Kenneth Tynan asked John Osborne in the early 60s to join the fledgling National Theatre and make history. Osborne replied that he had already made history. And indeed he had when he tossed his Molotov cocktail of a play, Look Back in Anger, into the genteel English theatre of 1956, which Arthur Miller had described at the time as being hermetically sealed off from life.

It is enterprising of Miranda Harcourt to celebrate here the fiftieth anniversary of this famous play’s first production at the Royal Court in London. In an ideal world it would be possible to celebrate this anniversary by also performing in repertory his 1991 play, Dejavu, in which Osborne revisits his characters in Look Back in Anger thirty years on.

In 1956 Look Back was, as Osborne admitted, a traditional three-act play no different in structure from a Rattigan play. What was startling was the strident central character, Jimmy Porter, who as Osborne pointed out was widely misunderstood at the time, largely because of the emphasis on "anger" in the title and the journalistic tag "angry young man".

However, the play was seen as speaking for a generation fed up with the inertia of a complacent post-war Britain. Today it seems to be a story, as one writer has said, of obsessional love and self-hatred. It could also be self-portrait of the playwright.

In this third – and first professional – production in Wellington since Nola Millar’s in 1959 for Unity Theatre Jimmy and Alison’s one-room flat seems enormous though most of the action is confined to a carpeted island in the middle of the stage where Jimmy and his friend Cliff sit claustrophobically close to each other on two tatty armchairs while Alison stands at an ironing board.

There is no attempt to recreate the fifties so you have to get used to, amongst other things, no smoking and New Zealand newspapers standing in for the posh Sunday papers that Jimmy reads despite complaining that the book reviews seem to be written in French. Jimmy’s off-stage jazz playing sounds like harsh electronic music and the important scene in which Alison’s father, a retired Indian army colonel, comes to take her back home away from Jimmy, has been  unfortunately reduced to a voice-over scene, presumably for economic reasons.

Lucy Wigmore’s Helena, Alison’s actress friend, has the no-nonsense, matriarchal authority off to a T that Osborne describes, and Louis Sutherland is all amiability and Sunday afternoon lethargy as Cliff, while Mia Blake probes the depths of Alison’s despair and almost makes the unconvincing ending convincing.

As Jimmy Aaron Alexander gets all the melodramatic fire and passion of Jimmy’s rhetorical, often self-pitying riffs but he misses completely Osborne’s statement that Jimmy is a comic character, a man of gentle susceptibilities, constantly goaded by a brutal and coercive world. Osborne goes on to say that the core of the character is best expressed, not only theatrically but truthfully, by a mild delivery – and Osborne emphasised the word mild.

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The great thing about seeing John Osborne’s 1956 break-through ‘kitchen sink drama’ Look Back in Anger fifty years on is that we now know what happened next.

We get to look back with the wisdom of hindsight, aware that ‘anti-hero’ Jimmy Porter’s infamous anger expresses a frustrated nostalgia for a future he couldn’t imagine, let alone lift a finger to create. All he can do is rail at what he feels is not right and destroy the people he loves in the process.

From a working class background, university-educated and aggressively avid for further knowledge – albeit from the ‘pompous’ Sunday papers – he has ‘married up’. Alison is a ‘privileged’ daughter of the rump of the Raj (her parents were based in India). Three years wed, he and Alison share a Midlands flat with Jimmy’s Welsh mate Cliff, who loves them both. The boys run a sweet stall at the market and of a Sunday, they read the papers while Alison irons their shirts.

In a risqué touch for 1956, Alison is wearing one of Jimmy’s shirts but it’s not so much that as the visible presence of the ironing board itself that symbolises modern theatre’s great leap from fashionable drawing rooms to ‘real’ life, as she is lived: predetermined and humdrum. This is the status quo that’s getting Jimmy’s goat.

Jimmy’s anger took root at the age of ten when he watched his father, a veteran of the Spanish civil war, die a slow and ignominious death. As a boy he felt helpless. More than that, in his rapidly disappearing innocence and ignorance-based arrogance, he felt as if he was the only one that gave a damn.

