Wellington Oracle

Review by Kel Parsons, photo credit Richard Ellis

A play that stands as a cultural artefact of its era can be a double-edged sword. It may present a lively portrait of its time that resonates with later audiences, or it may simply become a dated curiosity. In some cases, it may float between these two points, drawing directors, actors and audiences to it cyclically. John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger is such a work. Osborne, one of the so-called Angry Young Men of mid-century British literature (the English media also applied the term to his contemporaries Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe, among others), presented British audiences with something they truly hadn’t seen before—scenes of domestic rebellion again the dreary, hemmed-in life lived by thousands of Britons in the post-war period, but never previously examined in art. The play’s frank mentions of sex, its casual misogyny, its vicious critique of class—all these were novelties to audiences used to mannered melodrama, measured morality tales, and farce.

Canadian audiences of the 21^st century are removed from the world of Look Back in Anger by time and space, and many have never experienced the stifling realities of class difference that England has never managed (some would say bothered) to banish. Third Wall Theatre’s current production of the play, directed by Kevin Orr, gives viewers a sharp snapshot of these things, and also of something that is recognisable to most people regardless of culture: the phenomenon of the cannibal couple, the people wrapped up in that unhealthy relationship that seems to those on the outside to carry no markers of love, but on which the participants seem to thrive painfully.

The set and lighting for this production reinforce the notion that one is about to witness some sort of combat. The stage, consisting of pie-segment shapes of varying heights that contain part of a dingy Midlands flat, sits in the middle of the intimate Studio Theatre at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre like a bullseye, with widening concentric circles painted on the floor around it; the performance area is small, and the audience surrounds it. The fact that the audience is never in darkness—a warm light bathes both house and stage throughout—contributes to the sense of claustrophobia, as though the audience had trapped the characters onstage and were squeezing them.

Jimmy Porter, one of the least-sympathetic and thus most challenging figures in the modern English theatrical canon, is played by Stewart Matthews (who gives Jimmy his own native London accent, rather than playing him as a native of the Midlands), who brings a wiry, violent restlessness to the character’s intense narcissism. Another English native, Kristina Watt, plays Jimmy’s long-suffering wife, Alison. Watts is a delicate-looking actress who nicely emphasises Alison’s fragility and her bewildered love for Jimmy, but I would have appreciated seeing a bit more anger and tension in the character. Richard Gélinas plays the friend who shares the Porter’s home, a good-hearted Welshman named Cliff who attempts to keep the peace between them. One is innately drawn to Cliff, whose bluff kindness does not blunt his intelligence and his awareness of the role he plays in the Porter household. Gélinas plays him with a simple warmth that makes him particularly appealing. Entering into this strange triangle and shifting its balance is Alison’s actress friend Helena, played by Amanda Kellock; her robust presence, strength and sensuality contrast nicely with Watt’s frailty. Paul Mackan, Alison’s father, a portly and moustachioed civil servant of the Raj, was the only cast member with noticeable trouble maintaining his accent, but he is physically-perfect for the role. His admission to his daughter that he never really understood the England to which he returned after decades in India reminds the audience of the nadir to which the once-mighty empire had descended by the mid-50s. The remaining landscape of narrowness and exhaustion was all the father’s generation had to pass on to the likes of Alison, Jimmy, Cliff and Helena.

Nothing gets around the fact that Jimmy Porter is a hard man to love. The tendency has been to present Jimmy as a sort of anti-hero raging against post-war British repression; I think that Osborne himself, however, was much more likely to see Jimmy as simply an injured, self-centred man whose consciousness of his limited options in an admittedly constrained society causes him to lash out at those who love him, even as he laments that no-one does. Such people, of course, exist in all times and places, and invariably draw slightly masochistic partners to them with whom they often work out a strange, abusive dance. Jimmy and Alison Porter’s dance, made perhaps more desperate by its desperate backdrop, is worth seeing in this incarnation.

“Look Back in Anger” runs through November 1st in the Studio Theatre of the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre at Holland and Wellington; contact Third Wall Theatre for more details.