‘Terrible but magnificent’: the life and times of playwright John Osborne

With the news the Almeida Theatre is to stage John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger this Autumn as part of their double-bill ‘Angry and Young’ (its partner play being Arnold Wesker’s Roots), one can only wonder what today’s younger generation will make of it. Osborne’s first produced play, a portrait among other things of the corrosive marriage between a young lower class intellectual and his infinitely better-born wife, perfectly caught the rising mood in 1956 – one of searing frustration with postwar inertia and a moth-eaten establishment of colonels, judges and bishops that seemed set to endure forever. So seismic was the play’s impact, it was credited with changing the British stage, even British society, for good.

‘John Osborne didn’t contribute to the British theatre,’ said novelist Alan Sillitoe. ‘He set off a land mine called Look Back in Anger, and blew most of it up.’