"Look Back in Anger"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how John Osborne's 1956 play "Look Back in Anger" is considered one of the revolutionary plays of the time. The play deals with some painful realities of social and political structure of England in 1950s when the country was experiencing some significant shift in terms of cultural and social values. It looks at how it was considered a 'proletarian upsurge' of liberated working class writers rebelling against the establishment and how it turned the theater into an instrument of social change.

From the Paper:

"The very success of the play indicated that people were willing to accept new role of theatre. They wanted change and they would accept anything that served as an instrument of social change. British theatre in 1956 became that instrument: 'for a short time at least...a mirror in which the nation could observe, stark and naked, its own image' (Edgar 1981:38). Theatre suddenly found itself at the center of major wider realignment in British society, where people especially new breed of New Wave writers actively began challenging post-war certainties. 'Retrospectively, 1956 has become an annus mirabilis...crudely; Suez and Look Back in Anger seem part of the same event' (Hewison 1981:127)."

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