OSBORNE,JOHN: PLAYS 1 - Faber

'Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is, with special emphasis on the non-U intelligentsia, who live in bed-sitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, 'posh' and 'wet'. To have done this at all would be a signal achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage, the drift towards anarchy, the instictive leftishness, the automatic refection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour...the casual promiscuit, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determintation that no one who dies shall go unmourned...The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of 'good taste' and refuse to accept 'emotional' as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless. Mr Osborne is their first spokesman...I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger' -Kenneth Tynan, Observer-