Look Back in Anger: Faber Modern Classics - Softcover

Osborne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 057132276X ISBN 13: 9780571322763

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2015

Synopsis

Look Back in Anger transformed the face of British theatre; legend has it that audiences gasped at the sight of an ironing board on a London stage. John Osborne's play launched the 'angry young men' movement, writers from working or middle class background who had become disillusioned with British society, were sick of contemporary theatre's escapism, and wanted their work to reflect life as they knew it.

The play tells the story of a love triangle between Jimmy, an intelligent and educated man of working class background, his upper-middle-class wife Alison, and her superior and disdainful best-friend Helena. Jimmy hates his wife's background, almost as much as he hates himself. Dark and savage, Look Back in Anger makes readers and audiences re-examine what was once called 'the good life'.

About this title

Book Description

Look Back In Anger by John Osborne changed the course of English theatre in 1956 and expresses the mood of post-war Britain with originality, clarity and surrealist humour.

About the Author

John Osborne was born in London in 1929. Before becoming a playwright he worked as a journalist, assistant stage manager and repertory theatre actor. Seeing an advertisement for new plays in The Stage in 1956, Osborne submitted Look Back in Anger. Not only was the play produced, but it was to become considered as the turning point in post-war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the rebelliousness of an entire post-war generation of 'angry young men'. His other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1966). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991) published together as Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise. His last play, Deja Vu (1991), returns to the characters of Look Back in Anger, over thirty years later. Both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer were adapted for film, and in 1963 Osborne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones. John Osborne died on 24 December 1994.

David Hare's first full-length play was produced in 1970. Since then he has written over thirty stage plays and twenty-five screenplays for film and television. The plays include Plenty, Pravda (with Howard Brenton), The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy's View, The Blue Room, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, The Absence of War, The Judas Kiss, The Red Barn and The Moderate Soprano. For cinema, he has written The Hours, The Reader, Damage, Denial, Wetherby and The White Crow among others, while his television films include Licking Hitler, the Worricker Trilogy (Page Eight, Turks & Caicos, and Salting the Battlefield) and Collateral. In a millennial poll of the greatest plays of the twentieth century, five of the top hundred were his.

Michael Billington has been theatre critic of the Guardian since 1971 and of Country Life since 1986. He is the author of biographies of Harold Pinter and Peggy Ashcroft, critical studies of Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn, of a celebration of Ken Dodd, a collection of reviews, One Night Stands, State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, which won the Theatre Book Prize 2008, and The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present. He has also edited Directors' Shakespeare: Twelfth Night and Stage and Screen Lives selected from the Dictionary of National Biography.

He frequently lectures and broadcasts on the arts, teaches drama for the University of Pennsylvania and is a Visiting Professor at King's College, London and an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 057132276X
• ISBN 13: 9780571322763
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 144