Roots/Look Back in Anger at the Almeida review: the ferocious roar of angry young men and women resonate down the decades

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 Clark) returns home to her rural family after living with her socialist boyfriend Ronnie in London. We never see Ronnie, but we hear his views in everything Beatie says.

She’s passionate in her rants about art, education, politics, philosophy, but always parroting Ronnie’s views. Besides, the other Bryants don’t seem much interested. The women have got housework to do, and the men have got back-breaking jobs to get on with. ‘Don’t you come pushin’ ideas across at us,’ says Beatie’s brother-in-law.

Director Diyan Zora has the stage revolve very slowly – life goes on and never changes – while cast members offer up props from beside the stage as needed, conjuring a sense of community. There’s fine acting, particularly in the scenes between Clark’s bullish Beatie and her mother, played by Sophie Stanton initially with a subdued acceptance before breaking into rage at Beatie’s relentless haranguing.

Roots pushed contemporary audiences to the brink in terms of staged domesticity. Wesker had his female characters mashing potatoes, baking cakes, taking baths on stage. These acts don’t seem radical anymore, but the ideas still do. Transmuted, yes, and landing slightly differently more than half a century later, but still present, particularly around the roles of men and women and around who gets access to culture.

It’s a solid production, but you can see why it’s not done that often. The anger is deadened, drowned out in a society that’s far angrier, and far louder. Zora’s revival goes some way in cracking open the slightly dry carapace that surrounds the piece, and there are undoubtedly great moments, but too often it feels like an experiment in reviving a forgotten play, too much like homework.

Then, boom! Look Back in Anger (★★★★) starts and any sense of dustiness evaporates. Director Atri Banerjee has the round stage open up so that it becomes a black hole, with a young man staring over the edge of the abyss. Up pops an ironing board and a woman, and Jimmy Porter, one of the most famous characters in post-war theatre, starts his long tirade against the world around him.

Where Roots was all about what happens when a person seeks a solipsistic self-enlightenment and breaks away from the community, Look Back In Anger is about the endpoint of that process. Porter is alone against the world. He has no community, except his wife Alison and friend Cliff. He’s alienated everyone. He’s full of self-loathing for leaving his working class roots behind, and full of pure loathing for the middle-class milieu of his wife and her friends.

As played by Billy Howle, Porter is a sudden bolt of lightning, all punch and presence, making Roots look polite. He rages against a society full of people with no beliefs, no conviction, no enthusiasm. “People of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer,” he laments. “We had all that done for us, in the Thirties and the Forties. There aren't any good, brave causes left.”

His wife, meanwhile, stands quietly behind him ironing away. Rather than completely impassive, as she can often be in productions of this play, Ellora Torchia makes her sad and compressed, like she is desperate to explode in the way her husband does, but has enough self-restraint to keep it inside. There’s so much bitterness in her face, so much despair.

Howle becomes more and more tiger-like, pacing the cage, his face flickering, eyes twitching. Banerjee pulls the tension tighter and tighter, a nasty, thrilling tension, in which Porter expresses his vile, misogynistic, insulting views, shoving them at his wife and friend Cliff because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

At a distance of 68 years, Banerjee’s focus is less about one’s political place in the world and much more about the gender roles Jimmy, Alison and her friend Helena occupy. Staged today, though Porter remains a recognisable type, you suspect he’d be sucked into the far right, with his disturbing views about women and nostalgia for a nonexistent past, rather than the socialist left.

He’s unbearable. There’s no grand nobility to his statements now, no sympathy to be wrought. He’s a misogynist and a bully, pure and simple. It’s a crackling piece of drama, and compared to Roots it’s a better production of a better play, even if the flames die down eventually, replaced by the creaks and slight bloat of Osborne’s overlong script.

It’s a great bit of programming – Roots gives us an angry young woman, Look Back in Anger an angry young man – and fascinating to see two of the 20th century’s most discussed and dissected pieces of drama actually come alive on a stage. But there’s an imbalance: where Roots, for all its depth, can’t quite shake itself out of being a museum piece, you can still hear the ferocious roar of Look Back in Anger resonating loudly so many years later.

Almeida Theatre, Roots and Look Back in Anger run in rep from October 5 to November 23