Look Back In Anger Research Articles

Alison Porter in Look Back in Anger: Is She Responsible for her Sufferings?

John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger is a dramatic study of a strained marriage relationship. In it Jimmy Porter is the protagonist and Alison Porter, a retired Colonel’s daughter, is the heroine. The actual action of the play is centered around Jimmy’s relationship with her. Despite his dominance, his wife Alison Porter, is the most important supporting character on whom Jimmy inflicts pain by his tirades all the time until eventually she feels she can bear no more. Later on she leaves him in her pregnant state to seek peace. After the loss of the baby she comes back to him when both have lost faith in each other. So they will go back to their previous unhealthy relationship causing her to become deplorable again. My reading of Alison Porter is that she is a suffering person though some find Jimmy a sufferer. This paper aims at assessing her sufferings and the reasons behind them.IIUC Studies Vol.10 & 11 December 2014: 65-80

The Prayers and Tears of Foucault: Panopticism and the Politics of Dissent in An Enemy of the People and Look Back in Anger

Drawing on the thought of Foucault, this article argues that the anarchistic protagonists of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) are engaged in a hegemonic battle which puts their identities at stake and ultimately exiles them to isolation. It points out that the very success of both in renouncing authority’s sovereignty is what actually hastens their failure in the end. The identification of this failure with panopticism, which for Foucault characterizes the modern economy of power, is the primary concern of this article. It is argued that through the subtle process of normalizing subjects the panopticon establishes a disciplinary society where citizens are stripped of their subjective voices. The central characters of both plays are thus easily exposed to panoptic surveillance when they decide to take on the strategies of power. Further, using Foucault’s concept of exclusion, the article proceeds to illustrate how in filtering out these delinquent individuals the hands of power urge them to refine their ways and how, upon failure, they exert the policy of exclusion. Keywords : Foucault, Panopticon, Exclusion, Dr. Stockmann, Jimmy Porter

Contentious Politics of ‘Anger’ in the Face of White Masculinity: Class, Race, and Gender in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Contentious Politics of ‘Anger’ in the Face of White Masculinity: Class, Race, and Gender in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Популарна култура у драми Џона Озборна „Осврни се у гневу“

This paper analyses Look Back in Anger (1956) – a play written in the style of social realism by English dramatist John Osborne – from the point of view of popular culture. Popular culture is seen here as a number of material and non-material aspects of everyday life in the first half of the twentieth century. The notion of popular culture is largely taken from John Fiske (2001), who maintains that the instruments of everyday life are crucial for the development of popular culture. The analysis is divided into three sections: the first one deals with anger as a popular feeling of the 1950s, which is also the dominant mood in the play; the second one is concerned with popular industrial products, such as newspapers, the iron, toys for children, etc., which serve emotional rather than industrial, practical ends; the third one is devoted to the usage of certain popular elements as a means of communication with art, mostly with the aim of escaping from harsh reality or fighting against it. The final aim of the paper is to prove that popular culture plays one of the leading roles in the realism of this drama.

E. P. Thompson and the Kitchen Sink or Feeling from Below, c. 1963

Considerations of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class have situated its 1963 publication within political, social, and intellectual contexts. A study of its cultural, emotional, and affective contexts remains lacking. This article locates The Making in the context of an important genre developed, on stage and on screen, at the moment of its publication: the “kitchen sink” dramas written by the so-called Angry Young Men, including Look Back in Anger (1956/1959), A Kind of Loving (1960/1962), and A Taste of Honey (1958/1961). It understands these texts as a collective commentary on loss—the loss experienced by Thompson's working class subject and by his learned readership, too—and assesses the affective dimensions of class beyond Thompson's rendition of class formation. In so doing, it follows on the work of feminist critics and cultural historians who have sought, at once, to augment and challenge the view of class formation that E. P. Thompson was able to provide. Through this engagement, it seeks to extend Thompson's interest in the contours of class formation into a domestic sphere concerned, among other things, with emotional relations, consumer practice, and reproductive politics.

Don't look back in anger: the rewarding value of a female face is discounted by an angry expression.

