There are some out there who claim Damien Ryan doesn’t actually exist, and despite having interviewed him once before, I’m starting to feel there is truth to the rumour.

Finding time to speak with the man is like being granted an audience with the Pope, and with good reason; not only are his energies focused on the 60th anniversary of Look Back In Anger, which he co-directs at the Old Fitz Theatre this month, but he is also performing in Twelfth Night at Belvoir. Between juggling two such disparate styles of theatre in his head – Shakespeare and violent naturalism – it’s amazing he even has time for sleep.

“It’s funny, as you get older and get more experience… I feel like ten years ago I’d be very worked up by the busyness of having several projects at once, but you really do realise that it’s just a craft,” says Ryan. “It’s like woodwork. You go into a room, you try not to over-prepare because you want to be responsive to what’s organically happening – be it as an actor or director, although you obviously want to do a lot of research first to really get to know the play – but you don’t over-prepare exactly what you’re going to do with that [knowledge]. You want to get into that room and be as impulsive and as free as can be, free in the relationship between the actor and the text, between actor and other actors in that space. You kind of allow yourself to shed your ambitions a bit, your worries.

“When you’re a young director, you’re terrified of questions, that you’re expected to know everything, answer any question. But it’s quite the opposite. You don’t need to know, you need to find out. You need to ask questions. I find it very liberating now. To be honest, I’ve done many years of touring, spending six months doing just one play, and that I find incredibly wearying. It’s so unending, so repetitive, and I find that very hard. I almost love rehearsing a play more than performing it ad infinitum. That’s when you’re still searching and discovering.”

John Osborne’s play of conflict and class premiered back in 1956, and although the majority of reviews at the time were scathing, the significance today of Look Back In Anger is remarkable. Focussing on a complicated three-way romance, the play helped ignite a cultural shift from the escapism of theatre – that of musicals and classical performance – to stories that brought the rabble of humanity centre stage.

“Everyone knows it’s a seminal work, and I often think it’s the reason we have a theatre like the Old Fitzroy,” Ryan says. “It’s one of the plays that made such a theatre possible, that made that extreme intimacy, that raw naturalism. Obviously many plays since have gone a lot further than Look Back In Anger, in shock value or intensity or brutality.

“I mean, there isn’t even a swear word in this play. It has all this incredible shock value, but it’s quite clean to modern ears compared to today, where anything and everything can be found onstage. But it’s a play that every young actor at some point falls in love with, because the speeches are so remarkable, and the intensity of the characters. When Liz [Schebesta, co-director] and I put out the audition notice to see actors, we had such a line of people wanting to work on this play, which shocked us a little since it’s quite brutal in its misogyny. They find something very intriguing in what the play is saying, and the writing is just so good that so many actors just want to get their mouth around those words.”

Part of the significance of Look Back In Anger isn’t just the strength of the play itself, but the context. Just as earlier audiences were both convinced and repelled by the real-world representation of Jimmy Porter – a working-class character whose frustrations and casual cruelty towards the women in his life were all too recognisable – so will contemporary audiences find these echoes of emotional and cultural disillusionment eerily familiar.

“It’s a real joy to work on, even though the ideas are really harrowing,” says Ryan. “It’s something that is so topical to us today. This same disillusioned wasteland of ideals that have come to nought, this sense of having nothing to fight for, nothing to believe in, I think is characteristic of so many young men and women. I think it’s the same thing that drives the terrible violence that we see in our culture, the sense of young boys so desensitised by a hundred different types of boredom, where they grow up too quickly surrounded by sex and violence, while at the same time they’re not growing up at all.

“We change the incidental things that surround ourselves, but we don’t change the fundamentals. You turn on the news tonight and there will be three or four crimes of passion in Sydney this week. We change the nature of our homes, our relationship to technology, all of these things. We think we’re more enlightened. But there are so many psychological parts of us that just don’t change.

“Jimmy articulates all those things in 1956 without talking about particular things that are affecting people today, and I think that’s part of what makes it a classic. It tells the truth.”

[Look Back In Anger photo by John Marmaras]

Look Back In AngerrunsTuesday August 16 – Saturday September 10 at theOld Fitz Theatre; thenBelvoir St Theatre Tuesday September 13 – Saturday September 17.

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