Jimmy Porter is approaching his half-century. He has always been cranky and now he looks downright creaky. One can only wonder that such an old-fashioned, wordy, absurdly misogynist play could ever have been considered revolutionary. Ken Tynan famously said that he could not love anyone who didn't want to see this play. With hindsight that sounds a bit like a man declaring undying devotion for someone with a ticket to The Mousetrap. John Osborne's play owes more to Agatha Christie than to modern theatre.
But if you lower your expectations by dissociating the play from its performance history, ignoring its place in the drama textbooks and treating Jimmy Porter as a person rather than an icon, it is possible to have a reasonably good evening at the theatre. If nothing else, Gareth Machin's production reminds us what a good potboiler this play is: the tensions, twists and turns of the plotting actually make an audience gasp if they are unfamiliar with the text. Gasping isn't a sound you hear often in the theatre nowadays.
The play is also as marvellous a portrait of a marriage as, say, Ibsen's A Doll's House, to which it owes so much with its squirrels and bears motif. Machin's production begins by capturing this well. Right from the start the dingy attic, where Jimmy and his friend Cliff (Mark Meadows, vigorously good) are reading the Sunday papers and Jimmy's wife, Alison, is ironing, crackles with unspoken tension. There is, in the vocabulary of the 1950s, "an atmosphere". It is the atmosphere of dead Sundays and a marriage dying on its feet.
But the portrait of the marriage only works if both sides are equally matched. Osborne ensures that both Jimmy and Alison are armed to the hilt and he keeps the balance of sympathies constantly shifting. But the actors have to do their bit. The play cannot work if the protagonists are not on an even footing. This is a bloody battle, not a walkover.
But the casting here means there is no battle, just a washout. Helen Franklin's Alison has a quiet, matter-of-fact power but, while Nick Moran may have proved his street cred with the success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, he has absolutely no charisma as Jimmy Porter. In fact he has almost no stage presence at all. Apart from the accent, which is spot on, everything about Moran's performance is superficial, from his reedy, nasal voice, which frequently sounds camp, to the lack of expression on his smooth, strangely untroubled brow. The ironing board exhibits more animation and elicits considerably more sympathy. Look Back in Anger is only great drama when you love and hate Jimmy with the same passion with which he loves and hates the world and all around him. Moran ensures that you couldn't care less.
Until March 24. Box office: 0117-987 7877.
