Look Back in Anger of the Modern Time

It is in the year 1956 when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was first staged at the Royal Court, but it was only in the final semester in the college [I graduated in 2015] that I got to know about it through my HSS course in Masculinity Studies. And therefore, for anyone reading this article any further, a thorough reading of the drama is essential.

Look Back in Anger is set in the period of post-colonial British Empire, the Sun has now started setting down in the Empire. The highly reputed, overly coveted jobs over shore which were once present are not there anymore and with that, the pride itself on being called a Brit is decaying (interestingly, this is a pronounced effect after Brexit as well but that is not the part of our discussion here). The unemployment rate is high and therefore, even the well-educated are now part of the daily working class. The consecutive World Wars forced women to come out of their houses and be a part of the workforce. While this had certainly made women more empowered, but it added the pressure on the men and in many ways hurt their masculinity (the masculinity being defined here in its own time). And the plot over and over depicts the frustration in terms of anger expelled by Jimmy Porter both in terms of verbal speech and physical action. The time period in which we live although is separated by less than a century from the time depicted in the drama but everything has changed so fast in recent times that the drama on the first glance seems to have little or no relevance to the modern man. For some, they deem…