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by John Osborne, directed by Anita La Selva

FeverGraph Theatre Company, Thrush Holmes Empire Gallery, Toronto

September 19-28, 2013

Jimmy: “I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer”

   

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger from 1956 is one of those classic plays that is more read than performed.  It hasn’t seen a professional production in Toronto for over 25 years.  Yet, the play is considered a watershed in British theatre as John Russell Taylor made clear in his seminal study Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (1962).  The book was so influential that it is only in that last decade that people have come to realize Taylor overstated his case and that the older generation of playwrights he rejected, like Somerset Maugham and Terence Rattigan, wrote plays just as scathing about social injustice in their own way as Osborne.

Osborne’s play is very difficult to like.  The central character Jimmy Porter (Eli Ham), the first of the “angry young men”, does nothing around his squalid house but read the newspaper all the while haranguing his wife Alison (Tosha Doiron) for spending so much time doing the housework.  Porter has a working-class background and a university education, while Alison has an upper-class, military background.  Although she incurred her family’s wrath by marrying Jimmy, he never ceases to criticize her and the class she comes from.  Jimmy and his business partner Cliff (Adriano Sobretodo, Jr.), who lives with Jimmy and Alison, run a candy store at the local market.  It’s a job below Jimmy’s education level but it’s the only job he can get. 

Jimmy vents his anger is a series of long tirades against the class system, the wealthy, the church, and women in general to whom he thinks men have enslaved themselves.  If his frustration with having to live an unfulfilling life is meant to win him our sympathy, his rudeness to Alison and her guest Helena (Zoë Sweet) makes him repellant.  When Alison finally leaves him, his adultery with Helena, only lowers him further in our eyes. 

What supposedly shocked audiences at the time was the gritty realism of the play.  Rather than a well-appointed drawing room for a set, Osborne located the action in Jimmy’s cramped attic apartment with kitchen sink, ironing board and bed all in the same room.  To get to the essence of the play and the power relationships among the characters, the new production by FeverGraph does away with kitchen-sink realism and all other time- and place-specific details.

Performance take place in a room in the abandoned Thrush Holmes Empire Gallery at 1093 Queen Street West.  Likely inspired by Jimmy’s description of his apartment as “a very narrow strip of plain hell”, director Anita La Selva has chosen a long narrow room for the acting space and placed a single row on chairs along both long walls that that place the audience close to the action but make the space even narrower.  Taking her cue from Jimmy constant newspaper reading, designers Jeff Blackburn and Liam McCarthy have covered the walls of the performance space/the Porters’ apartment with newspaper clippings and pilled newspapers all over.  While Jimmy and Cliff read the newspapers, Alison irons them and La Selva thinks of numerous ingenious ways to use newspapers as props.  Even when the Porters have tea, it is in newspaper covered cups and saucers. 

FeverGraph is also a physical theatre company, so La Selva has certain sections of the very talky play performed as modern dance to a soundtrack of the actors speaking their lines.  Sound designer Sam Sholdice makes the transitions from actual spoken dialogue to recorded dialogue and back quite smooth.  What is unclear is why certain sections are chosen as the dance segments.  A pas de deux between Alison and Cliff seems natural because they finally have the chance to express their feelings for each other once Jimmy is out of the room.  Alison’s solo to her conversation with her father also makes sense since it is the one conversation Alison has with someone not in the apartment.    The ultimate point of these dance interludes, like the use of the newspaper, is to undercut the play’s realism. 

FeverGraph labels itself a “female-centred company”.  It felt “Driven to take this challenging male-centric text and awaken its contemporary potential”.  In that goal FeverGraph has succeeded.  If Jimmy Porter was the primary focus of the original production, that focus has now shifted to Alison and Helena.  It is quite clear that La Selva is most interested in how Alison copes with both with her husband’s constant verbal abuse and with Cliff’s constant flirtation.  Physically, she seems like the weakest of the characters, but as staged by La Selva it is clear that Alison has more inner strength than the other three characters put together.  One reason Alison married Jimmy was as a rebuff to her family, but, hard as it is, we have to accept that she does love him despite all of his ill treatment.  That being said, the most difficult scene in the play for a modern audience is her return to Jimmy after his adulterous fling.

La Selva has coaxed strong performances from the entire cast, especially from Doiron, whose character has the widest emotional arc in the play.  As Alison goes on with her housework in the face of Jimmy’s tirade, Doiron shows us Alison mind coursing through feelings of anger, rebellion, acceptance and endurance.  Her dance episodes are also the most expressive in the show, often conveying screams of rage that she has repressed

Eli Ham takes the almost impossible role of Jimmy.  His Jimmy is so unremittingly rude and obnoxious it is very difficult to see the stifled heroism in him that Alison and Helena say they can see.  The think he was born out of his time and should have lived during the French Revolution.  Now he has no cause to live and die for and wallows in impotent rage against a system he cannot change.  Ham does show us that Jimmy turns this general anger at the world at large toward those closest to him, but it is still hard to feel sympathy, much less admiration, for this behaviour.  Ham does show that Jimmy is capable of tenderness toward Alison, but this is couched in a regressive game of rabbit (Alison) and bear (Jimmy), that suggests that neither Jimmy nor Alison have fully coped with their passage from childhood to adulthood.  Jimmy’s anger at the world and Alison’s at her parents is the rather immature pique that others have destroyed an innocence they would have had continue indefinitely.

Sobretodo is the most physically adept player after Doiron and his pas de deux with Doiron is the most successful dance interlude of the evening.  His Cliff is so enamoured of Alison that he can’t even conceal his feelings in front of Jimmy, much to Alison’s chagrin.  Doiron shows that Alison is glad that at least one of the men she lives with can be kind towards her, but still makes it clear that her ultimate allegiance is to Jimmy.  Sobretodo, on his part, lets us know that Cliff knows this to and acts only within the confined limits of what he thinks Jimmy will permit.  He thus, like Alison, is frustrated in his desire but inured to that frustration.

Zoë Sweet’s Helena is a breath of fresh air in the claustrophobic world of the Porters.  She has a native spunk and self-possession that allows to stand up to Jimmy in a way that Alison can’t.  Yet, while we’re glad that Helena saves Alison from her awkward situation, we’re dismayed when we find she, too, desires Jimmy.  Both Ham and Sweet should indicate more clearly that, like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, one reason for the exaggerated nature of their mutual hatred is an underlying attraction.

Other than a Fringe Festival production in 2003, where Jimmy was played by a woman, no company has attempted to resurrect this famous play.  FeverGraph’s production is the most complete and most successful attempt Toronto has seen in decades.  Anyone seeking to complete their knowledge of 20th-century British drama would do well to see it.  Nevertheless, the stumbling block for a modern audience is the character of Jimmy Porter.  He may have been an accurate portrait of the frustration of young men in the 1950s, but his penchant for tirades makes him seem a petty tyrant, his misogyny a narrow-minded lout and his complete self-centredness an overgrown child. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Zoë Sweet, Eli Ham, Tosha Doiron and Adriano Sobretodo, Jr,.  ©2013 FeverGraph Theatre Company.

For tickets, visit http://fevergraph.com.