FringeReview UK 2024

Angry and Young. Wesker Roots, Osborne Look Back in Anger

Almeida Theatre

Genre: Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Almeida Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Almeida’s Angry and Young Season does something remarkable in yoking two canonic 1950s plays together – one with a woman and the other a man as protagonist. It’s not simply the five cast members common to both, with most of the creative team. Or even the two directors as they put it “leaning” on each other and collaborating. Diyan Zara directs Arnold Wesker ‘s 1958 Roots, and Atri Banerjee John Osborne’s 1956 Look Back in Anger till November 23rd. 

It’s also that we see in two very different plays conversations emerge around the H Bomb (a hopeless numbness), around similarities between Roots’ offstage Ronnie and very onstage Jimmy Porter in Anger, particularly in their need to make puppets or mouthpieces of the women in their lives. And, though in very different degrees, abusive.

Even in Anger a rebuke to Jimmy “You sound as if you were quoting” pre-echoes Roots. Seething politics, newspapers, obsessions with classical and jazz music deemed ‘authentic’ in the light of ‘commercial’ crooning and ignoring the more unsettling (because authentic) American rock n’roll. So that Bizet in Roots and (less centrally in Anger) Vaughan Williams become a feature. Even here Banerjee tweaks the latter: instead of The Lark Ascending as usual we get VW’s Suite on Folksongs, infused with Morris-Dancing datedness. Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and others agreed though: The BBC Third Programme and 1944 Education Act riled up a brilliant, duffle-coated disaffection.

Approaches differ too in that Zara cuts down Roots to one hour 45, sliding the first act climax into the next scene. There are some losses but the setting is as naturalistic as the circular red revolve allows, with authentic light sage-coloured Utility wear. Whereas Banerjee  turns Anger on occasion into a Francis Bacon painting.

Wesker Roots

At the start of Wesker’s 1958 Roots directed by Diyan Zara, there’s a swirl of construction at the start as Naomi Dawson’s pale-green Utility chairs and tables populate the set. It’s succeeded by the noise of buses and lorries (George Dennis’ sound notably subtle here, like an orchestra tuning for a future overture), to which Mrs Bryant (Sophie Stanton) marks time against Norfolk’s encroaching silence: which returning daughter Beatie (Morfyd Clark) judges as inertia. Entropy. Death. Not judging. But then there’s as much expectation as Godot.

Clark bursts on the scene as summer incarnate. Returning Beatie is full of the joys of “love in the afternoon. There’s nothing like it girl” she explains to phlegmatic sister Jenny (a warmly ribbing Eliot Salt) who counts herself lucky to have married Jimmy Beales (an alert, quizzical, downright Michael Abubakar) after bearing a child by another man.

Beatie, some of the family feel, is really too full of “squit”: readily telegraphing saws of  her London-based boyfriend of three years, socialist and Jewish Ronnie. He’s due Saturday week. Every time she quotes him she stands on a chair and Lee Curran’s halo descends, transcendent with irony.

Even Beatie’s folksongs are different. Tearing apart a pop standard she too knows well, she starts singing a socialist mining song she’s learned to get reluctant feet tapping. That works.

Mansplaining by proxy Beatie protests Ronnie’s dictums too fiercely.  Something’s not right. After all it was Beatie who chased Ronnie. Ronnie seems to be turning into Godot. A Godot who likes steak and kidney pie though.

Despite this, and entrenched views, it’s the family who get some of the best lines, puncturing Beatie’s pretensions by proxy. Certainly Beatie’s “no majesty” needs that too, though Beatie comes up with Ronnie’s own laconic:  “Failed all his exams. He’s an intellectual.”

Roots though is far more than the sum of very different antagonisms. Deka Walmsley’s chillingly contrary Mr Bryant may be laconic but he’s also a tyrannical bully who won’t lend his electricity for Beatie to make her sister a cake. He is also though a victim of illness and thus employer Mr Healey (Iwan Davies making the briefest of appearances). Healey is breezily benevolent but Beatie warns what will happen, alerted to unions and the need to fight. Indeed loss of status will fundamentally alter Bryant’s relationship with his family: but we don’t get that far.

