John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is now a half-century old and apparently - though this may be a good thing - looks it: Something to shout about. (Hat tip to my colleague Gene D'Alessandro.)
This is an odd piece - makes you understand what Maxine means when she writes about British newspapers - and it's capsule history of theatre in the 1950s seems a bit wobbly (the reference to Oklahoma! seems odd, since the musical opened in 1943). I have never found Anouilh long-winded myself, though maybe I like rhetoric when it's well done.
This passage, I must say, stumped me:
"And there is an enormous pulse of love that runs through it: not sweet love, not the candyfloss, mindless American version that Osborne could already see clogging up the arteries around the heart, but old-fashioned European love — nasty, possessive, clumsy, crooked and cruel — the sort Jimmy Porter, and many others, would be happy to go to war for."
What the hell is he talking about? Oh, and I still think Rattigan's plays have aged better.
No comments:
Post a Comment