Roots / Look Back in Anger
The Almeida, London

THE era of the angry young man. The 1950s. 

All seems so long ago. But if you’re wondering why to revisit them now, the Almeida will tell you, as they bring us two towering classics tuned to the modern age. 

Performed in rep at the Almeida until November 23, Arnold Wesker’s Roots (★★★★)  and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (★★★★), in symbiosis together, hold an unassailable position in the history of British theatre.  

The Osborne play came first in 1957, overturning with one blow the complacent post-war theatrical world of camp, middle-class, predictable drama and replacing it with a fierce, working-class realism in which the protagonist rails with unfettered fury against the world he resentfully inhabits. It possesses all the fervour of socialism, not through dogma, but through the bitter energy that is a source of activism, and which introduced the 1960s before they had landed. 

In Roots – the second play of Wesker’s Trilogy, staged in 1959 – another volcano of rage is about to erupt as the articulated concept of socialism makes its first waves in a family of downtrodden agricultural workers. 

Both plays overturn the status quo and replace complacency, and – in the case of the working classes – subjugation, with collective freedom and fierce resistance. They ring out to us in the 21st century with a call to arms, refuting what the powers-to-be tell us, challenging a life of falling living standards and general belittlement of the ordinary citizen, and inciting us to think anew. 

The Almeida has brought us these two plays in a mood of reverence. So how do they stack up?

Both plays, in these productions, take place on a bare, revolving stage against the backdrop of a hard, grey wall, damaged by time. Both plays are cast from the same pool of actors. Both plays work around an occasionally exposed central, grave-like cavern into which bodies disappear and from which living beings emerge. Both plays boldly display their theatrical artifice with the cast moving furniture, handing each other props and gazing through imaginary windows. This is theatre as far from the polite drawing room comedy as you could wish. 

But the two works have different directors and differ in tone.

Roots, as directed by Diyan Zora, immerses us in the relentless, slow-burn life of a Norfolk family. Wonderfully real and wonderfully recognisable to all of us who left our roots to find a different (better?) existence only to return to find nothing has changed, it’s a perfect scenario, revealing not only the terrible oppression of poverty but how hard it is to throw it off. 

Hope lies in Beatie who returns from London spouting the language of socialism through words she barely knows, words planted in her by a would-be intellectual who sees her as the perfect acolyte. While Morfydd Clark lights up the character of Beatie, and Deka Walmsley as her father weighs down the stage with the load he carries, this feels like a stripped-down version, the text edited and some of the intense domestic detail skipped.  

In the hands of Atri Banerjee, on the other hand, Look Back in Anger is given its head, speaking volumes. And though it’s traditionally hard to find charm in Jimmy Porter as he rants his way around the stage mouthing thoughts supplied by the author, Billy Howle gives him vigour and oomph. Though critics may carp at Jimmy’s bitterness and misogynistic slant, the sheer powerhouse of language he employs to turn the conventional on its head is a thundering game changer. 

Slightly lacking is the more tender angle – and there is little or no chemistry between Jimmy and the two female characters in the play which is a shame – but it’s still an awesome piece, refreshing in its naked expression of truthful thoughts and class anger.

This is an impressive team effort from the Almeida and still, after all these years, a wake-up call.  

Both plays run until November 23. Box Office: 020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk