It's time to rethink Alison Porter, wife of angry young Jimmy in Look Back in Anger. She chose the ironing board, after all, says Emma Fielding, who tackles the role in the National Theatre's new production. Here are the best of the rest.
Mary Ure played the original Alison alongside Kenneth Haigh's Jimmy in the 1956 Royal Court production. Her performance "deserves high honourî, said Tribune. "I can't understand why [Alison] doesn't throw a teapot at [Jimmy] quite early in the play...î When the show went to Broadway, Ure stayed at the Algonquin, where "problems of housekeeping (ie ironing) do not ariseî. Ure reprised the role for the 1959 x-rated film version. Richard Burton was her Jimmy. Ure - John Osborne's wife at the time - played the part like "Ophelia. Bullied and badgered beyond enduranceî, according to The Times. Labour peer Lord Amwell described the film as "pure filthî.
Emma Thompson's 1989 performance as Alison at the Lyric (to then about-to-be husband Ken Branagh's Jimmy) "revealed all the provocative passivity of a rabbit hypnotised by a snakeî, according to the late Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail.
Jane Asher's "pastily exhaustedî Alison projected some inner life into a satellite part, according to critic Irving Wardle. This was in 1963; the theatrical censor had been abolished and the play's insults (hardly violent nowadays) were restored in full for the first time.
And the others include ... Susan Wooldridge in the 1979 production at the Young Vic; Ciaran Madden in the BBC's Play of the Month in 1976; and Dorren Aris in a Granada TV version which caused national debate, nay uproar, in 1956.
