Battle Royal of the Sex Wars

By T.E.K.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER by John Osborne

The voice of Osborne is the voice of Thersites. He rails against the world around him, which he abominates as degraded and contemptible. The rhetorical force of his tirades provides the driving tempo of his plays. What is fascinating about his most potent dramas--Look Back in Anger, Inadmissible Evidence, The Entertainer--is that the hero whiplashes not only the world but also himself.

Without his self-lacerating venom, Jimmy Porter (Malcolm McDowell) would be an intolerable bully. As it is, he humiliates his upper-class wife Alison (Lisa Banes), who hides behind a stiff upper lip and an ironing board. He hectors his live-in friend Cliff (Raymond Hardie), with whom he has some sort of male-bonding kinship. And he browbeats his actress mistress Helena (Fran Brill), who moves in when Alison leaves.

When Look Back in Anger opened in 1956 it was greeted as a fusillade against British social inertia. The most famous speech in the play contains the lines: "There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the oldfashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New nothing-very-much-thank-you." To day, two other lines that begin and end this speech are more striking: "Why, why, why, why do we let these women bleed us to death? . . . No, there's nothing left for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women." In 1980 Anger seems most like a battle royal of the sexes.

This admirable revival at off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater honors all concerned. Malcolm McDowell stalks the boards with the frustrated fury of a caged lion. There is a poignant dignity in Banes' Alison, a fever in the loins of Brill's Helena, and Hardie's Cliff is the sort of buddy you would want in the front lines. --T.E.K.

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