The modulating effect of emotional expression on the rewarding nature of attractive and nonattractive female faces in heterosexual men was explored in a motivated viewing paradigm. This paradigm, which is an indicator of neural reward, requires the viewer to expend effort to maintain or reduce image-viewing times. Males worked to extend the viewing time for happy and neutral attractive faces but to reduce the viewing time for the attractive angry faces. Attractive angry faces were rated as more aesthetically pleasing than the nonattractive faces; however, the males worked to reduce their viewing time to a level comparable with the nonattractive neutral and happy faces. Therefore, the addition of an angry expression onto an otherwise attractive face renders it unrewarding and aversive to potential mates. Mildly happy expressions on the nonattractive faces did little to improve their attractiveness or reward potential, with males working to reduce viewing time for all nonattractive faces.

Sarcastic intertextualities as ‘Angry Speech’ in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Sarcastic intertextualities as ‘Angry Speech’ in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Look back in anger: flaws in the retrospective evaluation of risk assessment

The team from the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness recently posted a report on quality of risk assessment prior to suicide and homicide.[1][1] The report describes an un-masked retrospective survey of the risk assessments found in the case notes

Simon Shepherd, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British TheatreThe Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre. Simon Shepherd. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+250.

<i>Simon Shepherd</i>, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre<i>The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre</i>. Simon Shepherd. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+250.

Look back in anger - what clinical studies tell us about preclinical work.

Misled by animal studies and basic research? Whenever we take a closer look at the outcome of clinical trials in a field such as, most recently, stroke or septic shock, we see how limited the value of our preclinical models was. For all indications, 95% of drugs that enter clinical trials do not make it to the market, despite all promise of the (animal) models used to develop them. Drug development has started already to decrease its reliance on animal models: In Europe, for example, despite increasing R&D expenditure, animal use by pharmaceutical companies dropped by more than 25% from 2005 to 2008. In vitro studies are likewise limited: questionable cell authenticity, over-passaging, mycoplasma infections, and lack of differentiation as well as non-homeostatic and non-physiologic culture conditions endanger the relevance of these models. The standards of statistics and reporting often are poor, further impairing reliability. Alarming studies from industry show miserable reproducibility of landmark studies. This paper discusses factors contributing to the lack of reproducibility and relevance of pre-clinical research. Publish less but of better quality and do not rely on the face value of animal studies.

Don’t Look Back in Anger! Responsiveness to Missed Chances in Successful and Nonsuccessful Aging

Life-span theories explain successful aging with an adaptive management of emotional experiences like regret. As opportunities to undo regrettable situations decline with age, a reduced engagement into these situations represents a potentially protective strategy to maintain well-being in older age. Yet, little is known about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms supporting this claim. We used a multimodal psychophysiological approach in combination with a sequential risk-taking task that induces the feeling of regret and investigated young as well as emotionally successfully and unsuccessfully (i.e., late-life depressed) aged participants. Responsiveness to regret was specifically reduced in successful aging paralleled by autonomic and frontostriatal characteristics indicating adaptive shifts in emotion regulation. Our results suggest that disengagement from regret reflects a critical resilience factor for emotional health in older age.

Already Seen? Look Back in Anger, Déjàvu , and Postmodern Historiography

Historiography has enshrined the British 1950s as a decade of affluence and apathy, smugly unaware of the cultural shift its swinging successor the sixties will effect. In this way the stage is set for Look Back in Anger as revolutionary moment, yet a recent bout of academic revisionism has sought to question the epochal importance of John Osborne's 1956 play. Contemporary critical demotions of the play must initiate a reappraisal of its enduring metonymic status. This paper considers a range of the paratexts surrounding Look Back in Anger — reviews, authorial comment, academic analysis, filmic interpretations, and Osborne's 1992 sequel Déjàvu — to trace the implications of this reappraisal and to assess the extent to which this postmodernist reimagining of literary history might involve, in the middle-aged Jimmy Porter's words, ‘a deluded sense of recall.

Look back in anger

Look back in anger

Anger and Political Culture: A Time for Outrage!

This article examines the role of political anger in democracy. It reviews the work of Stéphane Hessel before examining the role and reception of anger in classical and modern thought. The author identifies two main traditions within which the concept of political anger can be located: revolutionary violence of the Marxist tradition and the peaceful, nonviolent tradition of civil disobedience initiated by Gandhi. The culture of anger going back to the ancients is examined, followed by a review of the ‘angry young men’ culture of a group of authors around John Osborne and his famous play Look Back in Anger. The author insists that the culture of political anger is an essential set of readings, techniques and skills that are indispensable in the neoliberal age.

