Monday, September 17, 2018

Can Look Back in Anger by John Osborne be seen as a psychological play?

One could argue that any non-comic stage work, especially from the twentieth century, is a "psychological" drama, but the psychological world to which John Osborne gave a voice has of course generally as that of an "angry young man." In Look Back in Anger, Osborne explores the psychological motivations that have brought together these idiosyncratic characters, Jimmy, Alison, Helena and Cliff. Alison has clearly "married down." Class conflict in Britain is at the center of the conflict between them. Jimmy is of working-class background but is an educated man. Despite having been to university, he prefers to make his living running a stall in a market. He's abusive to everyone around him, especially Alison, resenting her upper-middle-class background and also what he sees as her (and her friend Helena's) pretensions. Yet the "message" of the play must in some sense be that Alison has a mental "need" to be in this situation. The same would be true of Helena, who goes to bed with Jimmy in spite of (or because of?) the tension and hostility between them.
All of this from today's viewpoint could be viewed as a male chauvinist fantasy. It is difficult not to see misogyny not only in Jimmy's behavior but also in the ideas, the themes, upon which the play itself appears to be grounded. Conversely, the drama could be seen as a critique of those attitudes, which even in the 1950s were beginning to be seen as extraordinarily primitive. However one interprets it, the play is an intense examination, or more precisely a revelation, of a psychological dynamic between men and women that unfortunately is too commonplace even today.

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