Review: Look Back in Anger by Out of Context Productions
by Michael Meigs
Encouraged by applause at last year's FronteraFest, recent graduates of Southwestern and St. Ed's are taking a great big leap right now at the Off Center.
Look Back in Anger was a landmark, a watershed, a paradigm shifter (take your pick) for twentieth-century theatre in England. With his 1956 three-act play John Osborne took clubs and cudgels to the genteel British stage, presenting his protagonist Jimmy Porter as a fiercely intelligent university graduate of lower class origins, white hot with anger at a society that provided him no better opportunity in life than a position as a clerk in a candy store. Porter lives with his wife Alison in grubby rented digs. Their stolid, slightly dim friend Cliff has a room in the same building and spends most of his time with them
Osborne gave articulate voice to the British underclass. Jimmy Porter professes to believe in nothing and spends most of his time onstage ranting, challenging and insulting. Alison is a mute, intellectually brutalized young thing occupied most of the time with the ironing. The perpetual trope between the two men is Cliff's effort to read the newspapers and Porter's acrid dismissals both of him and of the 'posh rags.' There's a back story: Alison grew up in India, where her father served and became a senior military officer, and Alison's mother has never forgiven the crudely offensive Porter for overwhelming their daughter, marrying her, and taking her off to live in poverty.
Director Tyler King and the cast of Out of Context Productions (OOC), with the encouragement of mentor Jared J. Stein, theatre department staffs, and Austin arts supporters, have thrown themselves into the project. The productions runs on the highly unusual cycle of Mondays through Wednesdays, from December 1 to December 14 -- evenings not calibrated to attract the idly curious or the general public. Within the black box of the Off Center they've put up Leslie Turner's meticulously squalid set.
I am grateful for the opportunity to experience this landmark text, read so long ago that I had no recall of the clever plot twist at the end of Act II that transforms the triangle in the apartment. Osborne's language for his protagonist Jimmy cracks like a whip, and between the other two denizens of the rooming house there's such a patient, slow sympathy that one regrets that it appears not to have been a consummated love triangle. Michael Balagia as the much abused Cliff is slow to react, devoted to Alison Porter and inexplicably bound to his hyperkinetic buddy Jimmy Porter. Emma Martinsen as Alison is bruised in psyche and deeply reluctant to tell her husband that she's just learned that she's pregnant. Her girlfriend Helena (Emily Donald) is on a low-key mission of support, trying to bring about a reconciliation between Alison and her parents and trying to persuade Alison to escape the hell hole in which she has enclosed herself.
For this production there's an unfortunate irony in the company's name. Out of Context Productions maintains that Osborne's play has new relevance for us in the current economic difficulties of the United States. Director Tyler King chooses not to modify the context of the UK setting and language. That's his prerogative and an entirely reasonable approach; however, it makes him and the cast responsible for creating a reasonable semblance of the time, place and language of production. In Osborne's world and throughout the United Kingdom of the middle twentieth century, accents stamped individuals with class distinctions as clearly and finally as cattle brands identified longhorns in Texas.
To give this piece anything resembling its initial significance or impact, cast members would not only have to use 'British' accents, but at a minimum they would have to suggest the huge differences between the "U" (upperclass) accents of Alison and her friend Helena and the "non-U" accents of snarling Jimmy Porter and his phlegmatic friend Cliff. All of the young members of the cast deliver the dialogue in something close to standard U.S. speech, a fact made all the more evident by Donald Bayne's convincing accent as the stiff-upper-lip retired Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, who's come back from doing his duty for the Empire.
I emphasize the point about accent because I experienced it, studying in London in the 1970s and visiting distant members of my wife's family both then and later. Look Back in Anger is about frustration and the lack of opportunity, and Osborne was directly and accurately accusing the deeply embedded English sense of social class. Jimmy Porter is remarkable because he is both lower class and highly intelligent, with verbal mastery that shocks when coming from the mouth of a clerk who runs a sweets stall.
The United Kingdom has undergone a gradual democratization of speech, symbolized by the decision at the BBC more or less in the early 1980s to begin using announcers and commentators with strong regional and class accents -- going beyond the quaintly traditional Scots or Irish dialects into rougher variants such as Liverpudlian, Yorkshire, West Country or lower-class London, including Cockney.
That is the context in which I disagree with the decision of director Tyler King and lead actor Zac Carr to create Jimmy Porter as astonishingly loud and agitated. Seeking to express Jimmy's aggression, Carr shouts, interrupts and harangues throughout, with an enormous unnecessary expenditure of energy. His tirades became tiresome and childish within the first ten minutes of this two-and-a-half-hour production. To my mind, Porter's intelligence is that of the tormentor, that of a man who slices to the nerve while watching his victim squirm. That does not require a great deal of shouting; it requires a maliciously calibrated application of loud and quiet, enticement and insult, engagement and dismissal.
The third act of this Look Back in Anger is the most effective. Emma Martinsen as Alison has great dignity in her uncertainty, and her final scene of grief is strong and moving. She brings us, and her husband Jimmy, back from the precincts of class rage into those of simple humanity.
Review by Elena Passarello on austinist.com, December 13
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Look Back in Anger
by John Osborne
Out of Context Productions
2211-A Hidalgo Street
near Robert Martinez and E. 7th Street, behind Joe's Bakery
Austin, TX, 78702
