In his worn clothes and dead-end job, Jimmy is well aware of the inequity of life. Everything from newspaper editorials to church bells remind him that he is second class, but nothing is more emblematic of his perceived worthlessness than his treatment by Alison's middle class family. "Mummy had made me sign everything over to her, in trust, when she knew I was really going to marry Jimmy," Alison admits. In the aftermath of their wedding, her parents' attitude towards Jimmy grew even colder, as he explains to Cliff when he discovers a letter from Alison's mother: "Oh I'm such a fool! This is happening every five minutes of the day. She gets letters. Letters from her mother, letters in which I'm not mentioned at all because my name is a dirty word."
For Jimmy, this mistreatment is not just a slight against him; it's indicative of the entire battle between their social classes. And this isn't just a fight, it's an unfair fight. "The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!" he rants at the play's climax. But this is not a new sensation. "You see," Jimmy clarifies, "I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry-angry and helpless. And I can never forget it."
But class is only one part of the injustice. Jimmy also has history against him. Reaching adulthood in an era where the enemy is no longer clearly definable and absolute villains like Hitler and Mussolini have vanished, there seems to be no purpose in life, for rich and poor alike. "I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer," Jimmy explains, "We had all that done for us in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids. There aren't any good, brave causes left."
This isn't to say that Jimmy doesn't have a cause, and it isn't to say that this cause doesn't redeem him. At the play's end, after the couple have survived separation, betrayal, miscarriage, and endless cruelty, Jimmy breaks down to Alison: "I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter." It's a tenuous sort of resolution, but it's hard not to embrace Jimmy after seeing his heart so unguarded.
Look Back in Anger gave England a shock of indescribable proportions. As a New York Times reviewer described it, "Osborne is not loved in England. Those on the right detest him for his views on royalty and his contempt for their values. Those on the left suspect him for his relentless attacks on their preoccupation with materialism." The sheer transgression of his work ("Within the space of a minute every language taboo of the English stage was flouted") engendered an entirely new set of possibilities for the theater. Look Back in Anger fixed Osborne's place in the canon of British Drama, but it also created opportunities for a whole generation of truth-telling playwrights. Written on the ten-year anniversary of Look Back in Anger's debut, an article reflecting on the play's continuing impact described this trailblazing: "Until Osborne achieved a really big financial success, no one wanted to invest in plays that went against the most hallowed conventions. Once it was demonstrated that such serious drama in such unconventional language about such unconventional people could make money, the other young playwrights were able to come into their own."
The play also made an immediate success out of John Osborne. In 1958, Look Back in Anger was turned into a successful film, which was nominated for four British Academy Awards. The film poster announced: "the audience was jolted as if they'd been sitting for 2 hours in an electric chair!" In a newspaper profile written just five years after the debut of Look Back in Anger, Osborne is described as possessing "the comfortable feel of money and the pleasure of a charming flat in Chelsea and the use of a house in France," later adding: "He has satisfied his desire to wear fashionable clothes." While the success of his work gave Osborne an escape hatch out of poverty, it did nothing to change his politics or vigor. The same profile opens with the lines, "No British writer since World War II has enjoyed controversy more than John Osborne and few of them have caused so much of it."
By the time of his death in 1994, Osborne had written 24 plays for the stage, two screenplays (including Tom Jones, which won him an Oscar), a number of television plays, and two volumes of autobiography. His relationship with controversy continued through to the end of his life, and in 1993, while being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Writer's Guild of Great Britain, Osborne stood up and walked out of his own ceremony. The following day, there wasn't a single English-speaking paper in the world that could resist reporting on his effrontery under the headline "Angry Old Man."