Look Back in Anger (1956) is by far the most famous of John Osborne\'s plays. It was the foundational work of the genre for which the term “kitchen-sink drama” was coined. The gritty realism of its setting represented a revolution in the British theatre, one which gave to the play when it was first produced a political and cultural significance which it is hard to comprehend nearly 50 years later. The play was perceived as giving voice to a frustrated and politically and culturally disenfranchised constituency – the lower-middle-class, first-generation graduates whose literary heroes, including Osborne, became known as the Angry Young Men

The play describes 1950s life in an East Midlands bed-sitting room among the unde

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Published 17 July 2001

Citation: Wyllie, Andrew. "Look Back in Anger". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 July 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3921, accessed 9 February 2010.]