Look Back in Anger - John Osborne

In 1956 John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger changed the course of English theatre. ‘Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is. To have done this at all would be a significant achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on stage – the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of “official” attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour… the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned.’ Kenneth Tynan, Observer, 13 May 1956 ‘Look Back in Anger… has its inarguable importance as the beginning of a revolution in the British theatre, and as the central and most immediately influential expression of the mood of its time, the mood of the “angry young man”.’ John Russell Taylor