Looking Back in Anger, 50 years on

This year marks the golden anniversary of 'Look Back in Anger', the play that transformed British theatre. Peter Hall stages a new production this summer, while Radio 4 will broadcast another version. Here, in an extract from his autobiography, the late John Osborne recalls his work's tumultuous first night on 8 May 1956

Tony [Richardson, assistant director] and George [Devine, manager of the English Stage Company] took a monkeyish delight in giving the manuscript of Look Back to colleagues and acquaintances so that they could report their unfavourable reactions back to me. They used it as a litmus test of personality and taste, enjoying my unease as much as the aversion of those who read the play.

One of the most revered of theatre dames loved it least of all. "It should be thrown into the river and washed out to sea so that it may never be seen again." Tony relished every syllable as he repeated her verdict.

Casting Look Back started early in the new year. Finding Jimmy Porter was certain to be difficult. We were seeking something instantly recognisable to us both. Fortunately we were unaware that we were casting what we were to be told weeks later was an unlikely freak and, later still, an archetype. The problem was the practical one of finding not a new archetype but an actor who could face the withdrawal of audience approval and, even, seem to incite it.

Casting is almost always achieved by default and sometimes by calculated compromise. I am not suggesting that selecting Kenneth Haigh was abject. It was a covert Richardson inspiration. The part claimed Kenneth like a stray dog. But then, there were no other takers. Kenneth took it and Tony nodded. Actors are launched by such nods before agents' demands make them unapproachable and reviewers claim to discover them. Tom Courtenay, Rita Tushingham, Albert Finney, Michael Caine and Sean Connery were all given this impeccable auction nod at exactly the right moment of risk by people like Tony, George and Harry Saltzman.

Casting Alison was almost as difficult. The known young stars were a vapid bunch. Actresses and their agents counted the number of Mrs Porter's lines, as well they might, and weighed them against a top salary of £40 a week. The part itself, among other things, was a study of the tyranny of negation. No doubt it was too much to expect anyone to realise that this was the source of its theatrical muscle. Alison's brutal power lay in the puny crackle of her iron. "Why doesn't she throw the board at him?"

A film name, however untried, Rank or Pinewoody, might give some ballast to a cast of unknowns. Tony rang me excitedly to say that he thought he had found our Alison. She was appearing as Ophelia in Paul Scofield's Hamlet. She and the production were dreadful, but I must go and see her in a film called Storm Over the Nile, an appalling remake of The Four Feathers, only watchable for the inclusion of the original's second-unit footage by Zoltan Korda.

As it happened I had heard of her. Her name was Mary Ure and I had seen her picture on the front page of Picture Post as she bought vegetables at Hammersmith market outside the Lyric Theatre, where she had scored a star-is-born kind of success in Time Remembered, by Jean Anouilh, again with Scofield. I went to see the film. Mary seemed only more wooden than the other players. "She looks just like Elsa Lanchester," I said. Tony had obviously made up his mind. "I think you're quite wrong," he said. "I know she can be good. She's a tough little girl from Glasgow." He made her sound like a sparky barmaid.

I stage-managed the auditions for the company and received 10 shillings for each one. One of the actors selected was Alan Bates and he was among those asked to give readings for Cliff. I favoured Nigel Davenport, but Tony dismissed him. "Nigel's just like an old horse." John Welsh seemed a fair choice for Colonel Redfern, in spite of his slight Irish accent.

The atmosphere, if I remember it at all, seemed subdued and unspeculative. Rehearsals began in the church hall. Tony made it clear that I was to absent myself from them until I could be of practical help. I was a little surprised but soon grateful for his instinct. When I was permitted to be around, Kenneth was sullen and argumentative. Alan was agreeable and bent on pleasing. Mary was merry as a cockroach in a Kelvinside tea-room. She carped only once at a line about women being noisier than men. It wasn't her experience at all. I tried to point out that it was only the opinion of the character in the play, not mine. For once, I was dishonest in this respect.

Tony's technique of divide and rule was already adept. He kept insisting that I mustn't "upset" the actors. He must have said the same to them about me. He controlled an iron conspiracy in which no one dared speak to anyone else out of his presence. George and I were mutually intimidated and isolated from each other by this simple ploy for months.

The English Stage Company now employs a full-time press officer and assistant. In 1956 this job was served part-time and just as ineffectively by a man called George Fearon. He was overpaid, but less so than his successors at £10 a week. Mr Fearon was given a copy of the play and invited me for a drink at a pub in Great Newport Street. He equivocated shiftily, even for one in his trade, and then told me with some relish how much he disliked the play and how he had no idea how he could possibly publicise it successfully. The prospect began to puff him up with rare pleasure. He looked at me cheerfully as if he were Albert Pierrepoint guessing my weight. "I suppose you're really - an angry young man ..." He was the first one to say it. A boon to headline-writers ever after. An Angry Young Man. "... Aren't you?" I could see no help coming from that quarter.

We had one preview night, nearly unknown then when stars would be expected to clean up automatically for weeks in the provinces before descending on the West End. George and Tony were baffled by the persistent laughter. When the third act opened to discover Helena drooped over Alison's ironing-board, no one could ignore the cheers that applauded the ironing-board's performance. "But why do you think they're laughing so much?" asked Tony, alarmed. "Because it's supposed to be funny," I replied. Neither of them was reassured.

