Jimmy Porter

Jimmy is the “angry young man” of the play, usually found spouting tirades
against the complacency of the British upper classes, and especially
against his wife Alison and then his lover Helena. Born working class but
highly educated, like his friend and roommate Cliff, but has an ambivalent
relationship with his educated status, seeing himself mostly as a working
class man and yet frustrated that his education can do nothing to affect his
class status. “He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice,
of tenderness and freebooting cruelty.” Jimmy “alienates the sensitive and
insensitive alike,” and his “blistering honesty, or apparent honesty…makes
few friends.” Jimmy is a frustrated character, railing against his feelings of
alienation and uselessness in post-war England.

Alison Porter

A woman from an upper class background, and Jimmy’s wife. She is drawn
to Jimmy’s energy, but also exhausted by their constant fighting. Jimmy
accuses her of being too complacent and lacking “enthusiasm,” and her
own father, Colonel Redfern, agrees that she has a tendency towards too
much neutrality. She feels stuck between her upper-class upbringing and
the working-class world of her husband. Alison eventually leaves Jimmy,
but returns to him later in the play after she loses their child to a
miscarriage. This suffering changes her, and causes her to commit more
fully to the intense emotion inherent in Jimmy’s world.

Cliff Lewis

A kind man of working class background, and a good friend and roommate
to both Jimmy and Alison. He lives with the couple, and helps to keep them
together. Cliff is “easy and relaxed, almost to lethargy, with the rather sad,
natural intelligence of the self-taught.” He and Alison have an affectionate
relationship that borders on a sexual one, but both of them are content with
comfortable fondness rather than burning passion. Cliff eventually decides
to leave to pursue his own life, rather than staying in Jimmy’s apartment.

Helena Charles

Alison’s upper class friend, who comes to stay with the couple while acting
in a play, and ends up having an affair with Jimmy after Alison leaves him.
She is described as having a “sense of matriarchal authority” that “makes
most men who meet her anxious.” Helena has a strong code of middle-
class morals that eventually force her to leave Jimmy.

Colonel Redfern

Alison’s father, a former colonel in the British army stationed in the English
colony of India (back before 1947, when India still was a colony of
England). He is “gentle” and “kindly,” but also “brought up to command
respect.” After leaving his post in India, “he is often slightly withdrawn and
uneasy” because he lives “in a world where his authority has lately become
less and less unquestionable.” Jimmy says that the Colonel is stuck in a
past version of England, and the Colonel himself agrees with this. When
the Colonel comes to help Alison pack to leave Jimmy, he shows himself to
be self-aware and incisive, commenting that both he and Alison like to stay
neutral and avoid showing emotion, to their detriment.

Hugh Tanner

Jimmy’s friend, who took Alison and Jimmy into his apartment in the first
months of their marriage. He was Jimmy’s partner when they went on
“raids” against Alison’s upper-class friends at fancy parties, and Jimmy saw
him as a co-conspirator in the class struggle. Then Hugh decided to leave
for China to write a novel, and Jimmy felt betrayed. This reveals Jimmy’s
deep traditional values (he was angry that Hugh abandoned his
mother, Mrs. Tanner) and his sense of patriotism.

Mrs. Tanner

The mother of Hugh Tanner, called “Hugh’s mum” by Jimmy, she helped
set Jimmy up with his sweet stall. Jimmy loves her, and Alison thinks this is
just because she is lower class and “ignorant.” In the middle of the play,
Jimmy learns that Hugh’s mum has had a stroke, and Jimmy goes to visit
her in the hospital. In one of his few expressions of true vulnerability, he
asks Alison to come with him. She refuses, and leaves him shortly
thereafter. Jimmy is offended that Alison seems to see Hugh’s mum only in
terms of her class, and not as a person. He thinks that society in general
ignores the humanity of working-class people, and that Alison’s and other’s
treatment of Hugh’s mum is a prime example.
The Angry Young Man
Osborne's play was the first to explore the theme of the "Angry Young
Man." This term describes a generation of post-World War II artists and
working-class men who generally ascribed to leftist, sometimes anarchist,
politics and social views. According to cultural critics, these young men
were not a part of any organized movement but were, instead, individuals
angry at a post-Victorian Britain that refused to acknowledge their social
and class alienation.

Jimmy Porter is often considered to be literature's seminal example of the

angry young man. Jimmy is angry at the social and political structures that
he believes has kept him from achieving his dreams and aspirations. He
directs this anger towards his friends and, most notably, his wife Alison.

