10:53am Wednesday 1st October 2008
By Michael Purton
Written in 1956, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger captured the frustration of a generation of young men with no great causes to fight for.
Born too late to become a hero by fighting in the Second World War, the protagonist Jimmy surrounds himself with a flat as dingy and claustrophobic as the trenches and a wife and friend he can verbally battle each day.
The minimalist set of the production at Greenwich Playhouse perfectly captured this claustrophobia and poverty.
The tight space the tattered armchairs and dining table occupied, along with the darkness surrounding them, suggested there was nothing for the characters beyond their grim flat.
One of the themes of the play is the idea the characters choose to suffer. Perhaps because they believe they deserve to suffer like their parents did during the war, perhaps because they believe a life without suffering is empty.
Whatever their reasons, Jimmy and his wife Alison, along with their respective best friends Cliff and Helena, all choose to confine themselves in the flat and violently argue with each other.
Lesser actors would have made it seem the characters argue purely because they dislike each other, but Brett Harris and Fiona Rose Boylan conveyed the twisted pleasure Jimmy and Alison take from their marriage of suffering.
Although Harris is small in stature, his performance was huge, with frustration and rage behind his every word and action. Yet he avoided making Jimmy a one-dimensional caricature of anger by showing the love he has for his wife in the brief pauses in their arguments.
Boylan gave a measured performance as Alison, an upper class girl who has chosen to abandon her privileged roots to slum it with Jimmy.
She captured the conflicting feelings of love and hate Alison has for him by subtly adjusting the tone of her voice and expression on her face. At times she looked at him with pure hate, and her voice echoed it, but a moment later her eyes and voice were full of love for Jimmy.
Philip John and Laura Corcoran also gave rounded performances, showing a range of emotions which made Cliff and Helena more than just secondary characters.
The small theatre at Greenwich Playhouse, which places audience on the stage, literally inches from the actors, meant it was more like screen acting for the cast, as the audience had a close-up view of their every facial twitch.
At times this was too much for the young cast, as they struggled to hold the correct expression. But director Maria Chiorando made the right choice in allowing the actors to be exposed and it added a vulnerability to the characters which made them seem more real.
This created an emotional bond between the audience and the characters which made Look Back in Anger an overall excellent production.
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