Before the late 1950s, theatre was just posh people chatting in drawing rooms: sexless, staid, stale. Then a group of disaffected playwrights became angry at the state of the country, and at the state of theatre, and wrote plays in which working class people shouted in kitchens instead. Dubbed the Angry Young Men, this disparate bunch of writers brought domesticity, realism and working class concerns to the stage.
Chief among the new generation of dramatists were Arnold Wesker and John Osborne, and chief among the angry young plays by these angry young men were John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 and Arnold Wesker’s Roots three years later. You could argue there’s never a bad time for a revival – that younger generations will always be angry – but it does seem like a particularly ripe moment to bring these two plays back to the fore, because young people have got quite a lot to be angry about. So more than six decades on from their premieres, the Almeida is reviving them in rep as part of a season of called Angry and Young.
You can watch them separately or, as I did, have a double dose of anger on one day. Both take place on a huge round red stage (Naomi Dawson’s design), and both are fuelled by the same preoccupations of class, gender and culture. They also have the same cast.
But in many ways they couldn’t be more different. Roots (★★★) is set in Norfolk, written in dialect, and is the more muted of the two productions. Beatie Bryant ( Morfydd Clar.