Portrait of an Artist as Proto-Chaotician: Tom Stoppard Working His Way to Arcadia

Portrait of an Artist as Proto-Chaotician:Tom Stoppard Working His Way to Arcadia William W. Demastes (bio) Mix vaudevillian slapstick with crisp, witty language. Add a song or two in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. Try doing a whole scene in limericks. How about a shell game using humans popping in and out of shower stalls? Maybe add some really funny Communist-bloc shenanigans. Set it on a verandah in India or in the secret byways of Hamlet's Elsinore Castle. Why not open eyes with a striptease act dangling from a trapeze? Maybe parody the work of Agatha Christie, or play fast and loose with Oscar Wilde. Or how about taking on Shakespeare himself? How about a play about a rather minor, uncharismatic English academic? And make it about love. Maybe re-create a ferry-ride across the River Styx, and figure out a way to get the Greek god Pan into the modern world, using classic rock to do it. In a nutshell, that's the theater of Tom Stoppard. Clearly, for Tom Stoppard the world is anything but serene and orderly. But disorder for Stoppard is not only an inescapable condition; its presence is in many cases cause for celebration. His is a far cry from the ennui-ridden existentialism or absurdist despair that occupies the thoughts of many of his contemporaries. In other words, well before the phrase "chaos theory" made its way into popular discourse, Stoppard was working beyond Newtonian linearity and striving for a way to make some sort of sense of the disorderly nonlinearity of existence. In short, from virtually the beginning of his career, Tom Stoppard was a proto-chaotician. In this essay, I will explore, first, how viewing Stoppard's work from the 1960s to 1980s from this perspective enhances our understanding of his career, and, second, how once he discovered chaos theory in the 1980s, he responded to it in Arcadia in his own distinctive way. [End Page 229] Stoppard Introduces Himself When Stoppard first splashed onto the London stage in the mid-1960s—with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967)—the British theater scene was dominated by two distinct "schools" of drama, one being the kitchen-sink realism embroiled in social consciousness-raising initiated by John Osborne and his landmark Look Back in Anger, and the other the distinctly anti-realistic "absurdist" minimalism initiated by Samuel Beckett and his landmark Waiting for Godot. British theater basically split into two camps, one presenting a politically-active, left-leaning vision that change can occur by utilizing devices of logic and reason, the other believing that logic and reason had exhausted themselves and had in fact generated cataclysmic outcomes (i.e., two world wars) necessitating re-assessments of logic and reason themselves. Naturalist social critique and engagement played alongside absurdist assault and disengagement, making for a vibrant theater scene lasting for the most part even up to this day. In Stoppard's 1960s experiments in the theater, we see several poor imitations of both Osborne and Beckett (by Stoppard's own admission1) pop up, but his big first success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was an early signal that something and someone new had hit the stage. The play splashed onto a scene ill-prepared for a work that seemed intentionally to blur theater's two-camp distinction. Critics of the naturalist inclination saw the play as trite, empty, socially blinkered theatricality, while those of an absurdist leaning saw it as an entertaining but somewhat cluttered and ultimately insubstantial addition to the growing canon of Beckett imitators. Those who were impressed saw something important and major in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but they couldn't quite pin down what it was. Though Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was first produced in London in 1967, it is quite possible that the first person to understand Stoppard's play didn't get around to explaining it until nearly a decade later. Clive James, in his 1975 essay "Count Zero Splits the Infinite," hits the nail on the head when he sees Stoppard's play engaging the fundamentals of physics itself. For all the intertextuality, metatheatricality, parody, satire, and word-play...

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia , and: Sarah Kane's Blasted (review)

