Look Back in Anger Aitor Bori Ibáñez Grupo B
By: John Osborne
Author's Bibliography:
John Osborne was born in December 1929 in London. He was a symbol of change in the
British Theatre. His father was an advertising copywriter, and he died in 1941 leaving
Osborne an insurance settlement which he used to finance a boarding school education at
Belmont College in Devon. But after a few years ther, he was expelled after an attack to
the principal. However, he never went to any school or university anymore. He came back
to London and he became involved in the theatre. He joined a job that consisted on
tutoring a young company of actors. He also was an actor-manager in several companies
but he decided to employ himself in writing plays. Before he appeared, the British theatre
was mainly based on melodramas and middle class drawing-room comedies. However,
when Look Back in Anger appeared on stage, it shocked the audiences and and "wiped
the smugness off the frivolous face of English theatre," as John Lahr put it in a New York
Times Book Review article. He was an struggling actor and playwright, and this play made
of him a canonic model of theatre, television and films. He had as well a profound effect on
the Brithish culture. In the late 1950s, he was asked to write and to produce a play by
Lawrence Olivier, a famous actor. So he wrote The Ententainer a play which talked
metaphorically about the decline of the British empire from the point of view of a failing
music-hall. This play, in which John Osborne was an actor, received critical acclaim. During
the 1960s he would continue writing. During these years, he wrote and produced a lot of
successful works, including the play Luther based on the life of Martin Luther. In 1963 he
won an Academy Award for his screen adaptation of Tom Jones. Despite of the great
succes of some of his former plays, he also went through an erratic period. Afterwards of
winning the 1963's prize, his plays were not as important as before and critics said that he
did not funfil his earlier potential and even audiences were not impressed by his furor
anymore. His death on 24th December 1994 was due to complications of his diabetes
illness. He was buried in the churchyard at Clun. John Osborne belongs to the generation
of the “Angry Young Men” whose main feature is bringing to the stage a challenging
realism. He shows disaffection and contempt against the stablished order, but mainly he
focuses his anger to the hipocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes. His
works are:
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