The Angry Young Jimmy Porter, Kitchen Sink Realism in John

Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and its relevance in the twenty-first

century society

By Mouli Chattaraj

Abstract

Jimmy Porter is a sharp, sensitive undergraduate, a victim of class disparity, spokesman of the

under-thirties generation of post-war Britain. He is a bitter man with a sweet-stall, trapped in a

society which has fallen from its high noon, while he, with his heightened sensibilities,

intelligence and education is left to bear the burden of the crudeness of the subsequent

generation. Jimmy lives with his wife Alison, whose upper class background he resents, and his

friend Cliff Lewis. Jimmy slings mud at Alison relentlessly, hoping to elicit any form of reaction

from her, but in vain. Cliff acts as a fulcrum between the couple’s differences, forming an

affectionate relationship with Alison. Disillusioned, alone, rebellious Jimmy lashes out against

the society, its evil misdeeds and an angry young man is born. Look Back in Anger becomes the

diary of every sensitive individual, a document of his emotional contours. It is a text not only of

historical interest but one that makes complexities of human relationships and communication

cross-culturally contemporary.

Keywords

Jimmy Porter, Osborne, alienation, kitchen sink realism, angry generation, modern society,

disillusionment
 The first action in the play is of Jimmy Porter slamming down a newspaper, and this

singular act of aggression, disdain and rejection sets the mood for the rest of the text. This, by

extension is the spirit of the time and age in which Osborne wrote Look Back In Anger- an age

marred by the horrors of bloodshed and animalistic brutality of man against mankind. Post

Second World War there was a shocking overturning in the socio-political, cultural, economic

and psychological conditions in England, manifested in an entire generation of men and women

who took a nosedive into no longer having solid ground under their feet. There was no more

grandeur of god remaining- there was only the gutter of man. (Pearce). Modernity is

characterized in terms of this consciousness of the discontinuity of time, a breakdown in

communication. It is this post-structuralist world in terms of the universal psychology where

there is no centre, and actions and events are understood with respect to nothingness, away from

longstanding constructs which transcendentally connects man with nature and the Almighty. And

this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying which describing modernity as “the ephemeral,

the fleeting, the contingent.” (Baudelaire)

“The Porter’s one-room flat in a large Midland town. Early evening. April.” marks the

setting of the play; but this is no longer April of the High Romantic Spring; it is the spring of

T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, where “April is the cruelest month”. We now perform pilgrimage1 upon

the wasteland of the Self. Porter, through his name, becomes the symbol of men who have been

condemned to bearing the agony of this contrast between the highlight of the magnificent past,

the Edwardian Twilight and the reality of the current civilization- wheezing, broken, and

purposeless. Jimmy Porter suffers from this discord, which then reflects upon his inner psyche,

demanding catharsis from the suffocation of this ‘one-room’, cramped collective (un)conscious

1
Reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Pilgrims to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.
committed by his generation. Their state of existence is reduced to “two small low windows”

instead of the Victorian inheritance of a large house; a sense of claustrophobia is invoked in

“still, smoke filled room” and “chilly Spring evenings, all clouds and shadows”- reflecting upon

the feline character of the foggy consciousness in Prufrock (Eliot) (ll. 1-3)

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table”

Until the 1950s, the playwrights of the British theatre such as Noel Coward, Terrence

Rattigan and Somerset Maugham focused only on the middle class drawing room. The

Englishman would characteristically be uptight about his emotions, never allowing himself to

vent on or be disturbed by plebian socio-political events. The state of the theatre was dull and

uninspiring- “apart from revivals and imports, there is nothing in the London theatre that dares

discuss with an intelligent man for more than five minutes.” (Tynan 148) It was then that

Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ;

