Jose
Sospedra Canovas
LOOK
BACK IN ANGER
Author:
John Osborne
Title:
Look Back in anger
Subtitle:
A play in two acts
Editorial:
Faber and Faber
Year
and place published:
1957, London
Dramatis
personae
In
this play appears 5 characters, all of them very differents one of the
other.
Jimmy
is a young of 25, thin and tall. He is very haughty and have strange changes in
the humour. He has a strong character.
Every
Sunday he read the newspaper and smoke. He lives with his wife, Alison, and a
friend of him Cliff. He doesn’t treat very well his wife.
Alison
is talla and thin, with big eyes. She is shy, and fells fear of his husband, so
she doesn’t dare to tell him that she is pregnant. She have to stand the insults
of his husband.
The other character who has a strong character is Helena, who refuses Jimmy’s acts about Alison and Cliff.
Cliff
and Alison are the weaker characters.
Coronel
Redfern is the father of Alison, he is very kind. He is about sixty and he was
in the British Army about 40 years.
Plot
The
plot of Look Back in anger takes us to an English apartment where Jimmy
Porter, his wife and Cliff live. Cliff is a friend of the couple. Jimmy shows a deep
contempt to both. , although he needs and loves them, but in his way. He is
always causing fights between all of them, in which ones, Cliff usually
acts
easing
up the situation, and Alison is attacked by his sweet character. The action has two main aspects: first,
Alison’s pregnancy, who tries to hide to her husband, and the arrival of Helena,
a friend of Alison and enemy of
Jimmy. The violence’s situations that they live at home originated by Helena’s arrival makes her to
persuade Alison to abandon Jimmy, because she thinks it would be good for her
baby. When
she abandons him, and beyond the last scene of vexation of Jimmy to Helena, they
kisses with passion and they starts a connivance. The
last act is a reflex of the first
one, in which Helena substitutes the role of Alison. However, she comes back
after having the baby she was waiting for. after the second abandon of Jimmy,
this time it is done by Helena, he feels soft cause of the state of misery his wife has
arrived.
The
play ends with Jimmy and Alison commiserating of their situation but in certain
way there are comforted by the fact of sharing it.
In
the play there is only one space: characters’ apartment, closed and urban, and a
bit claustrophobic because it is made up of one room. Temporally, the play
lapses in a few months, starting in
spring.
The
time of the play is placed in the fifties, in the years after the war, in a
recent past for us.
The
play is divided in three acts: the first one happens in April, the second is
divided in two scenes: the first is placed two weeks after the first act, and
the second scene is placed in the following night; the third act is also divided
in two scene: the first happens some months after what has happened in the
second act, and the second scene happens a moments after what happened in the
second act.
There
is no temporal coherence.
The
play is written in prose. The language used is colloquial, and there are
abundance of long sentences.
There
are metaphores.
I
think that this play is very interesting. It talks about how was the people
after the war, and this is interesting, although there are moments when the
dialogues of the characters becomes a little bit monotonous, and even a little
bit boring.
The
characters are very worked, they shows the feeling in that time, it’s quite
interesting
I
didn’t think that I liked this play when I started, but at the end I like
it.