(L-R) Jimmy Porter (Deborshi Barat) with Cliff Lewis (Tathagata Chowdhury)

When it was first staged in London in 1956, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger completely revolutionised British theatre. The character of Jimmy Porter lent a voice to the raw, unbridled anger and disenchantment of the post-war generation. “Osborne didn’t contribute to British theatre,” once wrote a playwright, “He set off a landmine and blew most of it up.”

Calcutta felt that seething rage of Jimmy Porter — the angry young man — on May 9 and 10, as city-based theatre group Theatrecian, in association with t2, presented Look Back in Anger at Gyan Manch to a full house.

“The angry young man wasn’t born in the racy scripts of Salim-Javed; his growls ricochetted off a squalid one-bedroom flat in the British Midlands — long before Bachchan, in short pants at Sherwood, had learnt how to scowl,” said Deborshi Barat, the man who played Jimmy.

As the plot unfolds, the helplessness of the characters reminds us of the similar situation in the present day. “Barring a few candle-lit protests, some heated discussions and blacking out Facebook profile pictures — how did we react to the spurt of rape across the country? We were angry and we were helpless. That’s what Osborne’s play is all about,” explained director and producer Tathagata Chowdhury, who also played Cliff, the Welsh lodger.

“The narrow strip of plain hell”, as the character Helena Charles describes the flat of the Porters, convincingly portrayed the extent of frustration and anger of a generation that “can’t be tamed by picking daffodils with auntie Wordsworth”. Same here, do we say?

Pictures: Bhubaneswarananda Halder