The themes of Look Back in Anger and how they relate to my character and scenes.

The play consists of three acts. It is based in a one-bedroom flat in the Midlands. Jimmy Porter is a lower middle-class, university-educated man and lives with his wife Alison. His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them. Jimmy, intellectually restless and frustrated, reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their acceptance of the world around them.
-info from gradesaver.com

Style:

Two sound images from off-stage are used very effectively in Look Back in Anger: the church bells and Jimmy's jazz trumpet. The church bells invade the small living space and serve as a reminder of the power of the established church, and also that he doesn't care at all for their domestic peace. The jazz trumpet allows Jimmy's presence to dominate the stage even when he is not there.

Set:

The play takes place in the Porters' one-room flat, a fairly large attic room. The furniture is simple and rather old: a double bed, dressing table, book shelves, chest of drawers, dining table, and three chairs, two shabby leather arm chairs. The drab setting of the play emphasizes the contrast between the idealistic Jimmy and the dull reality of the world surrounding him. We purposely inserted a single arm chair into our performance as we wanted it to reptresent the same meaning as the trumpet; Jimmy is the only person who touches and sits on the chair and we wanted to also show again that Jimmy still had authority even when he wasn't in the room.

Inevitably, previous discussion has touched on many of the themes and issues which have been seen as significant in the play:

• the continuing sense of class division in British society in the 1950s despite
the post-war changes.

• a clash of generations: that of Osborne, Jimmy and Alison versus the older
generation represented by Colonel Redfern and the people quoted in the
newspapers.

• a sense of disenchantment with political processes.

• the expression of a desire for emotional contact and intensity.

• the supposedly sado-masochistic relationship between Jimmy and Alison;
• a supposed misogyny on Jimmy Porter’s part.

Although the play was initially taken up by some as expressing some sort of
oppositionist political viewpoint, fairly quickly critics began to qualify this.
-research from enotes.com

The Kitchen Sink Drama

Kitchen Sink drama is a term used to denote plays that rely on realism to explore domestic social relations. Realism, in British theatre, was first experimented with in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by such playwrights as George Bernard Shaw. This genre attempted to capture the lives of the British upper class in a way that realistically reflected the ordinary drama of ruling class British society.
-research from gradesaver.com

According to many critics, by the mid-twentieth century the genre of realism had become tired and unimaginative. Osborne's play returned imagination to the Realist genre by capturing the anger and immediacy of post-war youth culture and the alienation that resulted in the British working classes. Look Back in Anger was able to comment on a range of domestic social dilemmas in this time period. Most importantly, I think it was able to capture, through the character of Jimmy Porter, the anger of this generation that was developing just below the surface of British culture.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Angry Young Man

Osborne's play was the first to explore the theme of the "Angry Young Man." This term describes a generation of post-World War II artists and working class men who generally ascribed to leftist, sometimes anarchist, politics and social views. According to cultural critics, these young men were not a part of any organized movement but were, instead, individuals angry at a post-Victorian Britain that refused to acknowledge their social and class alienation.

I think you could say Jimmy Porter is most definitely considered to be an example of the angry young man. Jimmy is angry at the social and political structures that he believes has kept him from achieving his dreams and aspirations. He directs this anger towards his friends and, most evidently, his wife Alison, which definitely takes its toll on her.

Loss of Childhood

A theme that impacts the characters of Jimmy and Alison Porter in the play is the idea of a lost childhood. Osborne uses specific examples -- the death of Jimmy's father when Jimmy was only ten, and how he was forced to watch the physical and mental demise of the man to demonstrate the way in which Jimmy is forced to deal with suffering from an early age. I think Alison's loss of childhood is best seen in the way that she was forced to grow up too fast by marrying Jimmy so soon. Her youth is wasted so early on by marrying him and also in the anger and abuse that her husband levels upon her early on in their relationship. 

Osborne suggests that a generation of British youth has experienced this same loss of childhood innocence. Osborne uses the examples of World War, the development of the atomic bomb, and the decline of the British Empire to show how an entire culture has lost the innocence that other generations were able to maintain.

Sloth in British Culture

Jimmy Porter compares his quest for an emotional life to the slothfulness of the world around him. It is important to note that Jimmy doesnt really see the world around him.. He seems a kind of slothfulness of character, and Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins in Christian moral tradition, that refers to laziness, abd being physically and emotionally inactive which is exactly what Jimmy is. 

This slothfulness of emotion is best seen in the relationship between Alison and Cliff. Alison describes her relationship with Cliff as "comfortable." They are physically and emotionally affectionate towards each other and have a connection to each other that is like no other relationship in the play, even though Alison is actually married to Jimmy and that is a complete opposite relationship, but neither Alison or Cliff seem to want to take their passion to another level of intimacy. In this way, their relationship is lazy. 

Masculinity in Art

This is seen in the play in specific examples in which Jimmy Porter emotionally distresses Alison, his wife, and delivers a grisly monologue in which he wishes for Alison's mother's death.

Osborne, however, asserts that he is attempting to restore a vision of true masculinity into a twentieth century culture that he sees as becoming increasingly feminised, which I think he most definitely did when writing LBIA. This feminisation is seen in the way that British culture shows an "indifference to anything but immediate, personal suffering." 

Real Life

In the play, Jimmy has the desire to live a more real and full life. He compares this burning desire to the empty actions and attitudes of others. At first, he generalises this emptiness by criticizing the] opinions of those in the newspapers. He then turns his angry gaze to those around him and close to him, Alison, Helena, and Cliff.

Osborne's argument in the play for a real life is one in which men are allowed to feel a full range of emotions. The most real of these emotions is anger and Jimmy believes that this anger is his way of truly living.

Hero and anti hero:

Most plays embody more than one myth. Though Jimmy's alienation - his feeling of being out of place, his idealising of the past, his use of memory, as a defence against meaningless. Jimmy's way of looking back is congruent with his country's way of looking back. Both share assumption about explaining current affairs by contrasting them with an idealised past. 

Anger and Hatred

Jimmy Porter drives out of a deep well of anger. His anger is directed at those he loves the most such as Alison and Cliff. He lashes out in anger because of his deeply felt helplessness. When he was ten years old he watched his idealist father dying for a year from wounds and nursed him. "pouring out all that was left of his life to one bewildered little boy." He says, "You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I think this is one of the most expressed themes in the play and one of the most common themes.

research and notes from:
-enotes
-wikipedia
-wikidot
-gradesaver