Look Back In Anger
19 November 2024
Almeida Theatre
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
Look Back In Anger, part of the Young and Angry season at the Almeida Theatre, is the second of the kitchen sink dramas staged for this project. While Roots had modern appeal and a feel of current immediacy, Anger seems wholly out of place and outdated in the way it portrays an abusive relationship (content warning for domestic abuse in this write-up!) and the focus it puts on the perpetrator in this play.
Full disclosure, the play was so unpleasant and inane that I left at interval and did not watch until the end. So my review is only based on the first act played at the Almeida. The highlight of the production is definitely the stage design though, which can absolutely not be faulted. A bright red stage with a large round turntable in the middle, adding an unsettling dynamic when it spins slowly, allowing the characters to engage in a well choreographed ballet of physical theatre that highlights the action, though most of the time it is still, with characters sitting and talking without much else going on.
The play starts on a slow Sunday, where Alison slowly irons clothes while her husband Jimmy and friend and flatmate Cliff argue over who gets to read the posh newspaper, and animatedly discuss its contents. The discussion quickly deteriorates into verbal abuse of Alison, who comes from a upper-middle-class military family who find her match with working class Jimmy deplorable. He is a harsh, aggressive man filled with anger at his station in the world, which he takes out on Alison with violent glee.
When Alison’s friend Helena joins the fray, the stage is dominated by the dinner table the two women sit at, talking about Alison and Jimmy’s relationship history. It’s a very long scene of just words describing various scenes of the past. When book reviewers say “don’t tell us, show us”, this is exactly what this scene feels like. A long exposition of the couple’s past, from first meeting over how their respective families reacted to how they ended up in the small, dirty flat they share with Cliff. It is a lengthy, mind numbing scene dominated by Jimmy’s trombone playing in the background, words flowing with little emotion and absolutely nothing happening on stage. This scene drags on, mundane and lifeless, until another aggressive altercation occurs.
The entire play is deeply misogynistic and the character of Jimmy makes little sense. An abrasive man filled with anger and frustration, who supposedly runs a sweets stall at a market, deeply manipulative and violent. The couple’s relationship is dominated by coercive control and overt physical abuse, yet there is no sympathetic side to either of the characters. The fact that the entire history of their relationship is only conveyed through words, back and forth talking between seated characters, makes the story deeply uninteresting and stagnant feeling.
This is one “classic” play that should have stayed in the history books rather than being brought back to the stage. Surely there are ways to make it interesting and current, yet in this production it is simply tedious and unappealing.