The Kitchen Sink Drama

Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to
explore domestic social relations. Realism, in British theatre, was first
experimented with in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by
such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw. This genre attempted to
capture the lives of the British upper class in a way that realistically
reflected the ordinary drama of ruling class British society.

According to many critics, by the mid-twentieth century the genre of realism

had become tired and unimaginative. Osborne's play returned imagination
to the Realist genre by capturing the anger and immediacy of post-war
youth culture and the alienation that resulted in the British working
classes. Look Back in Anger was able to comment on a range of domestic
social dilemmas in this time period. Most importantly, it was able to capture,
through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of this generation that
festered just below the surface of elite British culture.

Loss of Childhood

A theme that impacts the characters of Jimmy and Alison Porter is the idea
of a lost childhood. Osborne uses specific examples -- the death of Jimmy's
father when Jimmy was only ten, and how he was forced to watch the
physical and mental demise of the man -- to demonstrate the way in which
Jimmy is forced to deal with suffering from an early age. Alison's loss of
childhood is best seen in the way that she was forced to grow up too fast
by marrying Jimmy. Her youth is wasted in the anger and abuse that her
husband levels upon her.
Osborne suggests that a generation of British youth has experienced this
same loss of childhood innocence. Osborne uses the examples of World
War, the development of the atomic bomb, and the decline of the British
Empire to show how an entire culture has lost the innocence that other
generations were able to maintain.

Real Life

In the play, Jimmy Porter is consumed with the desire to live a more real
and full life. He compares this burning desire to the empty actions and
attitudes of others. At first, he generalizes this emptiness by criticizing the
lax writing and opinions of those in the newspapers. He then turns his
angry gaze to those around him and close to him, Alison, Helena, and Cliff.

Osborne's argument in the play for a real life is one in which men are
allowed to feel a full range of emotions. The most real of these emotions is
anger and Jimmy believes that this anger is his way of truly living. This idea
was unique in British theatre during the play's original run. Osborne argued
in essays and criticisms that, until his play, British theatre had subsumed
the emotions of characters rendering them less realistic. Jimmy's desire for
a real life is an attempt to restore raw emotion to the theatre.

Sloth in British Culture

Jimmy Porter compares his quest for a more vibrant and emotional life to
the slothfulness of the world around him. It is important to note that Jimmy
does not see the world around him as dead, but merely asleep in some
fundamental way. This is a fine line that Osborne walks throughout the
play. Jimmy never argues that there is a nihilism within British culture.
Instead, he sees a kind of slothfulness of character. His anger is an attempt
to awaken those around him from this cultural sleep.

This slothfulness of emotion is best seen in the relationship between Alison

and Cliff. Alison describes her relationship with Cliff as "comfortable." They
are physically and emotionally affectionate with each other, but neither
seems to want to take their passion to another level of intimacy. In this way,
their relationship is lazy. They cannot awaken enough passion to
consummate their affair. Jimmy seems to subconsciously understand this,
which is the reason he is not jealous of their affection towards one another.

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

The character of Colonel Redfern, Alison's father, represents the decline of

and nostalgia for the British Empire. The Colonel had been stationed for
many years in India, a symbol of Britain's imperial reach into the world. The
Edwardian age which corresponded to Britain's height of power, had been
the happiest of his life. His nostalgia is representative of the denial that
Osborne sees in the psyche of the British people. The world has moved on
into an American age, he argues, and the people of the nation cannot
understand why they are no longer the world's greatest power.
Masculinity in Art
Osborne has been accused by critics of misogynistic views in his plays.
Many points to Look Back in Anger as the chief example. These critics
accuse Osborne of glorifying young male anger and cruelty towards women
and homosexuals. This is seen in the play in specific examples in which
Jimmy Porter emotionally distresses Alison, his wife, and delivers a grisly
monologue in which he wishes for Alison's mother's death.
Osborne, however, asserts that he is attempting to restore a vision of true
masculinity into a twentieth century culture that he sees as becoming
increasingly feminized. This feminization is seen in the way that British
culture shows an "indifference to anything but immediate, personal
suffering." This causes a deadness within which Jimmy's visceral anger
and masculine emotion is a retaliation against.

