Richard III and Jimmy Porter
When I went to see Ralph Fiennes in the live broadcast of Richard the Third at the Tuschinski a couple of weeks ago I was again struck by how much fun it is to appear in this play. Yes, fun. Everyone gets to rant and rave and spout streams of vituperative venom in a most satisfactory way.
The fact that Richard is a pantomime character created initially by Thomas More as an exercise in Tudor brown-nosing (he obviously couldn’t keep it up) is neither here nor there. It’s the ranting and raving that counts and no doubt many an actor has felt the cathartic effect of mentally replacing that unfortunate Plantagenet with their own villain of choice, whether that villain be spouse, mother-in-law, theatre producer, landlord, agent or great- uncle Albert.
I thought about the much-maligned Dicky when I was listening to a programme this week from the BBC Archive on Four featuring David Tennant about a play that was first produced sixty years ago. A play that caused shock waves to ripple through the English Theatre because of the gratuitous and ranting and raving. It was of course Look Back in Anger by John Osborne and it is clear that although Tennant sees Jimmy Porter as a monster he is attracted to the character.
I last saw this play in the sixties but I can’t say I’m keen to see it again, simply because of all the ranting and raving. Some people have said they find it difficult to understand what he is ranting about although the reasons are clear enough. When he uses his wife as a verbal punchball accusing her of not feeling enough, of being intense enough, and hoping she would have a child who would die in order to make her feel, it is of course it is Jimmy Porter himself who can’t feel. He looks around at the people he sees in the grey, pallid, conservative era and sees only the lassitude in a people recovering some kind of equilibrium in a postbellum period.
It is always a dangerous thing to look for biography in the life of a novelist’s or playwright’s work and we should do so with hesitation even if we know that the Porter marriage is based on Osborne’s own first marriage. But I believe we have to take John Osborne’s own life as the basis for the play, with, however, a couple of caveats. Osborne upgrades and downgrades Porter at the same time. Porter is the working class, university-educated intellectual whereas Osborne himself went to a minor public school but not to university. Osborne, to his own dissatisfaction, came from the class that Orwell called the shabby-genteel.
In spite of that I think we can safely say that the chronologies match and that Porter was born in the same year as Osborne, 1929. Which would make him sixteen when the Second World War ended. It would seem that Osborne/Porter was suffering from the same syndrome Orwell experienced after the First World War – the feelings of envy and guilt of having been too young to take active part.
Those six years had been filled with high emotion, an intense carpe-diem mentality and the constant fear of violent death. Yet somehow it also gave a certain satisfaction to those involved. How often have I heard people who took part say that the war years were the happiest time of their life.
But the time of high-intensity gave way to a period that was characterised by lack of housing, overcrowded classes, a puritanism that had been set aside in the conflict years and returned with a vengeance, censorship, a disregard of the needs of mentally-wounded ex-combatants and a dumbing down of real emotion. That high-intensity had given way to lassitude and a domesticity that was pursued like the Grail.
This is what Jimmy Porter is ranting about and all that belligerence that so many people spent in war has been saved up and released in mental marital fisticuffs.
But does this have anything to do with the violent diatribes in Richard III? In a way it does. If we look at the period in which the play was written we can see that a similar period of lassitude had over taken England. With the defeat of the Armada the fear of a Spanish invasion had died down somewhat, puritanism and censorship were the spectres haunting the theatres, paranoia manifested by an increase in the Secret Service.
So it was just at this time in 1591 that Richard III was penned, the message being, ‘Things were much, much worse under this monster. Then our dear Harry comes along and puts things right. Think on. We´re much better off now.´
And so we have the ranting and raving directed towards this deposed King - on a suggestion by William Cecil perhaps, the personification of Elizabeth’s administrative arm? Who knows? Wherever the idea came from, it gave the actors the opportunity to spit and swear and forget their frustrations in a constant spout of vindictive vilification.
The fact that Richard is a pantomime character created initially by Thomas More as an exercise in Tudor brown-nosing (he obviously couldn’t keep it up) is neither here nor there. It’s the ranting and raving that counts and no doubt many an actor has felt the cathartic effect of mentally replacing that unfortunate Plantagenet with their own villain of choice, whether that villain be spouse, mother-in-law, theatre producer, landlord, agent or great- uncle Albert.
I thought about the much-maligned Dicky when I was listening to a programme this week from the BBC Archive on Four featuring David Tennant about a play that was first produced sixty years ago. A play that caused shock waves to ripple through the English Theatre because of the gratuitous and ranting and raving. It was of course Look Back in Anger by John Osborne and it is clear that although Tennant sees Jimmy Porter as a monster he is attracted to the character.
I last saw this play in the sixties but I can’t say I’m keen to see it again, simply because of all the ranting and raving. Some people have said they find it difficult to understand what he is ranting about although the reasons are clear enough. When he uses his wife as a verbal punchball accusing her of not feeling enough, of being intense enough, and hoping she would have a child who would die in order to make her feel, it is of course it is Jimmy Porter himself who can’t feel. He looks around at the people he sees in the grey, pallid, conservative era and sees only the lassitude in a people recovering some kind of equilibrium in a postbellum period.
It is always a dangerous thing to look for biography in the life of a novelist’s or playwright’s work and we should do so with hesitation even if we know that the Porter marriage is based on Osborne’s own first marriage. But I believe we have to take John Osborne’s own life as the basis for the play, with, however, a couple of caveats. Osborne upgrades and downgrades Porter at the same time. Porter is the working class, university-educated intellectual whereas Osborne himself went to a minor public school but not to university. Osborne, to his own dissatisfaction, came from the class that Orwell called the shabby-genteel.
In spite of that I think we can safely say that the chronologies match and that Porter was born in the same year as Osborne, 1929. Which would make him sixteen when the Second World War ended. It would seem that Osborne/Porter was suffering from the same syndrome Orwell experienced after the First World War – the feelings of envy and guilt of having been too young to take active part.
Those six years had been filled with high emotion, an intense carpe-diem mentality and the constant fear of violent death. Yet somehow it also gave a certain satisfaction to those involved. How often have I heard people who took part say that the war years were the happiest time of their life.
But the time of high-intensity gave way to a period that was characterised by lack of housing, overcrowded classes, a puritanism that had been set aside in the conflict years and returned with a vengeance, censorship, a disregard of the needs of mentally-wounded ex-combatants and a dumbing down of real emotion. That high-intensity had given way to lassitude and a domesticity that was pursued like the Grail.
This is what Jimmy Porter is ranting about and all that belligerence that so many people spent in war has been saved up and released in mental marital fisticuffs.
But does this have anything to do with the violent diatribes in Richard III? In a way it does. If we look at the period in which the play was written we can see that a similar period of lassitude had over taken England. With the defeat of the Armada the fear of a Spanish invasion had died down somewhat, puritanism and censorship were the spectres haunting the theatres, paranoia manifested by an increase in the Secret Service.
So it was just at this time in 1591 that Richard III was penned, the message being, ‘Things were much, much worse under this monster. Then our dear Harry comes along and puts things right. Think on. We´re much better off now.´
And so we have the ranting and raving directed towards this deposed King - on a suggestion by William Cecil perhaps, the personification of Elizabeth’s administrative arm? Who knows? Wherever the idea came from, it gave the actors the opportunity to spit and swear and forget their frustrations in a constant spout of vindictive vilification.
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