Reviewed by: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and: Sarah Kane's Blasted Luc Gilleman Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. By John Fleming. Modern Theatre Guides. London: Continuum, 2008; pp. 122. $16.95 paper. Sarah Kane's Blasted. By Helen Iball. Modern Theatre Guides. London: Continuum, 2008; pp. 121. $16.95 paper. The expanding series of Modern Theatre Guides from Continuum now counts ten volumes, each offering an approximately hundred-page discussion of a well-known play. The series includes Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, August Wilson's Fences, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, David Mamet's Oleanna, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Sarah Kane's Blasted, Patrick Marber's Closer, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The general preface refers to them as "key plays of modern times," although the series so far consists only of English-language works. Each volume starts with a detailed overview of the playwright's career, and the series includes only one play to represent each playwright's oeuvre. While one might argue the editors' choice of plays, these little theatre guides prove to be convenient sources for in-depth studies of single plays. Sections on the playwrights' backgrounds compensate in large measure for the representative-play approach, and the guides can only encourage readers to pursue additional plays. These are workmanlike productions, each volume uniformly divided into "Background and Context," "Analysis and Commentary," "Production History," and "Workshopping the Play." In the back is a useful timeline, situating the play among major political and cultural events, and several pages of "Further Reading," followed by references and a detailed index. The guides offer not just compilations of facts and summaries of other scholars' research, but also original insights from people who have already published extensively on the subject. The two studies of British plays I examined are for the most part engagingly written and equally informative. Unlike the socialist and feminist Caryl Churchill, to whom another volume in the series is devoted (see Theatre Topics, March 2009), Tom Stoppard is considered an apolitical (read conservative) playwright who writes "flashy" and "intellectualist" plays. Yet, as John Fleming points out, Stoppard was involved in humanist causes related to the former Soviet Union, and he never avoids important moral issues. The breadth and scope of his oeuvre are astonishing, from straightforward, realistic plays of epic dimensions (e.g., the trilogy The Coast of Utopia [2002]) to comedic and brainy plays of ideas like Arcadia (1993), probably one of the most discussed plays in recent theatre history. Widely referred to as the best science play, it has spawned a number of articles and websites that use the play to explain such arcane matters as Fermat's Last Theorem, thermodynamics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory, making it a particularly daunting subject for a brief study. Fleming wisely keeps science discussions to a minimum and does not dwell overly long on what is a far more difficult problem: the relationship between scientific content and theatrical form. Many will find his section on the play's production history of particular interest, because Arcadia is more challenging to produce than might be suggested by its limited cast and single set. Actors have to learn to bring out the humor and sexiness in lines that deal with complex theories. The play's popular success, Fleming argues, should be attributed to Stoppard's decision to switch directors from Peter Wood, who until then had directed all his major plays, to Trevor Nunn, known for his ability to tease out emotional subtexts, even in arcane material. Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) presents a very different kind of production challenge. Its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre was panned by critics, who were unable to look beyond the play's shocking imagery. Kane's suicide in 1999 led to another ill-considered critical approach—a stunned or awed reconsideration of her work as a sort of diary of depression. Since Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001) and Graham Saunders's "Love Me or Kill Me": Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002), Kane's work has been the subject...

Shooting Star: Peter Whitehead and 1960s Documentary

Shooting Star:Peter Whitehead and 1960s Documentary Michael Chanan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Peter Whitehead filming Benefit of the Doubt, 1967 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Glenda Jackson and Mark Jones in Benefit of the Doubt, 1967 [End Page 324] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Peter Whitehead filming Benefit of the Doubt, 1967 [End Page 325] A decade into the twenty-first century, the 1960s remains a period whose significance and image remains to be recovered and contested. There is the dominant and mediatized version, that of "flower power" and Swinging London, and there is the version that persists in the memory of those who participated in what we then called the counterculture—this writer thinks back to those years in the first person, for whom the decade began when he was fourteen and thus coincided with his coming-of-age in the seething London of the time. As Peter Whitehead—who is nine years older than me—observes in Paul Cronin's film portrait of him, In the Beginning Was the Image (US, 2006), the idea of Swinging London was an invention of Time magazine. For him (as for myself) the sixties were the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Aldermaston marches; the movement against American imperialism and the war in Vietnam; and the Dialectics of Liberation, a two-week conference in 1967 at the Round house, London's leading alternative venue, which was or ga nized by a group of psychiatrists—or in the lingo of the day, antipsychiatrists—led by R. D. Laing and David Cooper. The list of participants is a very good guide to the principal currents of thought of the counterculture. Most were American, including Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg. They included radical academics who had emerged into prominence after the eclipse of McCarthyism and the election of John F. Kennedy as U.S. president. Several were explicitly Marxist, and a good number were European or European-born: the names include Gregory Bateson, John Gerassi, Paul Goodman, Jules Henry, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Sweezy, and (from Paris) Lucien Goldman. In other words, the po liti cal orientation of the gathering was strongly powered by civil rights and revolutionary militancy, [End Page 326] crucially informed by Marxism but in the spirit of Sartre's critique of "lazy Marxism"—in a word, libertarian. I do not recall the presence at the Roundhouse of either Communists or Trotskyites, but I do seem to remember references, in the spirit of anti-imperialism and solidarity with Vietnam, to the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. Peter Whitehead was the shooting star of British documentary cinema in the sixties, who rose and fell with the counterculture that he documented, and in Cronin's film calls "a sort of cultural revolution." If the root of this revolution in America, along with the civil rights movement, was the Beat Generation of the fifties, then the En glish equivalent were the "Angry Young Men," the mediatized epithet taken from John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, which appeared in 1956 and was brought to the screen by Tony Richardson three years later. Richardson's film launched the British new wave, alongside Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (UK, 1958) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Karel Reisz (UK, 1960). Curiously, when Whitehead speaks of what cinema consisted of for him in the early sixties, these are not the films that figure. He says, "You're talking about Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni. That was the cinema, completely. There was nothing else . . . that's what I was brought up on. God knows why I ended up making documentary films." But perhaps the omission, apart from marking the European orientation of metropolitan film culture in the United Kingdom, also signals, in Whitehead's case, a subconscious act of distantiation from what in fact was closest to him, the milieu of the London-based British new wave. Because in terms of habitus (to invoke Bourdieu), the concept of "in dependent filmmaker" that operated in Britain in the sixties came from the Free Cinema group of the preceding decade and...

