Look Back in Anger

The play is about an angry young man, Jimmy Porter, who looks back because he has so little incentive to look ahead. The words pour out of him, a flood of satire and invective. The words are often cruel, but they are also vibrant and colorful. They sting the characters of the play and the audience, too. In Jimmy Porter's boiling resentment at not being able to find himself in his own generation, he makes life impossible for those he most cherishes. Living with Jimmy in a poor attic apartment is his wife, Alison. The critic Walter Kerr described her as "his bloodlessly patient wife, drained of all response, hopelessly unable to convey the inexplicable love she continues to feel—drawn in sure, plain, unselfpitying strokes." A friend, Cliff, is a no-man's land upon which some of their pain can be visited. Helena is a friend of Jimmy's wife who, in an effort to help the wife escape this life, is herself caught in the same trap.