John Osborne’s The Entertainer ; Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, shed new light on the

prevailing mood of decay and displacement of the rural working class, voicing against the

earlier, long cherished cultural institutions, forsaking the drawing room for the kitchen. The

mouthpiece character, Jimmy Porter, for Osborne, is subsequently constructed as one who is

utterly bitter and critical of the social situation. He suffers severe isolation and dislocation, a

generation gap not just confined to the older Redfern, but one that has seeped into his own

generation as well. The consciousness of the zenith of the Victorian and Edwardian past looms

painfully over the horizon of a post War emotionless world. This is the modern Christian Hell,

already depicted in agonizing detail in Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. For Jimmy,
nostalgia then is the only means of surviving this emotional and social claustrophobia-

attempting to look at life through rose tinted glass, only to realize it is a mirage in the desert of

spirituality, a mere illusion.

The play finds itself in a society riddled with left and right winged politics, a no-man’s-

land between Tory and Labor parties. One of the fundamental distinctions of kitchen sink drama,

as opposed to ‘Avant Garde’ theatre or the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was that it dealt with mostly

left inclined ideologies, finally bringing upon the stage the anguish of modern life, following

Henrik Ibsen, speaking of power politics, societal hierarchies, including the minority into the

mainstream- expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Post war, public morality had hit rock

bottom when time had become the most valuable resource nobody dared waste. There was

complete collapse of permissive spaces and lack of time, in turn, signified lack of certainty. Man

as an essentially sexual being, began overriding through socially acceptable barriers;

relationships contracted and shriveled into meaningless actions- “Of restless nights in one-night

cheap hotels” (Prufrock, 5). Alison and Cliff’s relationship projects this breakdown of values,

something Jimmy fails to reconcile with owing to his Puritan nature. Cliff is Jimmy’s friend

while Alison is his wife, yet they share a playful bond with underlying currents of sexual tension.

Jimmy cannot bear their displays of affection, yet he cannot bring himself to make any

straightforward objection to their relationship. As a result he lashes out with bitter poison at

them, not being able to express his disapproval directly, given the abandonment issues he had

incurred since early childhood with the loss of his father and the image of his mother as a

flippant, insincere character. In his essay for Declaration, Osborne had said, “I want to make

people feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think afterwards.” and this sentiment has
been the driving force in his protagonist who had a profound conviction that society was

flourishing at the expense of human feeling. (They Call it Cricket) (Nanda)

Jimmy’s character as an “angry” man seems questionable at first, for his anger is

incomprehensible with it not being directed at anything in particular. However it is this very

directionless nature that becomes a commentary on the futility of his generation. He is, in fact,

through his relentless tirades, attempting to share his emotions, in the faint hope of finding a

companion to suffer with, in this desperately lonely world. Critic Mary McCarthy her essay, A

New Word states, “To be actively, angrily, militantly bored is one of the few forms of protest

open to him… At the same time it is one of the few forms of recreation he can afford; his

boredom becomes an instrument on which he plays variations, as he does on his trumpet… But

other people suffer … he ought not to make other people suffer because he is unhappy… But this

is unfortunately the way unhappy people are; they are driven to distribute their suffering.” This

sense of anger stems from his sense of isolation from the society, and the reverse is also true.

Jimmy desperately seeks companionship in Cliff, and more so in Alison, but his overwhelmingly

powerful personality creates an almost atrocious aura about him, which makes him

unapproachable. As a result, Jimmy withdraws within himself, creating an illusory other universe

which interplays with appearance and reality, a trope deeply woven in modern drama. In A

Streetcar Named Desire , Blanche’s room is separated from Stanley and Stella’s by a mere

curtain, a semi-permeable membrane, a side of which remained dark and obscure to the

audience, paralleled in Look Back in Anger to the room Jimmy plays his trumpet in- a room

which is never seen but only heard and indirectly conveyed. This ‘other’ is the id, the

subconscious psyche, which is away from the centre stage of reality as we know it, and Blanche

and Jimmy try desperately to break away from this inevitable truth of existence they have so
painfully acquired in life. Maybe that is why Jimmy only has reactions throughout the text, and

no independent action, which makes him impotent despite his powerful speech. His refusal to act

leads to him not being heard on most occasions. His inability to reconcile with the fact of the

20th century being an age where there is no space for beauty and glory has left him utterly

disillusioned and herein lies the immediacy of the text with respect to its times. But on the other

hand, Jimmy seems to revel in his pain of standing alone beside his dying father and Mrs.

