Almeida Theatre 1950s double bill: ‘An angry return to the kitchen sink’

Almeida Theatre | ★★★★✩

I suspect Arnold Wesker would have been delighted to have his play Roots paired with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Both playwrights were part of the Angry Young Man theatrical revolution. But it was Osborne’s, first seen in 1956, three years before Wesker’s, that became emblematic of a new era of theatre by placing an ironing board centre stage.

Meanwhile, Wesker’s play would become best known as part of the East End Jewish playwright’s famous trilogy, preceded by Chicken Soup With Barley and followed by I’m Talking About Jerusalem. Yet the revival of Anger and Roots as part of the Almeida’s Angry and Young season has upended the notion that Roots is the minor relation to Osborne’s work.

Intentionally or not, the paired works that share the same excellent cast make the case that Roots is by far the better play. Set in rural Norfolk its heroine is Beatie Bryant (a terrific Morfydd Clark) who has returned to the family home from London where her head was filled with all sorts of high-minded ideas about politics and culture by her socialist Jewish boyfriend Ronnie.

She quotes him to her family all the time, telling them what Ronnie – the son in Chicken Soup – thinks of this and what Ronnie thinks of that. Though we never see him there is much that Ronnie has in common with Jimmy Porter, the flawed and much better known protagonist in Osborne’s work (played by Richard Burton in the film version). Both men are given to what today we would call mansplaining.

Morfydd Clark in Roots Photo: Marc Brenner[Missing Credit]

In Diyan Zora’s surefooted production of Roots, performed on a circular stage that revolves at dead slow speed, Ronnie’s views on the democratisation of culture are delivered by Beattie to her bemused parents and siblings with a burning passion while she stands on a chair that serves as a soapbox. And sometimes her pleas to her family to let art into their lives bears fruit. When Beattie plays Bizet’s L’Arlésienne on a her record player the music awakens a glimpse of possibility that her dulled mother (Sophie Stanton who embodies the grind of subsistence living) has never felt before.

These days Ronnie is seen as a patronising and chauvinistic figure. But the “Jew boy”, as Beattie’s brother benignly calls him, is really an introduction to Jewish discourse and to some extent Wesker himself. Similarly, Jimmy will also tell anyone who stands still long enough what is wrong with the world. But Atri Banerjee’s production cannot prevent Osborne’s flawed hero from coming across as a terrible bore. That two women, one with a her own successful acting career, fall for this constant complainer and his laboured, heavily ironic riffs on social injustice are today laughable. Played with relentless self-pity by Billy Howle, the chip on Jimmy’s shoulder – more like a great big spud – is partly the result of the contempt he felt from his middle class in-laws. But it is also just the way he is. Banerjee artfully attempts to justify Porter’s misery with an expressionistic abyss that briefly appears in the middle of the stage.

But I defy anyone not to wish that he falls into it. Wesker, whose reputation was much overshadowed by Osborne’s, emerges as much more potent dramatist by far.