Up close and personal

This year sees the 50th anniversary of John Osborne's ground-breaking Look Back in Anger.

This play introduced the expression "angry young man" to the world and brought the drama of real life to the stage for the first time, changing the face of British drama forever.

Look Back in Anger was up close and personal, as sensationally gripping as soap opera, as faithful to reality as fly-on-the-wall documentary and as skillfully compiled as a classic. The play took on not only the pre-war divisions of class and injustice which were still remarkably intact, but also the stuffy dead end in which theatre was stuck.

The Peter Hall Company season in Bath provides a unique opportunity to celebrate this landmark anniversary, beginning Wednesday, August 16 and running until Saturday, September 2. Peter Gill directs.

Jimmy Porter is passionate, articulate and educated but trapped within a dead-end job and the claustrophobia of the bed-sit where he lives with his wife and best friend. In an atmosphere charged with sexual tension and fraught with frustrated energy, this emotional and powerful work is both an extraordinary portrait of post-war Britain and a love story for its time.

Playing the role of Jimmy Porter will be one of Britain's most charismatic young actors, Richard Coyle, well-known as Jeff in Coupling, DI Walters in Cracker, John Ridd in Lorna Doone and John Strange in Strange. Film credits include A Good Year, Topsy Turvey and The Libertine. Stage appearances include The York Realist with Lloyd Owen, Proof with Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Carlos and After Miss Julie.

Mary Stockley stars as Alison Porter. Her stage work includes the recent West End revival of Anything Goes and playing Marilyn Monroe in last year's production of Terry Johnson's Insignificance.

On TV she has appeared in Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries and her films include the recent Pierrepoint and V for Vendetta.

Richard Harrington (Cliff Lewis) recently starred as Allan Woodcourt in the BBC's Bleak House.

His TV credits also include Gunpowder, Treason and Plot; Spooks; Dalziel and Pascoe; Silent Witness; Care and Rehab and Coronation Street.

His theatre credits include Other Hands, Art and Guff and Gas Station Angel.

Ronald Pickup (Colonel Redfern) was nominated for a 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Amy's View. His many TV appearances began with Doctor Who in 1963, and include Fortunes of War, Hustle and Inspector Morse. He plays Fraser in The Worst Week of My Life.

Rachael Stirling (Helena Charles) shot to fame in the series Tipping the Velvet and recently starred in Hotel Babylon, The Truth and Riot at the Rite. On stage she won rave reviews for her performance in Theatre of Blood (reprising the role her mother, Diana Rigg, played in the film), and in Tamburlaine. Her films include Still Crazy, Maybe Baby and Complicity.