Elsewhere there’s poignant homage to the old who cite a time of greater vitality but are themselves near exit in Stan Mann (a truculently delectable Tony Turner). Jimmy himself is a Territorial who finds CND incomprehensible. But an offstage sister almost welcomed nuclear extinction as an escape from feeling or thinking anything. Roots refuses to shrink back from the encroaching world, bomb or (commercially exploitative as it is) Rock n’Roll.

Roots portrays two days over a week apart played in real time. The first act usually culminates in Beatie’s showstopping demonstration of Bizet’s L’Arlessiene. It’s counterpart to the moment of genuine transcendence at the end of Act Two.

Here the whole play runs over 100 minutes straight through. There’s losses here. Memories of James Macdonald’s superb 2013 Donmar production with Linda Bassett and Jessica Raine as mother and daughter aren’t banished because the original saturates us in place and predicament. Though Clark can single-handedly overwhelm with the force of her Beatie, some heft behind her is stripped away.

It’s still surprising these days to have a cast of nine with a play of this scale, some with now tiny roles. For the Welcome Ronnie moment brother Frankie Bryant (Billy Howle) and sister in law Pearl (Ellora Torchia) amplify high spirits going nowhere.

Against all this though the fundamental relationship between mother and daughter is played out by Stanton and Clark as both love and fury are exchanged with justice on both sides.

Stanton is quietly towering, reflecting bafflement condense and wounded anger. Her expression as Beatie lays into her is as wounded as Beatte’s when she responds. She’s also very funny, repeating po-faced the same “indigestion” in her back (also repeated by others) so her character delivers gags without realising it.

How can Beatie claim “I hate you” to a mother who simply does her best? Yet she shuts off the news and classical music as Beatie says. And how can Beatte, full of her wallpaper-like abstract painting (clearly nodded by Ronnie with a clever shrug) proclaim after a reveal, that she can continue judging by proxy from a man she can’t claim, in a voice not her own?

Wesker’s answer is unforgettable and one of the great moments of British postwar theatre. Clark manages it without egging affect and (even with Bizet drifting in like a benediction from beyond our Ronnie) with a keen sense of Beatie’s character allowing self-knowledge to come with personal and overwhelming force.

There’s still a delicate balance between Wesker’s honourable intentions in educating Beatie and excoriating his own alter ego (he in fact married his Beatie or Dusty) which can still come across as loaded with mansplaining it isn’t mansplaining.

But the balance is struck here. In dialect coach Edda Sharpe’s canny distinction of tones, Clark speaks less broadly than those around her (unlike some Beattis) and stands alone: belonging nowhere entirely. But unlike everyone else, even Ronnie, this outstanding Beatte stands rooted in herself.

Roots

Writer Arnold Wesker, Director Diyan Zora, Set Designer Naomi Dawson, Costume Designer Tomas Palmer, Lighting Designer Lee Curran, Sound Designer George Dennis, Fight & Intimacy Director Yarit Dor.

Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Costume Supervisor Sabia Smith, Wigs, Dialect Coach Edda Sharpe, Assistant Director Tian Brown-Sampson, Production Dramatherapist Wabriya King.

Osborne Look Back in Anger

Jimmy Porter leans over the edge of an abyss where the red revolve reveals an aperture: both hell as characters descend through it, and a surprising change to Naomi Dawson’s set used very differently hours before. When two men read newspapers on the edge of a precipice, it’s a direct Francis Bacon quote from an exhibition the characters might have seen. “This is hell, nor am I out of it.” Jimmy, educated Alison, and probably Cliff would shrug “Marlowe.”

1956 and the Third Programme is never far away, indeed is flicked on. By the end, Huit Clos is never far away either. There’s a gripping circularity emphasised here that never struck me till now.

Director Atri Banerjee has taken a play by its duffle-coated scruff yet is faithful, letting the prolix work run to 2 hours 45 yet gripping throughout with minor judicious cuts. Billy Howle’s Jimmy often delivers at an almost manic velocity yet this seems wholly natural and consummately lucid: no blur of vocal distinction anywhere. And there are moments of silence and palls of grief.

Whereas Roots, playing on the same revolve, emphasises a provisional (and provincial) naturalism, this one – so lovingly detailed in Dawson’s set of seedy 1950s dining chairs – is modishly undercut. Lee Curran’s lighting, faintly spectral in Roots, here sculpts expressionist gulphs before reverting to a dingily-lit naturalism that suffuses most of Anger.

