Roots and Look Back in Anger at the Almeida Theatre – Angry and Young season review

“I doubt I could love anyone who did not want to see Look Back in Anger,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan in 1956, marking a line in the sand, a moment when the history of British theatre underwent a seismic shift and the plays of a generation of “Angry Young Men” came to define a new beginning.

Times change and the way in which contemporary audiences perceive the writing of the past alters too. So it is greatly to the Almeida’s credit that it has turned the spotlight back to those heady years of the late 1950s when disillusion with the pre-war certainties of class, race, and empire were suddenly under attack. This mini-season (called Angry and Young) sets John Osborne’s play alongside Arnold Wesker’s Roots (written three years later) and places them in the hands of young, rising directors.

They still feel incendiary but not necessarily in the way that their authors intended. For one thing, both are shot through with misogyny (the woman’s movement not really having registered its effects so early). In Osborne’s case, the dislike is explicit as his hero Jimmy Porter bullies and demeans his wife Alison. In Wesker’s case, it seems almost inadvertent, as ingrained in period attitudes as pickled onions, ham and trifle for a special tea.

The plays, shown one after the other on press day, complement each other neatly. Roots takes its heroine Beattie Bryant (an impassioned Morfydd Clark) back to her Norfolk farming family for a visit. She’s been away for three years and under the influence of her boyfriend Ronnie, an avowed socialist, whose life advice she quotes ad nauseam.

Roots is the central play in Wesker’s semi-autobiographical trilogy about the Jewish working-class Kahn family that begins with Chicken Soup with Barley and ends with I’m Talking About Jerusalem. Ronnie is present in both those plays but here absent from the stage though his thoughts still fill it. He sees Beattie as his mission; he wants to give her – undereducated as she is – the words to build bridges to a different life, the roots of culture that will enrich and enhance her understanding.

Since Wesker based the play on a visit to his wife’s family, Ronnie is meant to have a point. The problem is that he comes over as a patronising snob, railing against the conditions in which Beattie’s family live without offering either warmth or empathy.

What we see on stage is a group of people whose lives have been coarsened by circumstances, constrained by grinding, exploited poverty as they labour for little reward. No wonder their exchanges have been reduced to gossip rather than conversation, revolving around the petty grievances of daily life. The problem is that Wesker’s writing lacks the ability to leap into the family’s minds; it’s a sociological study rather than a drama.

Diyan Zora’s stylised, non-naturalistic staging pushes them further away. On a red revolving set by Naomi Dawson, Lee Curran’s lighting design bathes Beattie in shafts of bright white as she parrots Ronnie’s words. When she dances to an example of the classical music that her mother has dismissed as “squit”, she is suddenly liberated into a new world. Her final speech, when she finds the language to define herself, is meant to be the first step to self-realisation.

Yet the scenes that land most vividly are those when her peculiar brand of stubbornness, her determination to find a different life, come into conflict with her mother’s weary resilience. Sophie Stanton’s tight-lipped Mrs Branton is one of life’s copers, turning the hourly arrival of the village bus into an event, getting ready to face whatever disaster is about to strike. The play’s contempt for her is wearying and the production doesn’t do enough to address it.

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger also drips with contempt, full of controlled venom and savage spite. An excellent Billy Howle endows Jimmy Porter’s rants against everything that offends him – women, posh people, the world – with an almost unbearable power. There are too many words, but they still spit and bite.

The writing ranges from the observational – Jimmy describes living in a flat beneath two women when “even a simple visit to the lavatory sounded like a medieval siege” – to the insightful, as when Alison (a fragile Ellora Torchia) observes to her army general father “you’re hurt because everything has changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same” – and for all its verbosity, it always feels as if it comes from the heart.

Director Atri Banerjee also gets the best of the shared abstract design. Here the revolve has a second platform within it, which drops to create an abyss at the centre; the play opens with Jimmy flat on the floor, staring into nothingness, a perfect image of his despair at a modern life which is failing all his hopes and dreams. “There aren’t any good, brave causes left,” he famously exclaims, and Howle’s extraordinary, intense performance lets you see the weight of unhappiness that has caused.

His Jimmy really is lost and by emphasising that, Banerjee subtly counteracts Osborne’s unbearable desire to see this ruthless man-child as a hero. He also switches the attention to Alison’s pain, conjuring – particularly towards the end of a long but engrossing first act – a portrait of an abusive relationship where neither partner can truly leave the toxicity they are creating. Peter Rice’s sound design, full of Jimmy’s blousy trumpet playing and harsher sounds of bells and brass, underlines the enclosed nature of their world.

At the close, ash falls from the sky, and Curran’s smoky lighting gets more shadowy, leaving this sad couple trapped in a “silly symphony of their own making”, isolated by their own need. It’s an intelligent reading of Osborne’s over-emphatic play, much bolstered by excellent supporting performances from Iwan Davies as good-hearted Cliff, Clark as the ambiguously interfering Helena in this play, and Deka Walmsley as Alison’s upright father.

In the end, neither production quite makes the case for the plays as illuminating for today. As time has passed, it’s interesting how much closer the works of Coward and Rattigan, with their insight into eternal truths of the soul, speak to our times than their politically locked and self-consciously ‘radical’ successors. But Tynan was half right. Both Roots and Look Back in Anger are plays we should want to see, relevant markers in modern British history. The Almeida deserves applause for these revivals.

Roots ★★★

Look Back in Anger ★★★★