Look Back in Anger | Bristol Old Vic

By Toby O'Connor Morse

7 March 2001

There is nothing more difficult than staging a 45-year-old play, particularly for a theatre like the Old Vic which generally targets an audience not even born when the John Osborne work was first staged. Yet the youth of the audience may be the key to Look Back In Anger's appeal: angry young men are starting to acquire the patina of nostalgia.

This is perhaps why despite the lead being Nick Moran, the star of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and the director the outstanding young Gareth Machin, there are no attempts to drag the play into the 21st century. It is presented as a perfectly crafted period piece.

Moran's performance is sleek, polished, extremely funny at times and clearly embued with a thorough understanding of the part. Yet all this is fatally undermined by the way he speaks the lines. His delivery echoes that of a music hall comedian, the note of anger almost lost in wave after wave of cynical, world-weary patter. Lines like "one day I want to stand in your tears, to splash about in them'' are delivered without vitriol, chanted through clenched jaw in a nasal whine which lacks the spiritual muscle to endow this Jimmy Porter with a boiling core of angst or rage.

Without that inner strength, the focus of the play shifts. This shift may be fully intentional on the part of Machin, who always manages to draw finely honed performances from his actors and deserves this opportunity to display his talents on the Old Vic's main stage.

But intentional or not, this production is far more about Alison Porter than it is about Jimmy. Helen Franklin's Alison is beautifully observed with precisely the speech and mannerisms which the character requires. Franklin displays a fluent naturalism which eases the audience into the heart of the piece, and it is her hurt and confusion with which one empathises most strongly and her absence which is noticed in the scenes in which she is off stage.

There are no grand theatrical gestures in this production. The mastery lies in the tiny touches, the all-embracing, nigh fanatical, attention to detail. Mick Bearwish's one-room flat set is scrupulously chaotic: a jumble of Faber editions and clothing under a rain dribbled skylight.

The costumes, also by Bearwish, are perfectly period while also helping to define each character almost at a glance. And the glances themselves, even from actors well outside the focus of the scene, add key, almost subliminal counterpoints to the action. As a director, Machin is the perfect miniaturist rather than a bold and haphazard expressionist. It is this, above all, which makes this production of Look Back In Anger an unmissable experience.