Theatre Look Back in Anger Tonight at the Loeb Ex

PITY Poor Jimmy Porter.

They've ripped out his guts and substituted bile, have transformed his rhetoric into rant. No longer the liberator of a stage, he has been bound into its conventions, becoming a plaything for experimenting youngsters and a typical "serious" theatre audience in wire-rims and leotards.

I walked into the Loeb Ex Thursday night determined not to compare John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger with Liz Coe's production. After all, it was Osborne himself who thought that critics have continually overemphasized the social and historical values of his work. In an oft-repeated remark, he stated that his purpose was to make the audience "feel" something-and think about it afterwards.

But while watching Look Back in Anger, his audience was aroused precisely because of the social context-and the moral values that went with it-which "hero" Jimmy Porter's nigh-anarchistic statements reviled. And part of the joy that young Britons felt in experiencing the play-and glorified by Kenneth Tynan in his influential reviews-came from Osborne-Porter's own delight in consciously attacking the symbols of decency and stability which had been lulling the progeny of the Welfare State into complacent acceptance and lethargy, where life was guaranteed, but spirit was not. In Osborne's play, Porter's rage had no outlet, and was turned inward upon himself and his personal world. Osborne's impact, however, was felt throughout the island, and influenced not only such dramatists as Arnold Wesker and John Arden but the Free Cinema movement as well; as Lindsay Anderson put it, all were determined to "raise the red flag" once again, to realize that giving a man just enough bread to eat might be giving him the solace that sinks him.

ALAS, a lot of water's gone under the bridge since 1956. Those British who sadly watched the resolution of the Suez War have been getting pleasure and revenge in watching the rise and fall of another empire. And the more successful rad-lib playwrights and filmmakers found national values immutable and moved on to Hollywood.

The values of Look Back in Anger, however, are not nullified by the change in its creators' attitudes. In fact, I would think that if presented as a period piece, it would have all the greater tragic impact. However, the Loeb Ex group has not only updated the play, but moved it to America.

Both moves are disastrous. The context is so implausible that one cannot believe in the honesty of the theatrical experience. We are shown a stiff-upper-lip Colonel firmly set in the aristocratic European military tradition-and are asked to accept him as part of upper-class New York social circles. We are asked to believe in a young debtype with scruples about sex and religion. And, after one of the greatest tie-loosening decades in American history, we must also accept her guilt over marrying the man she loves against her mother's wishes.

ALL THESE changes would be minor indeed, as would many of the incidental anachronisms, if Jimmy Porter had been able to survive the transition intact. Unfortunately, current experience works against him, and his very moral outrages are obscured by political issues. In a country where youth are writing and collectivizing and protesting against institutions which are protecting distorted values, Jimmy Porter is nothing but a snivelling little constipated pig.

And he's no longer even dramatically amusing. Even with the legitimacy of his social bitterness taken away by the director, he should still be able to implicate the audience in the artistry of his sadistic diatribes. But Pope Brock plays him in such a one-note key of gulping and spitting and snickering cynicism that the spectacle becomes numbing.

Of course, not all of Osborne's force can be diminished, and when rich-bitch Helena enters in the Second Act as foil for Porter's venom, the performance really sparks; but her spark is as ephemeral as Ali's in the thirteenth round. The director has done everything possible to obstruct dramatic tensions. The violent actions are more uncomfortable than discomfiting, the quiet moments are languorous. Against the evening's generally ham-handed pacing, Porter's songwriting-dancing interludes seem too clever by half. The actors strive valiantly to overcome the director's schematized conception, but only John Archibald (who plays both Porter's friend Cliff and Mrs. Porter's father) is successful.

But whose fault is it that everything about the production-including the Caligari -like setting-is inimical to the reality portrayed? It is too easy to criticize students who have responded deeply enough to a serious and difficult play to invest the necessary time and pain involved in its presentation. No, this Look Back in Anger seems a product of a society where culture and social truth are isolated from each other. And, in its own lack of provision for programs which could combine theatrical activity with a meaningful social or historical perspective, Harvard only perpetuates our society's cultural superficialities.