Tanner. There is a sense of bitter satisfaction, even pride in his lonely visits with death, as he

claims “I was the only one with her” (Malik, Look Back in Anger 63), referring to Mrs. Tanner’s

deathbed. In the words of John Russell Taylor, “Jimmy Porter is the self –flagellating solitary in

self – inflicted exile from the world, drawing strength from his own weakness and joy from his

own misery.” (Taylor, John Osborne: Look Back in Anger: A Casebook 77) Modern and post

modern creative artists resist rationalism and scientific materialism. They use this scientific

materialism to communicate real-time felt emotion. Jimmy is aware of his own state as

extremely idiosyncratic and private (but honest), yet he is unsure whether it attains the

understanding of the masses, arresting his expression to chaotic communication.

But it is not just one aspect that angers Jimmy. He is apparently angry at everything-

Alison, the Sunday paper, church bells, brother Nigel, the noise women make, the H-bomb, the

Bishop of Bromley …and almost everything else under the sun, which makes him difficult to be

taken seriously at all times. His anger therefore seems unfocussed and childish, lacking an

agenda; his words targeted at everything yet essentially nothing. But that exactly is the idea of

his fury. In this morass of nothing, Jimmy seeks to create an identity for himself, he shouts to be

heard, he is angry at the non-entities, the ones without a voice sunken into the complacency of

life fed to them by systematic, organized suppression and oppression of hierarchies. He is angry
at Alison, not just because of her higher class upbringing, but because she does not have the

strength of character to carve a place for herself in this world. She is empty, and it is this

vagueness of life, represented through her, that Jimmy revolts against.

“We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar” (Hollow Men) ll 1-10

He had married Alison only to realize her hymen of perception hadn’t been penetrated yet with

experience, and he had felt betrayed, while Alison had failed to realize the reason behind his

anger. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mistah Kurtz is a ‘hollow’ man, hollow at the

core, but before his death, he exclaims ‘The horror! The horror!” as he comes in contact with the

reality of the living experience. When he dies, he dies a morally ambiguous man, a fraud, but he

does not die hollow. Alison though not evil or possessing morally negative qualities, remains

hollow till she loses her child. Alison’s miscarriage was as if Providence’s intervention, their

punishment for not treating their marriage with respect, for Jimmy’s vulgarity and vitriolic

comments, and Alison’s indifference to it all, or maybe because she had failed to rid this world

of sterility owing to her virgin state of being. The child had failed to be a messiah to salvage the
relationship which Jimmy and Alison had so meticulously built to destroy. It is only after the loss

of the baby, that Jimmy’s anger towards his wife dissipates, yet this union happens at a juncture

where there is no future remaining to move towards. The angst of Jimmy Porter had been both

the building block and the nemesis of his relationship with Alison- first with the charm of his

fiery halo, then the overwhelming presence of a man who shouts to draw attention towards

himself, to be acknowledged, to be desperately loved. In a way he is more sinned against than

sinning, having to survive every moment with the knowledge that there is no companion to fall

back on.

Mary MacCarthy in A New Word says, “Both Hamlet and Jimmy Porter have declared

war on a rotten society; both have been unfitted by a higher education from accepting their

normal place in the world. They think too much and criticize too freely.” Even Kenneth Tynan,

the greatest supporter of the play comments in The Observer, “Jimmy Porter is the complete

‘young pup’ in our literature since Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark.” (Taylor 42) Jimmy is

therefore this quintessential figurehead of protecting a crumbling civilization, someone who is

too in love with life to believe it can be this ordinary. Hence he keeps attempting to escape this

present and return to a past, living in a magic cirque of memory, where he believed everything

was far more resolved than it actually had been. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, Jimmy too feels

estranged from his kinsmen, yet he tries to find companionship in Alison, through maximum

provocation, by even ranting about her mother, or the simplest idiosyncrasies of her nature. The

analogy of Jimmy with Hamlet solidifies further as the former feels betrayed by Alison’s

correspondence with her mother, like the latter had been with Ophelia’s obedience to Polonius.