Newspapers

Jimmy and Cliff read newspapers throughout Act 1 and Act 3, and they are
a major visual feature in the apartment. Jimmy uses the newspaper as a
symbol of his education. They are a way for him to mimic the habits of the
upper class, university-educated elite. He repeatedly comments on what he
is reading, sometimes using erudite vocabulary. He also uses newspaper
articles as a way to belittle the intelligence of Cliff and Alison, which is one
of the tactics he employs to make himself feel smarter and more
worthwhile. Yet, Jimmy’s relationship with newspapers also shows his
ambivalent relationship to his educated status. He says that the
newspapers make him “feel ignorant,” and he often mocks “posh” papers,
which, in his mind, are out of touch with the real concerns of working class
men like him. The newspapers in the apartment also form a “jungle,”
showing that, in a working class environment, this status symbol becomes
something that upper class characters like Alison would consider chaotic
and dangerous. This reflects the way that greater social mobility has
caused social upheaval in Britain.

Pipe

Jimmy’s pipe is another example of an upper class symbol that Jimmy uses
instead to reflect his working class status. Pipes call to mind old, educated,
university professors. Jimmy’s pipe is a way for him to dominate the scene
and assert himself as a rebellious force in the world (and he uses his force
largely to rail against upper class norms). His pipe smoke fills the room,
and creates a smell that other characters come to associate with
him. Alison says in the first act that she has “gotten used” to it, reflecting
the way that she adapts her values and sensibilities depending on the
context that she is in. Helena later says that she has grown to “like” the
smell, reflecting the attraction that she feels to Jimmy, and also the fact that
she retains more of a sense of self than Alison does in the same situation—
Helena positively likes the smell, while Alison is merely “used” to it. While
living with her parents in the third act of the play, the smell of pipe smoke
reminds Alison of Jimmy, and soon after, she comes back to him. Once in
the apartment, she absentmindedly cleans up the ashes from the pipe,
reflecting the fact that she retains her upper class sense of respectability
and order, even as she returns from her parents’ home to live in Jimmy’s
world. The pipe thus becomes a litmus test of Helena and Alison’s
relationship with Jimmy throughout the play.

Bear and Squirrel

Alison and Jimmy’s bear and squirrel game gives them a way to access a
simple affection for each other that they cannot achieve in normal life. The
bear is associated with Jimmy, and the squirrel with Alison. The animals
symbolize the fact that social norms and conventions interfere with the love
that these two characters have for each other. Their relationship is a site of
class and societal conflict, and this means that their love becomes fraught
with anger and fighting. When they act like animals, whose only concerns
are food, shelter, cleanliness, and sex, they can forget that conflict and feel
a simpler version of love for each other. The fact that they keep stuffed
animal versions of the bear and squirrel in the apartment reflects a childlike
innocence that these characters find it difficult to maintain in their troubled
world, but that they still hope for.

Church bells

The church bells symbolize a respectable middle class morality

that Jimmy finds oppressive. Helena subscribes to this version of morality,
which posits that some things are clearly right, while others are wrong and
“sinful.” Jimmy, on the other hand, believes that the rules of respectable
society are something to struggle against. In his mind, it is moral to act in
allegiance with his oppressed class, and to feel emotions as keenly and
intensely as possible. The church bells chime from outside the window at
various points in the play, reflecting the fact that these middle class rules
are a fact of life in most of the world, and that they often intrude into the
apartment, and into Jimmy’s life. He curses and yells when he hears them,
reflecting his anger at this system of morality. Alison leaves for church with
Helena in the middle of act 2, following Helena back into a middle class
world.

Trumpet

Jimmy’s jazz trumpet can be heard off stage at various points in the play.
Jazz has traditionally been protest music, and is associated with the
working classes. It symbolizes Jimmy’s desire to be a voice of resistance in
society, but it also shows the futility of that dream. It serves largely to annoy
and antagonize those around him, not to call a movement to attention. Like
Jimmy’s pipe smoke, the trumpet also allows Jimmy to assert his
dominance non-verbally. He disrupts his domestic scene (playing the
trumpet only inside), but makes little headway truly disrupting the world
around him.

