a Doll's house with an illegal issue who originally submits to the abuse created by Torvald and eventually leaves her husband and children to find her personality.