Helena, at first, was likewise detested by him because of her class and her faith in the church or

institutionalized religion. Jimmy is a prime symbol of the modern faithless man, who has lost all
centers of belief and does not perceive this religion to be a pillar of security but simply a blanket

of ignorance that feeds crowds, that soothes their heavy souls with false hopes and dreams of

redemption of a world sunken eternally in “the bleak midwinter”2. As V. R. Kanadey has rightly

put, “The physical loneliness of the modern man as a result of the industrial society is matched

by his intellectual and spiritual loneliness as a result of the pursuit of the spirit of science. Man

finds himself today a lonely being shivering in the cold night of positivism or pure

existentialism, mainly because of this spirit.”

In act III scene I, a conversation ensues-

“Jimmy: Have you read about the grotesque and evil practices going on in the Midlands?

Cliff: Read about the what?

Jimmy: Grotesque and evil practices going on in the Midlands.

Cliff: No, what about ‘em?

Jimmy: Seems we don’t know the old place. It’s all in here. Startling Revelations this week!

Pictures too. Reconstructions of midnight invocations to the Coptic Goddess of fertility.

Helena: Sounds madly depraved.” (Look Back in Anger 65)

It is precisely this depravity Osborne showcases- the “grotesque and evil practices” of the

Midlands, i.e., the critical conditions of the society caught between past glory and an uncertain

future, and the acute awareness of futility seeped into their consciousness, the state of this system

that has lost all meaning. “…People of our generation are not able to die of good causes

anymore.” (Look Back in Anger 73) These good causes according to him have died with the

past, and now “nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions, and no enthusiasm.”

(Look Back in Anger 14) This sense of frustration builds up to an ideological stupor, “a

2
Name of poem by Christina Rossetti.
monument to non-attachment”, and it makes the protagonist perplexed and lonely and an

alienated individual who is unable to communicate the absurd nature of this living experience.

There is thematic recurrence of the topic of fertility to emphasize on the sterility of modern

world and man’s inability to father a society devoid of chaos and psychological decay. Through

this play Osborne has brought to light the aggravating conditions of everyday, working class

people in the face of oppression.

The irony in the term “kitchen sink drama” now becomes significant. The kitchen is a

space socially attributed to females based on longstanding constructs, but the effect of most

proceedings in twentieth century world society were faced by, and mostly caused by men. There

are sexist undertones in Jimmy’s tired, which sometimes aren’t even subtle. The play too, like

most others in the genre, revolves around a male protagonist and there isn’t much scope given to

the female characters, and they remain more or less one-dimensional throughout the acts. The

power hierarchies between men and women are validated through Jimmy’s relationship with

both Alison and Helena, yet we are fascinated by him. We subscribe to his views, even though

his manner is condemnable, and we even sympathize with his existential agony. His vulgarity

intended to draw attention strangely does not paint him as a pervert, but as a man who has grown

deaf with the maddening silence, and he wants a chance to live, not simply exist. “Oh, yes, yes,

yes. I’d like to eat. I’d like to live too. Do you mind?” (Look Back in Anger 9) Jimmy’s sexism

doesn’t arise out of hate, but out of anger towards his mother; his anger towards Alison stems

from his class consciousness. We as an audience have readily been branded “dame Alison’s

mob” the moment we sympathize with her, knowing fully well that no matter how easy it might

be to please a character like Jimmy Porter, by simply giving him the attention he seeks, there is

always an end to the line of longstanding patience which an Alison or a Helena exhausted just by
being around him. Their silence is the only weapon left to hurt a man against whom no words

chance a stand, akin to the generations of abuse, psychological or physical, that women have had

to endure at the hands of the socially superior sex.