Class and Education

Look Back in Anger was published in the post World War II period in
England, in 1956. In 1944, The British Mass Education Act had made
secondary education free for everyone in the country. This meant that
whole new swaths of British society were now equipped to write about their
lives. John Osborne was one of these. His play broke into a world of British
theatre that had previously been a polite, upper class environment, and
brought a new angry energy and previously unencountered point-of-view to
the stage that startled some theatregoers. We see evidence of that new
class mobility, and the new reality it created, in the play. Jimmy
Porter comes from a working class background, but has been highly
educated. He went to a university (though not one of Britain’s finest— his
upper class wife, Alison, notes that it was “not even red brick, but white
tile.”) And though Jimmy went to a university, he is still stuck running a
sweet stall. He has in some ways left his background behind, but he also
doesn’t feel fully comfortable and hasn’t been accepted into the upper
classes. He uses big words and reads the newspaper, but he sometimes
has to look those words up in a dictionary, and he says that the Sunday
papers make him feel ignorant.
Alison and Jimmy’s relationship is the main place where class tension
unfolds. Alison comes from an upper class background very different from
Jimmy’s. Both portray the struggle between the classes in military terms,
focusing on the ways that these two sectors of society fail to blend. Jimmy
and his friend Hugh see her as a “hostage,” and they spend time in the
early years of Alison and Jimmy’s marriage going to upper class parties to
“plunder” food and drink. Though Alison and Jimmy try to make their
relationship work in the end, we get the sense that it’s built on shaky
ground, and that they might fall back into the cycle of anger and fighting
that they enact throughout the play. Alison and Jimmy may make their
relationship work for now, but the divisions between them run too deep to
ever fully heal. In Look Back in Anger, truces across class boundaries are
ultimately brief and inadequate.

Suffering and Anger vs. Complacency

Suffering and anger are highly associated with lower class-ness in the play,
and complacency with upper class-ness. Jimmy believes that lower class
people, who have suffered as he has, have an insight on the world that
upper class people lack. He berates Alison for lacking “enthusiasm” and
“curiosity.” He suggests that her complacency makes her less human, less
connected to life than he is. He sees this suffering and anger as an
important part of his identity. At a climactic moment in the play, Alison says
of Jimmy, “don’t try and take his suffering away from him—he’d be lost
without it.”
In the end, Alison finally experiences the suffering that Jimmy thinks she
has been lacking: she loses their child to a miscarriage. This, she believes,
forces her to experience the fire of emotion that Jimmy had always wished
she had. But the play leaves us unsure whether their suffering will actually
lead to any redemptive knowledge. The circular structure of the play—the
beginning of the first and third acts mirror each other—undermines the
sense that Jimmy’s life is really as dynamic as he suggests that it is. He
seems to be stuck in a routine. Osborne’s voice in the play, seen in his
stage directions, also tells us that Jimmy’s fiery energy can be self-
defeating. In his first stage direction describing Jimmy, Osborne writes, “to
be as vehement as he is to be almost non-committal.” When Alison finally
breaks down and tells him that she wants to be “corrupt and futile,” Jimmy
can only “watch her helplessly.” The play ultimately suggests that Jimmy’s
anger is an expression of his social discontentment and suffering, but not
an answer to his problems. He doesn’t channel it in any political direction,
joining a party or holding meetings or organizing his similarly angry friends,
or even conceive of any way that it can be channelled. Though it springs
from a moral fervour, it dissolves into a diffuse attack on many fronts, rather
than pointedly targeting and taking down any oppressive systems.
 Disillusionment and Nostalgia

Look Back in Anger is the archetypical play of the “angry young men”
movement in British theatre, which was marked by working class authors
writing plays about their disillusionment with British society. In Osborne’s
play, we see this in Jimmy’s sense of political emptiness. Jimmy complains
that, in the Britain of the 1950s, “there aren’t any good, brave causes
left.” Helena observes that he was born in the wrong time— “he thinks he’s
still in the middle of the French Revolution.” Jimmy’s angry fervour is out of
place in modern society, and this leaves him feeling useless and adrift.
Other characters also feel a sense of nostalgia for the past, but for different
reasons: they long for an era characterized by a leisurely life for rich Britons
and greater worldwide power for the British Empire. Many of these themes
of nostalgia revolve around Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, who had
served in the British army in colonial India. Jimmy says that Colonel
Redfern is nostalgic for the “Edwardian” past — early 20th century
England, before World War I, when things were supposedly simpler and
more peaceful.
In the end, the play argues that the characters’ disillusionment is legitimate.
Post-war Britain was marked by a stagnant economy and declining world
power, partly due to the fact that it no longer had many lucrative colonies
around the world (India, where Colonel Redfern served, gained its
independence in 1947). The play argues that these factors have left the
country’s young people adrift and disempowered. Jimmy’s anger is
therefore justified. Both Jimmy and Colonel Redfern, from their different
places in society, have nostalgia for a time when Britain was more powerful
on the world stage. The passing away of Britain’s imperial power is thus
painted in a negative light—and though Look Back in Anger voices a
revolutionary social critique of class conditions in England, it stops short of
criticizing Britain’s exploitation of its colonies. Instead, it argues that the
decline of the empire has led to the disenfranchisement of the men of
Osborne’s generation, and gives those disenfranchised citizens a strong
and angry voice in Jimmy Porter.

