Osborne’s Look Back in Anger blew the roof off of the norm. The prevailing theatre in England in the 1950s was the “well-made play,” exemplifi ed by Terence Rattigan (whose Man and Boy opened our season at Roundabout). These plays were comfortable, conventional, and careful plays about the upper middle class. Osborne led a generation of young playwrights writing gritty, shocking, and honest plays about their disaffected generation; these were known as “kitchen sink dramas” for their brutally honest portrayal of the harshness of reality. A press agent of the Royal Court Theatre referred to Osborne as an “angry young man,” and that became the moniker for the type of anti-heroes he and his contemporaries wrote about. These angry young men were a new niche in society: intellectuals educated at universities, but unemployed and unable to gain upward mobility because of their lower-class roots. With the emergence of this new class of people came this new breed of plays.


Osborne’s plays were always controversial; the government censored many of his shows by forcing scenes to be eliminated and shutting some productions down entirely. Finally, with A Patriot for Me, a play based on a true scandal involving an Australian spy, Osborne helped to end censorship that had been imposed by Lord Chamberlain. Osborne truly changed the theatrical landscape


UPSTAGE LOOK BACK IN ANGER


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