It focuses on the life and marital struggles of an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working-class origin, Jimmy Porter, and his equally competent yet impassive upper-middle-class wife Alison.

The supporting characters include Cliff Lewis, an amiable Welsh lodger who attempts to keep the peace; and Helena Charles, Alison's snobbish friend.

[3][4][5] Osborne drew inspiration from his personal life and failing marriage with Pamela Lane while writing Look Back in Anger, which was his first successful outing as a playwright.

The play was received favourably in the theatre community, becoming an enormous commercial success, transferring to the West End and Broadway, and even touring to Moscow.

We also learn that the sole family income is derived from a sweets confectionery stall in the local market—an enterprise that is surely well beneath Jimmy's education, let alone Alison's "station in life".

As Act 1 progresses, Jimmy becomes more and more vituperative, transferring his contempt for Alison's family onto her personally, calling her "pusillanimous" and generally belittling her to Cliff.

Written in 17 days in a deck chair on Morecambe Pier,[9][10] Look Back in Anger was a strongly autobiographical piece based on Osborne's unhappy marriage to actress Pamela Lane and their life in cramped accommodation in Derby.

Many are directed against the female characters, a very distinct echo of Osborne's uneasiness with women, including his mother, Nellie Beatrice, whom he describes in his autobiography A Better Class of Person as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent".

[12] Madeline, the lost love Jimmy pines for, is based on Stella Linden, the older rep-company actress who first encouraged Osborne to write.

Characters: The play was premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre, on 8 May 1956 by the English Stage Company under the direction of Tony Richardson, setting by Alan Tagg, and music for songs by Tom Eastwood.

Retaining the original cast but starring Vivienne Drummond as Helena, it received three Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play and Best Dramatic Actress for Ure.

For example, on BBC Radio's The Critics, Ivor Brown began his review by describing the play's setting—a one-room flat in the Midlands—as "unspeakably dirty and squalid" such that it was difficult for him to "believe that a colonel's daughter, brought up with some standards", would have lived in it.

The Daily Mail's Cecil Wilson wrote that the beauty of Mary Ure was "frittered away" on a pathetic wife, who, "judging by the time she spends ironing, seems to have taken on the nation's laundry".

On the other hand, Kenneth Tynan wrote that he "could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger", describing the play as a "minor miracle" containing "all the qualities...one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage—the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of "official" attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (e.g., Jimmy describes an effeminate male friend as a 'female Emily Brontë'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned."

Alan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (both of which are also part of the "angry young men" movement), wrote that Osborne "didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up".

Bates reprised his role as Cliff Lewis, alongside Drummond as Helena Charles, on ITV's Play of the Week in 1956, shortly after the theatrical production premiered.

[16][17] In 1995, Greg Hersov directed a production at the Royal Exchange, Manchester with Michael Sheen as Jimmy, Claire Skinner as Alison, Dominic Rowan as Cliff, and Hermione Norris as Helena.

[22] A 2024 adaptation started by Billy Howle as Jimmy, Ellora Torchia as Alison, Morfydd Clark as Helena, and Iwan Davies as Cliff at the Almeida Theatre.

[26] Look Back in Anger's turtleneck sweater, and wife ironing while wearing a slip, became symbols that both represented the Angry Young Men movement and which others satirised.