Gender
During World War II, many British women had stepped into new roles in the
labour force. After the war ended, most were expected to move back into
their traditional roles in the household, but many still held jobs outside the
home. The play takes a conflicted view of gender that parallels these
shifting dynamics. On the one hand, Jimmy’s angry, destructive, and
typically masculine energy drives much of the action and dialogue. On the
other hand, women are given agency, and female characters act in their
own interests, independently of men (most notably,
both Alison and Helena leave Jimmy).Femininity in the play is highly
associated with upper class-ness, and masculinity with lower class-ness.
This leads to clashes between the genders that also have an economic
dimension. Sticking to conventional gender roles means sticking to the
propriety and politeness of British society (which also means acting along
with your class role). For example, in stealing Alison away from her family
to marry her, Jimmy took on the traditional male role of a “knight in shining
Armor.” But Alison says that “his Armor didn’t really shine much,”
subverting this traditional gender role by adding a class dimension to it.
Jimmy was almost heroic, but not quite. There is clearly something
attractive in Jimmy’s virile, lower class masculinity, as first Alison and then
Helena are drawn to him sexually. Yet there is something destructive in it
as well, as both also end up leaving him. Further complicating the gender
dynamics, women, too, are portrayed as having a destructive power over
men. Jimmy says he’s thankful that there aren’t more female surgeons,
because they’d flip men’s guts out of their bodies as carelessly as they toss
their makeup instruments down on the table. He likens Alison’s sexual
passion to a python that eats its prey whole. At the end of the play, he says
that he and Cliff will both inevitably be “butchered by women.”
The muddled gender roles in the play add to the sense of realism that
made it such a sensation when it was first performed. Characters defy
social convention. Alison disobeys her parents to marry Jimmy. Helena
slaps Jimmy at the very start of their affair, and later walks out on him. An
unmarried man (Cliff) lives with a married couple. He flirts with Alison, but
Jimmy doesn’t particularly mind. The fluid and shifting gender roles in the
play reflect the more fluid realities of post-War British society, portrayed for
the first time in the traditionally staid and upper-class medium of theatre.

Love and Innocence

Jimmy believes that love is pain. He scorns Cliff and Alison’s love for each
other, which is a gentle sort of fondness that doesn’t correspond to his own
brand of passionate, angry feeling. When Helena decides, suddenly, to
leave him at the end of the play, Jimmy reacts with scorn and derision.
Love, he says, takes strength and guts. It’s not soft and gentle. To some
extent, Jimmy’s definition of love has to do with the class tensions between
Jimmy and Alison. Alison tells her father that Jimmy married her out of
sense of revenge against the upper classes. In asking her to leave her
background, he laid out a challenge for her to rise to, and their passion was
partly based on that sense of competition between classes. This subverts a
traditional love story—Jimmy’s anger at society overshadowed his feelings
for Alison, at least in her eyes.
It’s clear that Jimmy and Alison’s relationship isn’t characterized by much
tenderness. However, the two do manage to find some when they play their
animal game. Jimmy and Alison as the bear and squirrel are able to
express more simple affection for each other, but only in a dehumanized
state, when they leave their intellects behind. In the final scene, Jimmy
describes their game as a retreat from organized society. They’ll be
“together in our bear’s cave, or our squirrel’s dry.” Jimmy and Alison are not
able to enjoy love as a simple human pleasure. Their relationship is
buffeted by class struggle, anger, and suffering. Only when they remove
class markers and withdraw from society in their animal game are, they
able to reach some level of innocence.
This reflects a broader loss of innocence in a generation of post-war
Britons that had seen the hydrogen bomb dropped on Japan and 80 million
soldiers and civilians die during World War II. Their parents and
grandparents were able to grow up with some measure of peace of mind,
but these characters (and the real Britons of their generation) cannot. This
affects them even in fundamental parts of their domestic lives, like love and
marriage. They have trouble experiencing these things as simple
pleasures, because the world surrounding them is so difficult and complex.
Only by leaving their society, their human-ness, behind, can they find the
innocence to enjoy simple love.