When Jimmy Porter first burst on to the stage in Look Back in Anger, his ranting and railing against the harshness and contradictions of life in 1950s England proved impossible to ignore. The angry young man created by John Osborne was credited with ushering in a new era not just in the arts but in attitudes to authority and youth. The shock at the presence on stage of an ironing board — which kept Jimmy's meek, middle-class wife busy — illustrates how far art was removed from reality.
Five decades on, in a neat role-reversal, it is the husband who fusses over the ironing board in Lie Back in Anger, while the wife holds forth on the injustices and impossibilities of life. But does this angry young woman force us to consider uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our society? Well, she certainly deserves a hearing, but ultimately Jimmy Porter's 21st-century female alter-ego commands not so much attention as irritation.
Bridget O'Donnell was inspired by the 50th anniversary of Osborne's play to examine whether a modern woman can be as uncompromising as Jimmy and whether the allegedly revolutionary decades that followed the original have brought genuine change. The problem with her play lies perhaps with the successors to the kitchen-sink drama: the soap opera and reality TV show. In both the participants, real and imagined, examine their lives in minute, sometimes painful, often tediously repetitive, detail. Jenny, O'Donnell's anti-heroine, while keenly observed, rarely rises about this level.
The play opens, like Look Back, with the main character holding forth over the newspapers to husband Jimmy and best friend Kirsten. Sadly for Jenny, they are more interested in doing the ironing, watching Four Weddings and a Funeral and making tea than sharing her angst and reviving the passion of antiwar marches.
Her volume increases as she struggles to make herself heard above their somnambulance, or is it contentment? "Is this what we will teach our children - how to sleepwalk?" she asks. But all are rudely awakened by the arrival of Rufus, Jimmy's public school pal, on a break from his government post in Moscow.
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