(seen at the afternoon performance on 20th November 2024)
The monkey has just finished “Masquerade,” Oliver Soden’s masterly portrait of “The Master” – Noel Coward. Coward’s style of plays held sway in the West End until the arrival of the likes of Osbourne and Wesker’s “Angry Young Men” era.
It must have come as quite a shock to audiences used to polite drawing rooms to find themselves in a dingy boarding house with people talking openly about the effects of affairs – unwanted pregnancy and familial division, rather than treating love as something rather flippant and always only between married people.
By playing in repertoire these two breakout plays of the era ("Roots" being the other), the Almeida interestingly reveal as much about the backgrounds of the authors as the relevance of the plays today.
Wesker brings his working class origins to the fore, while Osbourne’s characters may be looking on themselves in anger, regretting past choices, but they are absolutely of the educated upper middle class at the very least, just younger and less inhibited.
Once again, little has dated – the expose of domestic violence, physical and psychological pack the same punch, the term “gaslighting” (coined in 1938 play ‘Gas Light’ by Patrick Hamilton) is demonstrated with shock value.
Jimmy Porter (Billy Howle) clearly rules his grotty roost as wife Alison (Ellora Torchia) and friend Cliff Lewis (Iwan Davies) suffer.
Louche and wasting his education, Howle’s Porter stumbles over his words, spouts misogyny like a v-blogger and admits to the morals of a public schoolboy. It is a selfish and compelling performance.
Torchia is stunned almost into silence, understood and only partially shielded by Davies as softer Welshman Cliff. The pair have a relationship that Porter and Alison should be having, Osbourne perhaps commenting on the emotional issues a formal education brings.
By contrast, visiting actor friend of Alison, Helene Charles (Morfydd Clark) has a clarity of view her own upper class background can bring. Clark is a wonderful transformation from Beattie in “Roots.” Entirely confident and able to see reality, her second half reversal into Alison’s situation is surprise and shock as history begins to repeat.
Deka Walmsley has less of a stretch from his “Roots” role as patriarch, but in rescuing his daughter brings the gravity required.
Also as with “Roots,” Naomi Dawson’s simple revolving stage is something of a distraction. Director Atri Banerjee is perhaps heavy-handed in its use at the beginning of both acts, actors spinning for no real reason. The descending ash, echoing the constant cigarette waste and scaling it into a metaphor for relationships and hope is, though a very effective final sequence.
From this distance, it seems that the things these young people are angry about are confined to their strata of society. Yet only by instigating change at that level can we unlock much else – mostly, as this demonstrates – for the better.
If we do not get quite the incisive insight into the text that a more intimately staged version might provide, it is still proof the play is aging well and remains relevant today.
4 stars.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner. Used by kind permission of the Almeida Theatre.