Roots is a great play that normally plays itself. Anger which clearly influenced or at least beat a pathway for plays including Roots, is rarely revived, despite its ground-breaking status. It seems in danger of proving itself a museum piece. Banerjee blazingly contradicts that and Howle gives the performance of his life.

Cliff (an impressive Iwan Davies) here emerges as a smart Welsh autodidact playing down to Jimmy’s “white-tile” university-educated snob. Osborne’s three characters, with Alison (Ellora Torchia) eloquent and blistering in her own right, all emerge as an intimate unit. Cliff with Jimmy in almost homo-erotic tussles; and Cliff with Alison in (apparently non-sexual) clinches in front of Jimmy. That’s mostly written in, and its singularity is emphasised here just enough to show how strange, and co-dependant their threesome is.

Davies gives Cliff real life and removes him from any shadow of ineffectual hanger-on. He’s genuinely lost though acutely conscious of that and able to say so. Torchia’s Alison refuses easy pathos and draws on class and education to counter Jimmy’s greatest tirades. This makes her muteness and ironing-board moments (echoed by Morfydd Clark’s poised Helena in hat was Act Three) all the more striking. They come across as Osborne’s own flawed reading, but most of all responses to abuse.

Because Howle’s Jimmy is not only agonised, ferociously articulate and “born out of his time” as Alison says, adding waspishly “an eminent Victorian” continually giving the lie to her being “not very bright”. Jimmy’s palpably abusive, returning to apologise in a pattern familiar to us all of the abuser: cringing moments of childish- make-up, supplied here in bear and squirrel toys the couple have ghoulishly acquired for the purpose. His offstage trumpet, in Peter Rice’s developed sound-world turns into a haunted broken blues fracturing over the birth of cool and death of film noir. Even his billowing white shirt (Tomas Palmer makes much of clothes throughout) suggests a d’Artagnan without a charger.

There’s much made here of Osborne’s two scenes of overhearing – Alison and Helena suffering Jimmy’s rants about each of them by accident. This production reverts to Osborne’s detailed directions and use of repeat scenes, lie Aliso and Helena drudging on the ironing board at the start of two separate acts, emphasising how they’re slaves to not just Jimmy’s rhythms but their inherited roleplay, even though Helena is an actor, if a rather Christian and hidebound one.

That makes Helena’s predicament both religiously transgressive and irresistible, handled here in an understated ballet: sex itself in Yarit Dor’s intimacy direction is a hinted ballet, never for instance the headlong snog Helena and Jimmy find in many productions. It emerges here as a ritual the two seem destined to go through: there is, perhaps a fundamental ack of joy in their desire despite Helena’s valedictory “I love you” when she determines to leave. Clark’s performance here is one of suffused radiance, literally one with the light dimmed so as not to stake Helena’s claim as a jobbing actor who can play passion too.

Deka Walmsley is transformed from curmudgeonly Mr Bryant to baffled Colonel Redfern, musing over “spiritual barbarian” Jimmy’s reduction of him to an Edwardian hothouse plant that can’t quite believe the sun as set on empire. Indeed he takes Jimmy’s metaphor further, emphasising the kinship Jimmy knows exists between them.

There are though flickers of joy, none more so than when Cliff and Jimmy engage in a number you might think cut from The Entertainer: a jaded glee the trio play up then fizzle with. Most of all, Alison and Jimmy’s co-dependency comes like a slap. An abusive, haunted circularity where both remain victims but Alison crushed into a role which children will neither worsen or relieve. Outstanding.

Look Back in Anger

Writer John Osborne, Director Atri Banerjee, Set Designer Naomi Dawson, Costume Designer Tomas Palmer, Lighting Designer Lee Curran, Sound Designer Peter Rice, Fight & Intimacy Director Yarit Dor.

Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Costume Supervisor Sabia Smith, Wigs, Hair & Makeup Supervisor Sophia Khan, Dialect Coach Edda Sharpe, Assistant Director Chloe Christian, Associate Movement Director Rhys Dennis, Production Dramatherapist Wabriya King.

Published October 2, 2024October 4, 2024 by Simon Jenner