The document provides background information on John Osborne's 1956 play "Look Back in Anger". It introduces the two main motifs of the "Angry Young Man" and "Kitchen Sink Drama". The play was groundbreaking for depicting the domestic lives and raw emotions of the working class in postwar Britain. The main character, Jimmy Porter, came to epitomize the disaffected youth of the time and their anger towards the declining British class system and empire. The play captured the mood of social change in 1950s Britain.

1. Social and
Political
context of
LOOK BACK
IN ANGER.

2. THE TWO ICONIC MOTIFS OF
THE PLAY :
1.The Angry Young Man.
2.The Kitchen Sink
Drama.

3. The play first
opened on
May 8, 1956.

4. First well-known
example of “Kitchen
Sink Drama,"
This style of theater
was given the name
"Kitchen Sink"
because of its focus on
the interior domestic
and emotional lives of
ordinary people.
It was about the raw
emotions and living
conditions of the
working class.

5. Angry young man.
A group of mid-20th
century British authors
whose works express
the bitterness of the
lower classes toward the
established sociopolitical
system and toward the
mediocrity and hypocrisy
of the middle and upper
classes .

6. INDIA ,1947

7. Hungary,1956

8. In the early 1950s
Britain had become
the third atomic
power, after the
USA, had recently
tested an H-bomb,
and there was
widespread fear of
nuclear conflict
and the effects of
nuclear tests.

9. His
Boredom
with Life:
One’s youth is slipping
away hour after hour in
this state of boredom,
he says. Church-going
offers no comfort to
him, and the sound of
church-bells only
annoys him. He tries to
escape from all this
boredom by playing on
his trumpet.

10. JIMMY’S
WAR
AGAINST
CLASS-
DISTINCT
-IONS

11. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.

12. Sloth in British Culture

14. NOTES FOR THE PRESENTATION:
 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 concept of Angry young man firstly appeared in Leslie Allen Paul’s
autobiography, Angry Young Man (1951) then later with John Osborn’s play was
gained currency specifically. The significance of the play is due largely to Jimmy
who is depicted against the conservative English tradition canon. In fact as a
character, he was not presumablely a new personality in the British society but he
is the first stark character example who represents the afflictions and implications
of the modernism in British political life after world war II. So he is the
representative to this newly minted generation.
14

15.  Angry young men movement represents a political
confrontation against the weakness of welfare state and of
course the political stance of labour party. This group of writers
brought a criticism to the middle-worker class who once took a
predominate role in English revulation. Because they observed
and believed that an indifferent and ignorent society grew up or
was created in post modern era. But in Look back in Anger, the
criticism has a binary role because Jimmy represents the
retreated part of the society while the people jimmy criticizes
represents the dominant powers. So Jimmy in fact is used in both
sense because every accusation Jimmy mentioned has also a
grain of true. However the major criticism is made via Jimmy. The
play between Jimmy and Alison implicates the validity this
criticism for example Jimmy says “ we will be together in our
bear’s cave – we’ve got to be careful- poor squirrels” also
Alison says “ poor bears” a character like Jimmy who criticizes
everyone finally retreats to his own shell with his wife.
15

16.  Maybe he never admits defeat but the implication being
that he and his wife are under delusion of the power of the
world what they have to create in order to be in safe and
again the resulting implication being that the escape from
the realities proves itself. Alison shows no resistance
against the gender discrimination. Jimmy is tortured by
anguish of having to know what is happening wrong around
him. He is nagging and deprecates everything and
everyone. This attitude shows the pathetic and helpless
state of his mind so this weakness is openly mirrored in his
marriage. For this reason he tries to compensate his lack of
confidence and the ambiguity in his social status by using
his sexual identity and abusing his wife's obedience and
trust. Thus John Osborn makes many critics using jimmy
multi-facetedly.
16

17.  Osborne wrote the play in only a few weeks in May of 1955. The
play was first rejected by many of the agents and theater
companies that Osborne approached about producing it. George
Divine, the creative producer for the struggling Royal Court Theater,
decided to gamble on the play and staged its first production. The
play opened on May 8, 1956.
 Look Back in Anger is considered one of the most important plays
in the modern British theater. The two iconic motifs of the play are
the aforementioned concepts of the Angry Young Man and the
Kitchen Sink drama.
 It was the first well-known example of "Kitchen Sink drama," a style
of theater that explored the emotion and drama beneath the surface
of ordinary domestic life. Realism, in British theater, was first
experimented with in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
by such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw. In a general sense,
the Victorian plays dealt mostly with polite themes from the late
19th and early 20th century upper ruling class. In contrast,
Osborne's play depicted the raw emotions and living conditions of
the working class. This style of theater was given the name
"Kitchen Sink" because of its focus on the interior domestic and
emotional lives of ordinary people.
17

18.  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
 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.
Background:
 The cultural backdrop to the play is the rise and fall of the British empire.
The beginning of the twentieth century saw the peak of power and
influence of British colonialism. By the 1950's, two World Wars, which
devastated the British economy, and
18

