By Teresa Merrigan

When Jimmy Porter first burst on to the stage in Look Back in Anger, his ranting and railing against the harshness and contradictions of life in 1950s England proved impossible to ignore. The angry young man created by John Osborne was credited with ushering in a new era not just in the arts but in attitudes to authority and youth. The shock at the presence on stage of an ironing board – which kept Jimmy’s meek, middle-class wife busy – illustrates how far art was removed from reality.

Five decades on, in a neat role-reversal, it is the husband who fusses over the ironing board in Lie Back in Anger, while the wife holds forth on the injustices and impossibilities of life. But does this angry young woman force us to consider uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our society? Well, she certainly deserves a hearing, but ultimately Jimmy Porter’s 21st-century female alter-ego commands not so much attention as irritation.

Bridget O’Donnell was inspired by the 50th anniversary of Osborne’s play to examine whether a modern woman can be as uncompromising as Jimmy and whether the allegedly revolutionary decades that followed the original have brought genuine change. The problem with her play lies perhaps with the successors to the kitchen-sink drama: the soap opera and reality TV show. In both the participants, real and imagined, examine their lives in minute, sometimes painful, often tediously repetitive, detail. Jenny, O’Donnell’s anti-heroine, while keenly observed, rarely rises about this level.

The play opens, like Look Back, with the main character holding forth over the newspapers to husband Jimmy and best friend Kirsten. Sadly for Jenny, they are more interested in doing the ironing, watching Four Weddings and a Funeral and making tea than sharing her angst and reviving the passion of antiwar marches.

Her volume increases as she struggles to make herself heard above their sonambulance, or is it contentment? “Is this what we will teach our children – how to sleepwalk?” she asks. But all are rudely awakened by the arrival of Rufus, Jimmy’s public school pal, on a break from his government post in Moscow.

Jenny is repelled by this man who is “like a walking Nuts magazine” but he is also compelling because he gives her something she craves: a reaction. Instead of taking cover from her explosive opinionating he fires back his own arsenal of prejudice and invective. He describes their verbal tussles as “oral S&M – I don’t know whether to kiss or kick you”. In a convincingly brutish ending to the first half of the production, Rufus shows that Jenny provokes a physical reaction in him as well as a mental one.

The fallout from this shocking encounter is not exactly what we would expect in the second half, which is more satisfying than the first because Jenny’s wearing monologues are better balanced by the other characters’ dialogue. With Jimmy gone on a possibly permanent visit to his family, Jenny is at the ironing board while Rufus has bagged her place as armchair critic. Jenny has not succumbed entirely to domestic serfdom; her zealous vacuuming proves to be a ploy to reclaim her chair and newspaper from Rufus, much to the approval of Kirsten, who has been galvanised by his behaviour into speaking out herself – and far more effectively than her friend .

What Jenny does succumb to is the notion of least said, soonest mended. For all her verbal pyrotechnics, she proves unable to speak out when it really matters – and in the process loses those dearest to her as well as the chance of a new future with a new life. In her mixed-up space, no one can hear her scream.

Jenny Hurren is convincingly restless as her namesake character, bedevilled by student debt and a mind-numbing job in a call centre as well as by her dreams of what might be. Her rapidly delivered monologues sometimes make one wish for a pause button. Natasha Magigi, apparently struggling with a throat problem on the night we attended, plays the friend seemingly more interested in wearing killer boots and reading Heat magazine than changing the world, though actually more clued up that the over-informed Jenny.

Alastair Kirton, as the husband, doesn’t convince us of his affluent upbringing but is affecting when struggling to comprehend when his wife reveals the full cost of Rufus’s attack on her. Pearl Marsland puts in a caricature performance as Jimmy’s mother, although the wardrobe department have given her shoes that are definitely what not to wear for a Kensington dame. The standout performance comes from Theo Herdman as Rufus, his vocal and physical presence immediately telling us that no good can come of him.

O’Donnell, a TV producer and director, has woven plenty of good lines and up-to-the-minute references into the script; it already has an almost achingly period feel. “You’re Primark, not Prada, in the lay league,” Rufus tells Jenny. The book hurled in anger at him proves to The Da Vinci Code. But she is better at writing bitterness, the characters sounding unconvincing in their admittedly youthful attempts at expressing tenderness. In the end, we are not unhappy to leave Jenny to her fate, for we feel that she is lying back in a bed largely of her own making.

Lie Back in Anger, presented by Batteries Not Included and the Union Theatre, runs at the Union Theatre until May 20, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 7.30pm. Box office: 020 72619876.