As a literary form, drama is an instrument of depicting the social reality, where the

dramatist as a litterateur addresses socio-political issues on stage, presenting “problem plays” or

“propaganda plays” or “drama of ideas”. Kitchen sink or dustbin drama is the outcome of a

Jimmy Porter’s aggravated response to his surroundings, i.e., the kitchen sink of war ravaged

compartments leading to the birth of an angry young man as society’s cry of help. Jimmy is

painfully tired of this ritualistic sameness of life, devoid of vitality. “Why do I do this every

Sunday?”, he cries in a kind of anger mixed with exhaustion at being alive in a place where there

is no certainty of God or any belief in the self. Like Meursault in Albert Camus’ The Outsider,

Jimmy too is a stranger to the society, and to himself. Nobody understands their impulses, their

emotions or inner thoughts, and their expression fails them- the former misunderstanding caused

by a taciturn nature, and the latter, a misunderstanding caused by saying too much,

uncontrollably, vehemently, passionately, to the point where there was no longer any language

left, there was only his blood bones spit and tears writhing on the floor, waiting to be accepted,

waiting to be loved, in all its raw, de-glorified state of being. Kingsley Amis’ novel Lucky Jim

appeared in 1954 to mock the cultural snobberies and social pretentions of middle class

academics who dominated university departments. Jim Dixon, like Jimmy Porter was a lower

class anti-hero debunking the hypocrisies of the upper class. Before Jim, John Wain’s Hurry on

Down introduced Charles Lumey who also saw himself as an “outsider”, at odds with an

oppressive society. (Malik, Introduction xvi) There’s a sense of disdain against an inauthentic

petty society where the “Bishop of Bromley” “makes a very moving appeal to all Christians to
do all they can to assist in the manufacture of the H-bomb.” (Look Back in Anger 11) The

establishment of the welfare system had strengthened class prejudice and given rise to new

resentments against the working people who were deemed undeserving of material benefits.

Osborne therefore felt that “This isn’t the kind of atmosphere that produces the heart-searchings

and the gestures of the thirties.” (Taylor, The Writer in His Age) Jimmy’s anger at the world, his

fright at becoming a victim of failed communication and vagueness, consistently reflects the

mood of the age. He is afraid that even after baring his soul, he would still not be understood.

To say, “I am Lazarus, come back from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.”

and be misunderstood- “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” (The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock) (Mukherjee)

The decadence of the twentieth century has spilled over its edges into the contemporary

21st century with another generation of humans who cannot reconcile with their fate of being

victimized over the digitization of the age. Like to the loss of faith post the Industrial Revolution

or advent of Darwinism, there has been a new wave of identity loss and alienation in the current

generation christened “Millenials”. The frustration in most cases is justified as it was for the

previous Angries. From the end of the Second World War which destroyed every fragment of

stability in modern life, within less than a century, a Third World War is in the brewing. The

present generation has seen the record of a gradual, consistent decline of human civilization over

the last seventy odd years; this modern hell has never given any room for redemption. After a

period of comparative calm of the 1970s or 80s, there had been a rampant boost in technological

advancement, in the 90s into the 2000s. The sense of a singular universal state of being devoid of

identity begun looming larger, as human interaction became minimal and contracted into

exchanges in ‘chat rooms’ or other virtual simulations of reality. This generation now seems to
be one fighting against the previous in terms of the latter’s apathy towards modernization

through technology or science, because they are still holding on to the past. The tendency is to

criticize advancement in the name of anti-traditionalism, but at the same time, the horrors of the

days gone by are never addressed. It is like moving on loop, going around the bend, trying to

propel forward, but somehow still getting sucked into a vortex where age-old norms are

considered ‘good’ by default. The youth is disconnected from its roots- in that they perish and