But Jimmy has been well looked after by women all his life – his mother, the older woman (Madeline) who initiated him into manhood, a series of girlfriends and now Alison – not to mention the mates he has also chewed up and spat out along the way. It could be said, then, that Jimmy is the privileged one. On the other hand his manic dependency, his deep lack of self-esteem – on the flipside of the superiority complex he exhibits – and his inability to achieve anything like domestic independence, let alone personal power, render him destitute.

It’s tempting to think Jimmy’s righteous and clearly self-defeating anger is old hat, that these days anyone wanting to bring about social change has the sense to model it in their own behaviour first. Jimmy, for example, demands that people "show some enthusiasm!" but the only thing he gets passionate about is proving how wrong everyone else is and how very right – far right? – he is.

Surely, though, the compulsion husbands feel to put down their wives in front of friends has long since been exposed for the desperate weakness it is. Mind you, it did play a major role in the social revolution that followed the fifties. Schoolteacher Reg in Roger Hall’s Middle Age Spread (1977) is a perfect example, and those of us who lived through that time can easily think of self-styled agents of ‘enlightenment’ who were deeply misogynistic. But surely that stuff has not survived into the new millennium. Has it?

It took me a while to recall where I’d heard that voice, that tone, all too recently. In the last three election campaigns it has been loud and clear in the harangues of Libertarian candidates as they vent their frustration at our collective inability to comprehend that we should claim ‘freedom’ on exactly the terms they prescribe! That’s where a Kiwi Jimmy would have ended up, after a disillusioning spell with the ACT party, I imagine.

These, then, are the sorts of thoughts this Miranda Harcourt-directed Look Back in Anger provokes. The company’s decision to play it in their own voices and use last weekend’s local Sunday papers, while leaving the dialogue, furnishings and fashions unchanged, cannot help but encourage us – in response to Jimmy’s provocations – to evaluate not only the times of his life but the whole half-century since.

The great strength of this production is the realness of its feel; of the feelings felt by each character every step of the way. What makes the play a classic is that everyone, including Alison’s colonial father (present only via one phone call in this trimmed-down version), is empathetically drawn, and each performance at BATS honours that.

Having systematically alienated himself entirely from any hope of audience sympathy, Aaron Alexander’s Jimmy subtly betrays his own self loathing then hits us in the solar plexus with the strength of his dependant love. We don’t have to like him but we cannot help but understand his desperation.

In the mind and body of Mia Blake, Alison is beautifully eloquent. Her private thoughts and her non-spoken responses to Jimmy and Cliff speak volumes. Most impressive is the understanding she gives us of why she’s attracted to Jimmy, and why she cannot … (no, I won’t reveal too much of the plot since a whole new generation may well be seeing this for the first time). Suffice to say that beyond the sympathy she wins initially, she too reveals flaws and provokes frustration as well as empathy.

As Cliff (Horatio to Jimmy’s malign Hamlet?), Louis Sutherland nails the co-dependant role of joker-cum-peacemaker splendidly. He and Blake also capture perfectly the special kind of loving friendship Cliff and Alison share, as it strengthens even more in the face of adversity.

Lucy Wigmore works wonders as she navigates Helena’s twisting route from censorious protector (of her close friend, Alison) to opportunistic lover, albeit with a heart and a conscience. And Ken Blackburn does much more than phone in his performance as Colonel Redfern, subverting any wish we might have to write him off as a fading old fart.

It’s not so much the characters as their relationships, the chemistry between them, that engages our hearts and minds. Miranda Harcourt’s attention to that dimension, played out in Martyn Robert’s subtly lit thrust-space setting, ensures a compelling 140 minutes (with two brief intervals).

However, somehow the flat feels rather too spacious and I couldn’t get the hang of its geography. And from where I sat, in a main bank of seats, I was sorry to be behind Alison as she delivered her final speech, knowing so much more would be there to see beyond the words being spoken. On the other hand, that staging places her with us – or us with her – and leaves the abiding questions firmly in our laps.

If you’ve seen the play before (incredibly this is its first professional outing in Wellington), or the film or TV versions, I recommend you refresh your sense of it with this production. If you’ve never seen it, don’t miss this opportunity.

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