When George Devine took over the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 he put out an advert seeking “hard-hitting, uncompromising writers” who could revitalise a postwar British theatre scene still stuck in upper-class drawing rooms. He found what he was looking for in John Osborne and his play Look Back in Anger — seen by Devine as “the bomb that would blow a hole in the old theatre”.

We seem to have been living with the aftershocks ever since. Osborne’s antihero, Jimmy Porter, is a disaffected, furious young working-class man, railing against the establishment and being vile to his upper-middle-class wife, Alison. But the play’s energy and urgency is undeniable and it galvanised a generation, with Osborne anointed the head of a new cultural movement of angry young men.

“It was a revolution in British theatre,” the critic and lecturer Aleks Sierz insists. “The essential energy of British new writing starts there. Without Look Back in Anger we wouldn’t have Mark Ravenhill, or Sarah Kane or Mike Bartlett.”

Despite its mythologised status, Look Back in Anger hasn’t been staged in London for 25 years. Perhaps that’s not surprising – because certain aspects of the play do not appear to have aged well. To a modern mind, the way Jimmy treats Alison can be viewed as emotional abuse, and the play can feel hard to celebrate due to its misogyny. Jimmy spends much of the play viciously undermining Alison in lengthy speeches: he ceaselessly criticises and belittles her as small-minded and unfeeling, insulting her friends and family (going so far as to wish her mother dead, and expressing sympathy for the digestive troubles of any worms who try to eat the corpse of “that old bitch”). Not knowing she’s pregnant, Jimmy tells Alison he hopes she conceives a child, and that it dies — just so he can watch her experiencing real pain. “It is a kind of revenge porn,” Sierz says. “After the collapse of his marriage to Pamela Lane, Osborne took out all his frustrations in the play.”

Even the director of a new production, about to open at the Almeida in north London, had reservations about staging it. When Atri Banerjee was asked by the theatre’s head, Rupert Goold, if he wanted to direct, he didn’t say yes immediately, being seized by the sense that Osborne’s play was “this little vial of radioactive poison”.

But ultimately it was too interesting to turn down. And the 30-year-old director hopes to confront the legacy of the play. “Why do we teach it? Why do we valorise it? What is it about?” he says. “If we don’t stage the play, it’s hard to answer such questions.

Osborne’s play will be put in context by being performed in rep — under the banner Angry and Young — alongside another play from the era, Arnold Wesker’s Roots, from 1958. Wesker said of Look Back in Anger that it “opened the doors for all the succeeding generations of writers”, himself included, so it is a smart move to pair the plays.

Roots, however, centres on an angry young woman. Beatie Bryant returns home from London to rural Norfolk, parroting the rhetoric of her boyfriend, a socialist firebrand, in an attempt to shock her complacent family awake. She then finds her own authentic voice. Roots is directed by Diyan Zora, and for each director the challenge has been working out how to make these plays feel as vital and relevant as they were in the 1950s.

Yet you may be relieved to hear that neither has been transposed wholesale into 2024 — there will be period costumes and the original text, even if neither Banerjee or Zora are going for full kitchen-sink realism. Instead, they promise more abstract stagings to help modern resonances to chime.

And when it comes to dealing with the misogyny of Look Back in Anger, Banerjee is clear that he wants to depict Jimmy and Alison’s relationship as “toxic and abusive”. In fact, that may be the thing that makes the play most relevant today.

“We live in an epidemic of misogyny and violence against women,” Banerjee says. “One of the things I was keen to explore as a young man was: what is this crisis in masculinity? What is it that causes men to be violent to the women they love? How do we break that cycle?”

Morfydd Clark performs in each play, as Beatie in Roots and Alison’s friend Helena in Look Back in Anger. A veteran of horror movies, including Saint Maud and Starve Acre, she considers Look Back in Anger a “domestic abuse horror” and hopes that in their version “Jimmy feels interrogated in a way that he maybe wasn’t always”.

There’s no excuse for Jimmy turning his rage on his wife, but the question of what happens when a whole class feels left behind and not listened to is one that should strike contemporary chords.

“Jimmy is a model of white masculinity that feels under threat,” Banerjee points out, likening that in the next breath to the riots of this summer. Billy Howle, the actor playing Jimmy, also points to parallels between the angry young men and the rioters. “Lots of people don’t feel that they have a voice. Where does that feeling of disillusionment go? What does it turn into? It can metastasise into quite ugly things.”

The directors also see parallels between the era when these “angry” plays were written and our time. “Look Back in Anger was written in a moment of political upheaval,” Banerjee says, and although he’s quick to recognise that today’s younger generation have not lived through world wars, millennials and Gen Z have endured plenty of turbulence, including financial crashes, austerity, populism, Covid and the climate crisis.

“There is a similar feeling of disenfranchisement, upheaval, and lots of young people feel very angry, whether that’s about Gaza, or [the] climate, or many of the big political issues,” Banerjee says.

The plays are about generational divides, another thing that feels pertinent. There are gaps between young and old, whether over voting for remain or leave in the Brexit referendum of 2016, or for Labour or the Conservatives in the recent general election.

“In the 1950s it was like there was a portion of society ready for change and a portion that were holding on to the way things were before,” Zora says. “And that’s how it feels now.” As Alison in Look Back in Anger says to her father, “You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same … Something’s gone wrong somewhere, hasn’t it?”

Whether audiences find these plays successfully hold a mirror up to 2024 or remain snapshots of a long-gone era, it is undeniable that Osborne and Wesker knew how to write enduringly juicy characters. Beatie is an unusually brilliant lead female part from the era, as full of conflicted, restless energy as Jimmy, if rather more optimistic and hopeful with it.

“She isn’t the hero, she’s just someone going on her own journey,” Clark says. “Roots is a call to arms to be curious. You have a choice not to be apathetic and that apathy is the thing holding us back from social justice and change.”

Howle is just as keen on Jimmy, even if Jimmy is problematic. The 34-year-old first read Look Back in Anger in his late teens and fell in love with it. “I loved the muscularity of the language. It trips off my tongue and I understood Jimmy. I just got it.”

Howle says he would never defend Jimmy’s misogynistic behaviour — but he does think we could do with more of his righteous fury against the way the world works. “What are you not angry about? You ought to be angry. In the world in which we live, the injustice of it, there is so much to be angry about.”

Look Back in Anger and Roots are at the Almeida, London N1, to November 23, almeida.co.uk