&lt;i&gt;Wholly Communion: Films and Filming&lt;/i&gt; Review 1966

Directed, produced, photographed and edited by Peter Whitehead. A Lorrimer Films production. British. Cert A. 35 mins. ALLEN GINSBERG (from Change, Andrei Voznesensky's Three- Cornered Pear/America and a Tibetan hymn), LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (from I Am Waiting and F*** Is To Love Again), GREGORY CORSO (from Mutation of the Spirit), HARRY FAINLIGHT (from Spider and Larksong), ADRIAN MITCHELL (To Whom It May Concern and Stunted Sonnet), MICHAEL HOROVITZ (from For Modern Man, 1914- 1964, R.I.P.), ERNST JANDL (from Im Anfang War Das Wort and Ode Auf N), ALEXANDER TROCCHI (from Cain's Book), CHRISTOPHER LOGUE (Chorus After Sophocles) and ANDREI VOZNESENSKY. Ever since the schoolmarm spirit succeeded in misrepresenting the rebellious passions of the romantic poets as inoffensive uplift, poets have been caught between, on the one hand, appealing to a public educated enough to appreciate their complexities, but withdrawn in a kind of blind distaste from everyday realities and vulgarities, and, on the other hand, touching the more numerous public which was healthily less snobbish but lacked that cultural background without which most modern, or, for that matter, ancient, poetry is to all intents and purposes so incomprehensible as to be an enigma. The new wave of beatnik poets, however eccentric and way- out and their contemporaries, at least represent a coming- together of the poetry medium and some u lar attitudes. It's no accident that through such fi gures as Donovan, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, this kind of poetry is beginning to link up with pop music; and some highly profi table cultural collisions and mixings seem imminent. A fi rst and highly encouraging eruption occurred when a poets' cooperative hired the Royal Albert Hall on June 11 last year, and, against all expectations, all but fi lled the huge auditorium. Indeed, they would probably have fi lled it completely had the management not deliberately turned away latecomers, under the pretence, which it must have known to be false, that no seats remained. One suspects that their real objection was to a poet's use of that four- letter word because of the harm which the word would do to their moral characters. But the Establishment's hostility is a backhanded compliment, and the event is for poetry what the success of Look Back in Anger was for the modern En glish theatre. A great deal of the night's excitement is caught in Peter Whitehead's fi lm (a twin to the paperback of the same name); it is all more astonishing in being made by a one- repeat, one- man unit. Some roughnesses of reporting, concentrated mainly in the fi rst half of the fi lm, help to recapture the actual atmosphere of the occasion, which was as improvised as a jam- session; and the fi lm is not just a newsreel so much as a piece of cinema- verite, as it penetrates, through the event, to feelings and hopes, as in the spirited exchanges between the chairman (Alexander Trocchi), a heckling spectator, and the poet Harry Fainlight, anguishedly [sic] persevering in reading his brilliant and nightmarish anti- epic of LSD visions, Spider. …

