The Fifties are back with a bang. James Macdonald’s brilliantly framed staging of Waiting for Godot (1953) is running in the West End and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is due in London shortly. And here is the Almeida, reviving Arnold Wesker’s Roots (1958) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) — two seminal works from the “angry young men” playwrights. Staged in repertory by one ensemble, they dive into that period between the war and the Sixties when a generation of men and women were pushing at the social structures they’d inherited, disillusioned with a world that had been torn apart and yet not changed enough.
In both, the kitchen becomes the scene for battle — between the generations, between the sexes, between the classes. In 2024, the works punch across the decades to speak to a society where anger is common currency. When Morfydd Clark’s Beatie stands in her parents’ kitchen at the end of Roots, raging that “we’re all taking the easiest way out”, she could be voicing exasperation over climate change or global inequality.
Time and distance also lend perspective. Looking back, the anger is qualified not just by what hasn’t changed but by what has. We see the sexism even more keenly. Diyan Zora’s deftly paced and beautifully acted production of Roots underscores this. She keeps Wesker’s punctilious naturalism and yet frames the drama as a memory play. It’s as if we were revisiting and reassessing, with Beatie, that crucial visit to her family in rural Norfolk that, by tearing a rift between them and her, saw her find her voice as an articulate young woman but left her rootless in an unequal society.
Clark’s Beatie begins by stepping on to a bare, circular playing arena, her past assembling around her as the cast pass up props and furniture. Immediately she’s back home, joking with her sister as the two wash dishes and sweep the floor. But a division has slipped between them. Fired up by her intellectual socialist boyfriend’s ideas, Beatie longs to galvanise her family into awareness of their own condition. They, however, are too busy, tired or preoccupied to hear her. That’s even more evident in her mother’s kitchen, where Beatie’s impassioned attempts to get her weary mother (Sophie Stanton, excellent) to discuss ideas are met with a running commentary on the passing buses.
It’s a play about women, set entirely in the domestic sphere and written with sympathy by Wesker. But while we see Beatie’s awakening, we notice too the way the playwright frames it as a response to her mansplaining boyfriend. Clark handles this brilliantly. She brings a certain irony to the passages where she repeats Ronnie’s opinions and is moving as she finds her voice. Her impassioned final plea for change could have been written now.
The anger and disillusionment that simmer and bubble in Roots boil over in Look Back in Anger, as does the sexism, finding voice in the toxic character of Jimmy Porter. It’s a hard play to watch: Jimmy is obnoxious, his abusive, controlling behaviour towards his upper-middle-class wife, Alison, hard to stomach.
Atri Banerjee’s blistering production faces that head-on. Billy Howle’s terrific Jimmy is viciously nasty, cruelly undermining Alison and lashing out at Cliff, the couple’s peacekeeping lodger. But while Jimmy is never excused, Howle does help to explain him. This is a man whose frustration at a stagnant society and his own lack of agency has curdled into self-pity, toxic masculinity and ugly misogyny. He’s utterly chewed up by anger.
He’s brilliantly well matched by Ellora Torchia’s desolate Alison, shrinking into coiled rage as she irons Jimmy’s shirts and sucks up insult after insult. On Naomi Dawson’s red disc of a set they seem trapped in a circle of hell that neither Iwan Davies’s decent Cliff nor Alison’s friend Helena (Clark) can break them from.
It’s a blazing production of a tough, ugly, angry, desperate, sad play. And together the productions prompt the disturbing question: are Jimmy and Beatie still with us today? And if so, why?
★★★★☆
To November 23, almeida.co.uk
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