Editing Look Back in Anger (section)

==Critical reception==
{{Unreferenced section|date=November 2017}}
At the time of production reviews of ''Look Back in Anger'' were deeply negative. [[Kenneth Tynan]] and [[Harold Hobson]] were among the few critics to praise it, and they now are regarded among the more influential critics of the time.

For example, on BBC Radio's ''The Critics'', [[Ivor Brown]] began his review by describing the play's setting—a one-room flat in the Midlands—as "unspeakably dirty and squalid" such that it was difficult for him to "believe that a colonel's daughter, brought up with some standards", would have lived in it. He expressed anger at having watched something that "wasted [his] time". The ''Daily Mail'''s [[Cecil Wilson (critic)|Cecil Wilson]] wrote that the beauty of Mary Ure was "frittered away" on a pathetic wife, who, "judging by the time she spends ironing, seems to have taken on the nation's laundry". Indeed, Alison, Ure's character, irons during Act One, makes lunch in Act Two, and leaves the ironing to her rival in Act Three.

On the other hand, [[Kenneth Tynan]] wrote that he "could not love anyone who did not wish to see ''Look Back in Anger''", describing the play as a "minor miracle" containing "all the qualities...one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage—the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of "official" attitudes, the [[surrealist]] sense of humour (e.g.,&nbsp;Jimmy describes an effeminate male friend as a 'female [[Emily Brontë]]'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned." [[Harold Hobson]] was also quick to recognise the importance of the play "as a landmark of British theatre". He praised Osborne for the play, despite the fact that "[[blinders|blinkers]] still obscure his vision".

[[Alan Sillitoe]], author of ''[[Saturday Night and Sunday Morning]]'' and ''[[The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner]]'' (both of which are also part of the "angry young men" movement), wrote that Osborne "didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up".