rejoice at the same time. A gloomy horizon awaits us with no silver lining where our ideas are

considered insidious, caged in binary entrapments; our futures are an illusion, and the four walls

of reality have been broken. The current youth feels discontent and misunderstood for the same

reason Jimmy felt discontent- they cannot communicate their fears with anybody. There is

constant pressure to outdo oneself but the competitive nature of the generation doesn’t allow the

forging of healthy relationships. Culturally, politically, environmentally, we had not been dealt

the best cards to begin life with, and there’s nothing we could do to undo the damage the pre-

millenials had committed. Countries are again transforming into fascist rules, proving history

does repeat itself and that man never learns. Our generation is the one trying to clean up after the

mess of the previous one, but the efforts go underappreciated and wrongly criticized. Our

attempts to unlearn age old traditions to build a world which is devoid of the evils which has

plagued and plundered ages are considered rebellious for all the wrong reasons. This generation

is the continuation of the same impure kitchen sink forgotten to be cleaned.

There is constant recurrence of the trope of the disconnected individual in popular culture

of the 21st century, simply because this age reflects much of the restlessness characteristic of the

1950’s youth. Benjamin Alire Saenz’s protagonist in The Inexplicable Logic of my Life, for

example, is plagued by anger management issues stemming from a lack of sense of belonging.
Also, since the idea of drama shifted dramatically since the post-Shavian period, life on stage

became a reflection of life off stage. It continues well into the 21st century where this has now

been included in the music of the times as well. St. Jimmy in the popular song ‘Jesus of

Suburbia’ by the music band Green Day is a character as the rage-counterpart who keeps trying

to make himself less vulnerable to the world.

“Get my television fix

Sitting on my crucifix

The living room in my private womb

While the Moms and brats are away

To fall in love and fall in debt”

While songs are not a genre which can contend for literary criticism, these lyrics from the Jesus

of Suburbia are some of the most simple yet effective examples to illustrate the sham that is 21st

century society. Technology is like narcotics, hooked to which we are unable to be productive,

yet it is not entirely our fault. We have been injected with this drug by the previous generation.

The living room again becomes the one roomed space which yields nothing unique-everybody’s

private womb is essentially one public “cesspool” of the collective filth of mankind. On the other

hand there is no financial stability either- one cannot risk bankruptcy to afford education, which

happens to be one of the most powerful tools of societal progression. Our generation incurs more

debt than knowledge, and the awareness of this discrepancy is enough to unsettle us. The media

is another subtle tool used to manipulate and control us, another kind of covert fascist ploy. Quite

naturally the tendency is to rebel against the existing system, be it educational or political, not

because it is the nature of the youth to be riddled with angst, but because existential anxiety has

been handed to us on a platter. Our greatest dilemma stands in whether to choose survival over
this existence, to simply live our lives as Big Brother3 has destined for us, or to fight back in this

‘City of the dead’.

The difference between Jimmy Porter of the 1950s and the youth of the 2000s is that the former

was mostly impotent in action, while it can’t be said so for the latter; yet it is this activity that

counts against us. Jimmy has been naturally regarded as “an orally fixated neurotic who projects

his own psychological shortcomings onto the external environments.” (Faber) It is natural

therefore, to be angry, to be disappointed in the state of affairs and the mindless opposition faced

in the path of good acts. Osborne quite prophetically stated that there are no good causes left to

die for, more so now, for a generation born in the cradle of nuclear warfare, nation heads who

fail to recognize the negative potentials of their misused power- a generation trying to figure out

where it falls in the scheme of the universe, only to repeatedly be reminded of their unprincipled

insignificance throughout the micro and macrocosms. Yet, like Jimmy, we as a generation too,

act as a destructive element, realizing the full force of our deaths, blasting away at some

indistinct target, trying to sift layer after layer of cant and criticism, until we reach that inner core

where people either feel or are irretrievably dead. (Nanda) Our generation is irrevocably lost

from our way home.

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3
Reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.
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