The overnight stardom of the ironing-board was forgotten the following evening, 8 May. The occasion seems to have been confidently documented by the few who were there, but I remember little. I was sitting in the front row of the unfilled dress circle between Oscar Lewenstein and the writer, Wolf Mankowitz. Wolf laughed loudly, and alone. Oscar glanced around him like a managing clerk anticipating a disastrous verdict from the jury foreman. Mary dispensed whatever spirit may have prevailed in wartime Kelvinside and pressed champagne on me in her dressing-room. Her unconcern for the play and herself was affecting as the night wore on. By the end of the evening I was very drunk as, for the first time, I went through the playwright's lap of dishonour round the dressing-rooms. This entails fawning upon an actor in front of his hostile and resentful relatives and agents while they look on with contempt for the ordeal you have inflicted on their idol. I was unaware that Binkie Beaumont, most powerful of the unacceptable faeces of theatrical capitalism, had been in the theatre and had walked out in the interval. Or that the critic TC Worsley had persuaded Terence Rattigan to stay.

Next morning, I woke in my cabin, still dressed, feeling cold and wondering whether anything had happened at all last evening, the anniversary of my father's birthday. I had a darkened recollection of my creaking bunk and kissing a very friendly plump girl rather older than myself. The taste of vinegary wine, whisky, Mary's champagne and too many Gauloises made me blush at the thought. I crept ashore, across to Mortlake, where there was a newsagent near Lady Hamilton's house. I bought all the dailies and walked back reading them.

There were five reviewers who made the dottle in the Devine pipe bubble with impatience. One was Philip Hope-Wallace, whose maidenly condescension seems to have been mysteriously revered by the less classy bibbers in El Vino. Whatever his possible charm in the bar, it was not on tap to those slogging at the rock-face. The others were Jack Lambert, who seemed to be able to draw off the actual blood of boredom from George, John Barber (whom he had known at Oxford) and Martin Esslin, the Hungarian opinion-maker and BBC mole, burrowing his way into the English air of London clubs. As for someone called Ossia Trilling, another Oxford poltergeist, whose copy flooded German-speaking newspapers and seeped back to chorus boys' magazines like Plays and Players, the dottle became positively volcanic.

When I arrived at the theatre, still nauseous from the early-hours drinking, George attempted to brace me up but his own disappointment seemed clearer and more stricken than my own. He told me there was quite a good notice in the Financial Times. Tony pretended to be astonished by both of us. "But what on earth did you expect? You didn't expect them to like it did you?" His affected scorn was preferable to anyone's encouraging nod. Meanwhile, a gloomy rearguard action was being rehearsed in the foyer by Fearon. Coining "Angry Young Man" still pleased him a little, although he could now see no usefulness in it. There was no advance at the box office. He had spoken to a psychiatrist who had seen Look Back and assured him that there were clinical examples of young men who behaved and talked like Jimmy Porter. Expert medical evidence might get us through the week.

In the afternoon, Tony held a short rehearsal. The actors were content. No one's performance had been put to any question and their courage in almost overwhelming their material had brought them solicitous attention. Mary was singled out among the victims. "Mary Ure triumphs over undress." She chattered on quite beguilingly.

During the first interval, people "passing comments" forced her into the upstairs bar for a drink "to steady my nerves". The barmaid confirmed her disquiet. "They don't like this one, do they dear? They don't like it at all. Never mind, it won't be much longer. We're having Peggy Ashcroft soon. They'll like that. But they don't like this one. Not a bit of it."

There was no reproach or show of unease from George or Tony. There was desultory talk of being "saved by the Sundays", but if either one of them nursed such hopes he concealed them from me. I watched the play for what must surely be its last performance, and there were almost as many laughs as there had been at the preview. The following day I walked over to the Mortlake newsagent once again and bought the Sunday papers. I read The Observer and The Sunday Times on a corporation bench in the bright May morning sunshine.

I went back to the boat to ring Tony. At noon a dozen of us drank pints of beer outside the pub in Lower Mall. George was grinning at me over his unlit pipe.

The newspapers rang. Kenneth Tynan, then also a script-editor at Ealing, asked me to lunch within days to talk about writing a film. Another call came, this time from the Dorchester Hotel. Would I ring Mr Harry Saltzman [a Hollywood producer] - urgently?

What the critics said

By Olly Rowse

Kenneth Tynan in 'The Observer', 13 May 1956: 'Look Back in Anger' presents post-war youth as it really is, with special emphasis on the non-U intelligentsia, who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, 'posh' and 'wet'. 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 ... The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of 'good taste' and refuse to accept 'emotional' as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless. Mr Osborne is their first spokesman ... I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see 'Look Back in Anger'."

Harold Hobson in 'The Sunday Times', 13 May 1956: 'John Osborne is a writer of outstanding promise, and the English Stage Company is to be congratulated on discovering him.'

Ivor Brown, on BBC Radio's 'The Critics': 'I felt angry because it wasted my time.'

Alan Sillitoe, author of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' and 'The Loneliness of the Long- Distance Runner': 'Osborne didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up'.

Arnold Wesker, the playwright, in 'The Independent': 'Osborne opened the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers.'