You may go expecting a museum-piece. What is startling is that John Osborne’s play, intimately based on his experiences as a married actor at Derby rep – and now celebrating its 60th anniversary – survives due to its unremitting emotional intensity. Director Sarah Brigham has also had the wit to precede it with an hour-long mono-drama by Jane Wainwright that charts the reaction of a gutsy modern working-class woman to life’s baffling disappointments.
Osborne’s play was initially hailed as a vital social document. It says a lot about the class-ridden culture of mid-50s Britain and paints a still-resonant picture of a younger generation educated but with nowhere to go. However, what keeps the play alive is its scorching, Strindbergian portrait of a failing marriage. Far from endorsing misogyny, it shows its destructive personal consequences. Jimmy Porter, thrashing around to find his place in the world and provoke his wife, uses words as his weapon: his spouse, Alison, is in no way a pliant punchbag but counters with an angry silence.
It is all there in the text which Brigham’s production has exhaustively mined. I’ve seen funnier Jimmy Porters but Patrick Knowles plays him very well as a displaced romantic who believes, rather like Osborne himself, that life is validated by pain.
Augustina Seymour’s Alison is a quietly strong woman who can neither live with nor without Jimmy, and who sees right through him when she piercingly claims “he’d be lost without his suffering”. There is strong support from Jimmy Fairhurst as Cliff, Daisy Badger as Helena and Ivan Stott as Alison’s father, who represents the Edwardian values that Jimmy secretly admires. But I suspect that what kept a packed house in thrall was Osborne’s unflinching study of a tormented marriage.
Wainwright’s Jinny has much in common with Osborne’s hero, while being totally distinctive. Like Jimmy, she has a degree but no fulfilling job. Where he plays the trumpet, she opts for the guitar. She also has a way with words and, as we follow her through a Derby day in which she auditions as a singer-songwriter, she offers sharply funny observations on her pregnant flatmate, the city’s denizens and the pretensions of the music industry’s middle-management, who seek to colonise feminism and tell her “menstruation is fashionable”. As buoyantly played by Joanna Simpkins, Jinny is oppressed but never downcast. “There’s no one voice of a generation – there’s millions,” she declares, and where she crucially differs from Osborne’s Jimmy is in her resilient refusal to give way to enraged despair.
- At Derby theatre until 26 March. Box office: 01332 593939.