19. the rise of the United States as the new world military and political
power meant that the British empire had entered a steep decline.
 If taking over the world was an endeavor enacted by the great
British Empire to show its strength, power, audacity, and above all,
the validity of its ideology, then the “setting of the sun” on the
Empire was more than the loss of political, economical, and military
power. With the granting of independence to India in 1947 after 40
years of struggle,Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National
Congress forced Britain out of India, also the loss of African
colonies and the near independence of the Commonwealth nations
such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the British Empire
was all but gone.
 The Suez crises in 1956, in which Egypt refused to renew the
British-owned Suez Canal Company's concession and which
resulted in a disastrous and humiliating intervention by England,
simply emphasized the lack of power wielded by Britain in the Post
World War II world.
 P.T.O
19

20.  In Hungary the people rebelled against their Russian—
imposed Communist Government, and Russia crushed the
revolt by armed might, while the rest of the world looked on
and did nothing. In the Mediterranean, the Egyptian
Government announced that it was taking over the Suez
Canal which had till then been owned and run by Anglo-
French interests. Britain and France sent their troops to
protect their interests in the Suez area but had to suffer
humiliation because the whole adventure only proved that
the days of British imperial glory were over.
 Meanwhile in England itself protest was organizing itself
round the question of nuclear disarmament.
 All these happenings contributed to the climate of opinion in
which Look Back in Anger first appeared. The hero of this
play was ideally constituted to be the all-purpose hero of the
dissatisfied young people.
20

21.  Jimmy Porter is representative of an entire culture that remained
nostalgic for this past glory. He idealizes the worthy causes of the
past even while he mocks those who cannot understand why the
times have changed as much as they have.
Look Back in Anger is a play that appeared in a time of crucial
transition from Britain's Victorian past into the modern twentieth
century. That anger became a symbol of the rebellion against the
political and social malaise of British culture. His anger is destructive
to those around him and the psychological violence of the play
received a great deal of criticism. Critics today agree, however, that
the play is central to an understanding of British life in the twentieth
century and, thus, a crucial piece of literature in the British canon.
 Effects:
Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really was. All the
characteristics of post-war youth are to be found in Jimmy Porter.
P.T.O
21

22.  His Boredom with Life:
Jimmy’s boredom with life is also characteristic of post-war
youth. He finds Sunday especially depressing because one
has to follow the same routine every time—reading papers,
drinking tea, ironing clothes. One’s youth is slipping away hour
after hour in this state of boredom, he says. Church-going
offers no comfort to him, and the sound of church-bells only
annoys him. He tries to escape from all this boredom by
playing on his trumpet.
 Jimmy’s War against Class-Distinctions:
Jimmy is also waging a war against class-distinctions. He
himself comes from a working-class family, while his wife
comes from the affluent middle class. Alison’s parents had
opposed her marriage to Jimmy, and Jimmy has never been
able to forget this fact even though four years have passed. He
keeps criticizing not only Alison but Alison’s family also. He
ridicules Alison’s father for living in the past.
22

23.  The Rise and Fall of the British
Empire:
The character of Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, represents
the decline of and nostalgia for the British Empire. The Colonel
had been stationed for many years in India, a symbol of
Britain's imperial reach into the world. The Edwardian age
which corresponded to Britain's height of power, had been the
happiest of his life. His nostalgia is representative of the denial
that Osborne sees in the psyche of the British people. The
world has moved on into an American age, he argues, and the
people of the nation cannot understand why they are no longer
the world's greatest power. Colonel Redfern is caught out of
his time. The England he left as a young army officer no longer
exists. Jimmy calls him "just one of those sturdy old plants left
over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can't understand why
the sun isn't shining anymore," and the Colonel agrees.
23

24.  No Good, Brave Causes Left in the
World:
Jimmy also laments the fact that there are no good, brave
causes left in the world so that people, of his generation are
not able to die for anything noble. There will be no brave new
world now but only a brave-new-nothing-very-much-thank-you.
Dying will be now as inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.
 Sloth in British Culture:
Jimmy Porter compares his quest for a more vibrant and
emotional life to the slothfulness of the world around him. It is
important to note that Jimmy does not see the world around
him as dead, but merely asleep in some fundamental way. This
is a fine line that Osborne walks throughout the play. Jimmy
never argues that there is a nihilism within British culture.
Instead, he sees a kind of slothfulness of character. His anger
is an attempt to awaken those around him from this cultural
sleep.
24

25.  Loss of Childhood:
A theme that impacts the characters of Jimmy and Alison
Porter is the idea of a lost childhood. Osborne uses specific
examples -- the death of Jimmy's father when Jimmy was only
ten, and how he was forced to watch the physical and mental
demise of the man -- to demonstrate the way in which Jimmy
is forced to deal with suffering from an early age. Alison's loss
of childhood is best seen in the way that she was forced to
grow up too fast by marrying Jimmy. Her youth is wasted in
the anger and abuse that her husband levels upon her.
Osborne suggests that a generation of British youth has
experienced this same loss of childhood innocence. Osborne
uses the examples of World War, the development of the
atomic bomb, and the decline of the British Empire to show
how an entire culture has lost the innocence that other
generations were able to maintain.
25

26. THE END