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LOOK
BACK IN ANGER
Taken from What's On Stage
Written by Carole
Woddis
Performance at Theatre
Royal, Bath
Published August
23th 2006
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1956 - The Suez debacle and Look Back in Anger.
The two events are indelibly intertwined. But one has all but disappeared
from the public memory; the other has become iconic. So it’s
not surprising that Peter Gill’s production bringing Peter
Hall’s 2006 Bath season to a close should have been so eagerly
anticipated. Despite all the celebrations surrounding the Royal
Court’s 50th anniversary celebrations - and a special evening
given over to Osborne - this is the only major production Look Back
in Anger will have had this year.
Despite this, and all the legacy baggage it carries, the burning
question remains: how does the play stand up? Indeed, does it stand
up at all now as any kind of play-for-today? Peter Hall himself
has thrown some doubt upon it by stating that Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot, the 50th anniversary of which he marked with his own
production last year (revived this year), is probably the greater
classic.
Gill’s great achievement is to give Look Back a fresh emphasis.
While Osborne’s harangues against class and privilege are
still relevant for UK plc today, Gill, our greatest social realist
director, provides new symbolism for them.
William Dudley’s wonderfully grungy brown, wall-papered garret
room sets the scene, framed within a skeleton outline of a larger,
Victorian dwelling complete with chimney stack and rampant lion
statue. The place wreaks of claustrophobia, and run-down imperial
decay within which Richard Coyle’s Jimmy
rants and rages at Mary Stockley’s ironing board-chained Alison
while Richard Harrington’s third party intimate, Cliff, looks
on.
And that is Gill’s brilliance. For this Look Back emerges
as not only a cry against a dying empire and passive indifference,
but as a piercing enquiry into the damage of witnessing and sexual
ambivalence. Gill‘s revival, ironically, looks back to the
inheritance of Noel Coward and Design for Living, of emotional possession,
and male-female conflict.
If Coyle’s Jimmy holds the floor, it is Harrington’s
Cliff, caught in shadowy spotlight against a haunting jazz riff,
who captures an atmosphere of aching loss and turmoil. Coyle’s
Jimmy carries none of the self-lacerating charisma Michael Sheen
brought to the role at the National a few years ago. But he’s
not afraid to show his self-pity or misogyny.
Stockley grows in painful self-awareness and Rachael Stirling, sounding
more than ever like her mother Diana Rigg, even to speech inflections,
plays Helena, the girl friend with a vampish calculation quite at
odds with her church-going character; theatrically riveting. Ronald
Pickup gives heartfelt support as Alison’s ex-India army,
ex-pat father.
But it is Harrington’s night. Watch him and weep.
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