It seems like a particularly American folly to mistake poverty for pigsty, which is, regrettably, what happens in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Look Back in Anger, under the direction of Sam Gold. Written by British playwright John Osborne, the play centers on a love triangle in a drab flat in the Midlands, in Central England, and it spawned something of a revolution when it premiered on the London stage in 1956; critics began throwing around the term “Angry Young Men” to describe Osborne and his cast of disaffected, bitter characters. In the current production, much of the bite is gone.

The action revolves around Jimmy Porter, a sharp-tongued, university-educated, working-class Brit who has married up, settled down, and is sinking. His wife, Alison, daughter of a retired colonel formerly lording it on the subcontinent, is frequently and unfairly the target of his diatribes. The two live in their rented flat together with Cliff, who is Jimmy’s business partner in a sweet stand. Cliff also serves as what he calls a “no-man’s land” between Jimmy and his wife. Alison leaves eventually, at the behest of a visiting friend, Helena, who quickly fills the empty space with her own warm body.

There are a lot of reasons this play is relevant today. One needn’t look far to find analogues between Jimmy and the lost generation of recent American college grads, awash in debt, distressed at their bleak prospects; for the first time in this nation’s history, the young generation is staring at a future with a downward trajectory. The Occupy movements that swept through the country after the economic collapse in 2011 were partly driven by resentment toward a generation, and a class, that wreaked havoc on an economic system, but still enjoyed its treasures. Jimmy, with his father-in-law freshly returned from newly independent India, could just as easily have been a character sketched last autumn.

This is a play that speaks to today’s America, and yet, in its current form, falls short of its potential. The most glaring problem with the Roundabout Theatre’s production is the set design. In the original, though Osborne is not heavy-handed with stage directions, one does get a good sense of the setup: a wardrobe covered with knickknacks at one end of the apartment, an ironing board at the other, and in between, a kitchen table and two shabby armchairs. In Gold’s production, the kitchen table is gone, and the tenants dine on the floor – on which, inexplicably, are tossed various rotting odds and ends: a discarded head of cabbage; soiled dishes; open tins of food. The immediate impression is of a pigsty, and there follows from this a perfectly natural association: in pigsties usually dwell pigs.

This is a grievous and false substitution, and one that recalls the unpleasant evacuation of protesters from Zuccotti Park for “sanitary considerations” last fall. The set design conflates two very separate issues, and implies that working class is not only a financial situation, but a hygienic one as well. The Porters sleep on a soiled mattress, kept propped up against the wall when not in use. This is not only unfaithful to the original, but misleading, as well — they’re hard-up, working-class folks, not squatters. People that leave a dozen dirty dishes to collect cockroaches on their living room floor are not ones who easily arouse our sympathy.

Then there’s the acting.

Mathew Rhys, perhaps familiar for his role as Kevin Walker in the ABC family drama Brothers and Sisters, plays Jimmy. Alison is played by Sarah Goldberg, mostly unknown to American audiences but with a string of British stage credits to her name. While both are fine actors, they are somehow mismatched in their roles. Rhys doesn’t have the necessary edge for cutting cruelty that his character must possess. Jimmy wages war on the world around him by dropping precise verbal bombs, and Alison defends the fortress of her self by only rarely acknowledging her husband’s sadism. Moreover, Rhys’s overemotional acting is somewhat like a sloppy invasion of ground troops, and Goldberg’s puzzling inflection at times vacillates between a lobotomized flat line and a madwoman. She’s at her best when she maintains the aloof detachment that all good British parents of a certain class instill in their children. In order for Jimmy to be believed when he complains of his wife’s distant demeanor, some trace of that characteristic must be discernible to the audience. Jimmy, at one point taking out a dictionary and reading a definition that is an indictment, calls his wife “Lady Pusillanimous.” Unfortunately, in this revival, Alison is not timid, but unbalanced.

Adam Driver, a former Marine who is a rising star on Broadway and in television, and a very physical actor, plays Cliff. The character is an even-tempered, if not brilliant, barrier between the warring spouses, but Driver portrays him with too much machismo and buffoonery, eroding Cliff’s credibility as a keeper of the peace. At one point, he wrings out a wet shirt over Jimmy’s head. It almost seems like an ad-lib, so out of place is it; it subtracts.

The most laudable performance is that of Charlotte Parry, whose portrayal of Helena, the upper-class actress friend of Alison’s, is sniping and penetrating. Helena, who intends to stay only for a week but remains in the apartment after Alison abandons her husband, usurps her friend’s place on the coital, though not marital, bed. Look Back in Anger is, in its own way, a moral tale, and Helena is unable to get beyond her guilt, even as she sins. Jimmy and Alison are married, though separated, and this still means something in the moral universe of Helena. When Alison returns to her former flat after a failed pregnancy at the play’s end, and finds her husband and her best friend cohabiting, Helena is the one who voices misgivings. She leaves, and Jimmy and Alison end up right where they started, and the lights go out.

Look Back in Anger resonates, despite its faults, because its revival comes at a moment in American history when a work about profound frustration can slide right into the national emotional landscape. Alison Porter is torn between an upper-middle class whose values she doesn’t share, and a working-class husband she can’t live with. Jimmy Porter, a man “born out of his time,” is trapped by the drudgery of a mindless existence and pangs of class inferiority. They are not bad people.

“The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!” These are Jimmy’s words, but they sound eerily familiar to us today.

Look Back in Anger is playing through April 8 at the Laura Pels Theatre located at 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY, 10036. For showtime and ticket information visit http://www.roundabouttheatre.org or call 212-719-1300.

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