Looking Back at the British New Wave

The evolution of what has come to be called the British New Wave offers an intriguing case of the critics’ mediating and constitutive role in the forming of a movement, school or trend (Zarhy-Levo 2001). This particular instance, however, illustrates a case of ‘second-order mediation’, namely that of the film critics voicing their perception that a new phase had begun in the cinematic domain by relying on and exploiting the ‘ready-made’ critical discourse already constructed around the literary and theatrical developments that had taken place a few years earlier, most notably the designation of the Angry YoungMan (AYM) phenomenon and the prevailing judgements surrounding the Royal Court Theatre’s productions, particularly that of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Zarhy-Levo 2008). To this extent, I suggest, the discourse constructed by literary and theatre critics not only provided the film critics with a ready-made means to promote a new wave, but also seemed to have inspired them to advocate their perception of progress in the cinematic domain. Moreover, the film critics’ reliance on this discourse can also account for the somewhat puzzling elements in their definition of the British New Wave, namely the date of its beginning and the films which it encompasses. The British New Wave is commonly perceived as comprising nine particular films released between 1959 and 1963: Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), This Sporting Life (1963) and Billy Liar (1963).1 Over the last three decades historians and critics of British cinema, reassessing the New Wave, have been engaged in an ongoing debate not only about whether these films should be seen as a distinct group (Hill 1986; Higson 1996) or as in fact very different from each

Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T. S. Eliot's Tradition and The Elder Statesman

On a scale of bangs and whimpers, S. Eliot's dramas have been regarded as inclining toward the less explosive end. From The Rock in 1934 to The Elder Statesman in 1958, Eliot's attempts to rehabilitate verse drama in English theater have been seen as brave but inherently challenged, and ultimately unavailing. There have been honorable exceptions to this critical consensus, and most recently at the Donmar Warehouse in London, a creative, theatrical effort has been made, in the form of a T. S. Eliot to refute and even replace it. (1) This festival was refreshing not least because it did not seek to justify itself with explicit reference to any historical abacus of centenaries or other anniversaries. More compelling, though, was the extent of the dramatic offerings, as the festival not only staged The Family Reunion, but also theatricalized some of Eliot's more strictly poetic works, such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, as rehearsed readings. In its effort to promote Eliot's dramas, and others of his works, as dramatic, the festival had more history on its side than the received critical wisdom about these plays suggests. The Cocktail Party, also presented as a rehearsed reading at the Donmar, and The Confidential Clerk enjoyed some significant commercial success, as well as critical acknowledgment, when they were first produced in 1950 and 1953 respectively. There was one play, however, that garnered no such accolades at its premiere and that the Donmar's Festival did not include. (2) This play was The Elder Statesman, which nonetheless put in an isolated appearance in 2008 as a rehearsed reading at the King's Head, Islington, where it was performed by the theater group Primavera, as part of its series of Forgotten Classics. (3) Unlike the efforts at the Donmar, however, this brave attempt required the pretext of a fiftieth anniversary. As the fourth and final instance of the English drawing-room dramas that were Eliot's favored generic template, The Elder Statesman was singularly unfortunate in its timing: in 1956, just two years before its premiere, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had opened in London, triggering a revolution in British theater that probably served to obscure retrospectively even the mixed success of Eliot's drama. (4) The elder statesmen meet the angry young men. (5) But another historical intersection will be the subject of this essay, and it is one that Robin Grove has observed independently: For the close of the 1950s, the plot could hardly be more old-fashioned. Europe may have torn itself apart, Hungary be crushed, Soviet and American empires threaten each other with destruction, Suez heap humiliation on top of dishonour, and Macmillan (1957) have come to power in a year of unprecedented industrial non-cooperation, but not a tremor from public event disturbs the protected milieux of the play. (6) Against this backdrop, of course, Look Back in Anger itself looks not just parochial but also bathetic. Whereas Grove asserts a disjunction between this context and Eliot's play, I propose a conjunction. And the pressure to do so may well derive from our recent historical vantage. As the fiftieth anniversary of Suez impinged on the public consciousness, there were articles in the news media that took this opportunity to plot the vicissitudes of the special relationship between the UK and the USA. (7) My argument about the play will be that it articulates a vision of loving inclusion that extends beyond the characters into an allegory of how European, and more widely Western culture retains its historical and transatlantic integrity, specifically after the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This cultural tradition thus compensates for political division among those parties that share in the tradition and externalizes that division by emphasizing where this sharing ceases to apply, namely in the Second and Third Worlds. …