Page 36 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes The angry young men were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and
novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group’s leading members included John Osborne
and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre’s press officer to
promote John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of
Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Man was published in 1951.
Following the success of the Osborne play, the label was later applied by British newspapers to
describe young British writers who were characterised by disillusionment with traditional English
society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to
whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as
useless.
The trend that was evident in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by
Kingsley Amis was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the
representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the
play’s 26-year-old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all his
contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their lower-
class mannerisms, and dislike for anything highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier played
the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were
acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade.
Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist
who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but who
is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.
Among the other writers embraced in the term are the novelists John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957)
and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the playwrights Bernard Kops
(The Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like
that of the Beat movement in the United States, the impetus of the movement was exhausted in the
early 1960s.

On May 8, 1956, a new play called Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court
Theatre in Sloane Square. The author was a young actor/stage manager named
John Osborne, and the play was actually a blast of rage directed at his ex-wife,
actress Pamela Lane, from whom he had separated rather painfully. Osborne
was working-class; Pamela was middle-class, and they had married secretly;
however, her parents had learned about the wedding and came all the same—an
episode that forms the subject of one of the play's best-known tirades.

Self Assessment
Multiple Choice Questions:

21. The angry young man were a group of mostly
(a) working and middle class British playwrights
(b) novelists who became prominent in the 1980s.
(c) middle and high class British playwrights
(d) high and aristocratic class British playwrights.
22. The term Angry Young Man often applied to
(a) anyone who rails for the establishment
(b) British ‘kitchen sink’ playwrights of the 1950s

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