Plays change. In 1956 Osborne's work was praised for its social passion. Now, watching Gregory Hersov's strong revival at the National, what strikes one is its excavation of marital pain. It is as if Osborne has moved from being Shaw to Strindberg in a generation.
Obviously the play still catches the fractious boredom of 1950s provincial life and the discontent of frustrated youth. Eden's England is a place where, according to Jimmy Porter, reason and progress are in retreat, bishops bless H-bombs, culture is in the hands of an exclusive club and class has re-asserted its pre-war primacy.
Jimmy's retaliation, however, is either to marry or bed upper-class women; sex becomes a form of revenge on a social system. This gives the play its emotional dynamic: Jimmy loves Alison but loathes everything she represents, while she, far from being passive, deploys the classic tactic of strategic withdrawal. Thus their domestic life becomes what Cliff, the amiable buffer-zone, accurately calls "narrow strip of hell".
This is certainly how Hersov's production is played, as a study in the intricacies of marital warfare. Michael Sheen delivers Jimmy's famous tirades as tactical weapons designed to penetrate the enemy's defences. He's always itching for a fight, so that even when a radio concert is playing in perfect peace he snaps: "Everyone's making such a din."
Sheen's Jimmy is not the Angry Young Man of popular imagination: more a desperate neurotic, sexually enthralled by his class enemy and for ever casting sidelong glances to see how his insults are playing. He's so locked into the battle that he's bored by a temporary truce as you deduce from the impatient finger-drumming when Matilda Ziegler's Helena replaces Alison at the ironing-board.
It's a shining performance from Sheen. And Emma Fielding as Alison makes nonsense of the charge that this is a nasty misogynist play. Fielding's Alison is an upper-class toughie who uses silence as a form of provocation, is capable of flooring Jimmy by remarking that he'd be "lost without his suffering" and who shocks even her father by the coldness of her defection. It is a good play precisely because Jimmy and Alison are well-matched opponents in the endless class war. What this production intelligently leaves open is whether the truce will turn into lasting peace.
William Gaunt also lends Alison's Edwardian army father the right degree of equivocal pathos, Jason Hughes's Cliff is clearly besotted by Alison, and Robert Jones has designed a fine set dominated by a sloping, slate-coloured ceiling that oppresses the characters and reminds us that, in Osborne's world, marriage is always a mine-strewn battlefield.
