'Roots' / 'Look Back in Anger' review — this blistering double bill of radical 1950s plays is essential viewing

Read our review of Roots and Look Back in Anger, starring Morfydd Clark and Billy Howle, now in performances at the Almeida Theatre to 23 November.

The London theatrical ecosystem is an intriguing one. The Almeida has opened a blistering double bill of 1950s plays associated with the Royal Court, even as that new writing theatre has reclaimed attention with a new play, Giant, one could well imagine at the Almeida.

No matter: the Almeida’s current pairing merits attention regardless of the address, placing John Osborne’s 1956 study in untrammelled bile, Look Back in Anger, with Arnold Wesker’s portrait of female self-improvement, Roots. This rare instance of theatrical repertory is essential viewing.

The two plays premiered two years apart but present characters at odds with the world. The focus in Roots is on the questing Beatie Bryant (rising film name Morfydd Clark, in a stonking star turn) a farmer’s daughter who seeks relief and release from what she none too charitably describes as “a small-minded family”.

She sees a possible way out in the unseen Ronnie, a high-minded socialist who functions as an equivalent Godot in terms of defining a play in which he never appears. (He does show up in the other plays that form a trilogy with Roots.)

Beatie has learned the importance of words – “bridges,” she says, “to get safely from one place to another”. But that also means burning a few, or at least throwing shade on loved ones.

You feel for the wonderful Sophie Stanton, playing a mum in thrall to the timetables of local public transport, when she snaps at Beatie late on, but you equally admire a parent who notes the nascent radical in her child. Not everyone with a life force for a daughter would recognise that fact, and Beatie absolutely won’t be reined in: the director Diyan Zora suggests as much, spotlighting the character’s periodic soliloquising for emphasis.

Beatie’s provincial roots co-exist with an unbridled passion heading who knows where? One minute Norfolk, the next very possibly Speakers’ Corner, and Zora and an ace cast – who appear at the periphery of Naomi Dawson’s set to offer up props as needed – leave you, well, rooting for Beatie every step of the way.

The stage floor of the same set opens up to suggest an abyss – or, shall we say, psychic despair made literal – in the director Atri Banerjee’s scorching reclamation of Look Back in Anger. This play has always been tricky given the relentless, unforgiving nature of the vitriolic Jimmy Porter, whom Billy Howle plays with a blazing charisma that draws the attention even as Jimmy’s words often repel. (All the Look Back cast are in Roots, which has the larger ensemble of the two plays.)

I was put in mind of the onetime National Theatre revival of this very play, with Michael Sheen, which dared to critique a defining character from the English canon who in decades past might have been held up for celebration.

But as Howle seizes the part with seismic authority, you feel the near-madness of a man at incontrovertible odds with both society and himself. His response is to lash out at the person he loves most – his patient wife, Alison (a tremulous Ellora Torchia), the colonel’s daughter drawn in some unknowable way to the demonic fury in a partner who could as easily destroy her.

The play posits the kind of mutually toxic mating dance that Edward Albee would revisit several years later in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that play’s George a natural for Howle in due course. For now, you shiver at Jimmy’s weaponising of verbal finesse – language from his mouth cuts arguably more deeply than a knife – even as you sense a lost and haunted manchild adrift in a world that, as Jimmy knows full well, doesn’t give a damn.

Iwan Davies and Morfydd Clark (doing astonishing double duty across both plays) lend exemplary support as onlookers-turned-participants in this possible fight to the finish. The show closes on the saddening image of the central couple lowering from view, looking neither forward nor back but immured in an existential prison from which, on this evidence, they may never break free.

Roots and Look Back in Anger are at the Almeida Theatre to 23 November.

Photo credit: Roots and Look Back in Anger (Photos by Marc Brenner)