Atri Banerjee, a Nice Young Man, Stages an Angry Old Play

The night before the theater director Atri Banerjee was due to leave London for Manchester to start rehearsals for a new show, burglars broke into his house. First he was assailed with racist abuse, then physically assaulted.

It was May 2019, and the Manchester job, directing an adaptation of “Hobson’s Choice,” at the prestigious Royal Exchange Theater, was a big break for Banerjee, who was stepping up after another director withdrew.

“It was a landmark moment for me,” said Banerjee, 30, whose parents are Indian and who grew up in Italy and the Britain. “I had never felt victimized or oppressed because of my brownness,” he said. “Suddenly you realize it’s very easy to be put into a box. It sharpened my political awareness about why theater, so good at celebrating the multiplicity of identity, is important.”

Banerjee was speaking in an interview at the Almeida Theater, in London, where he was rehearsing John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 play, “Look Back in Anger,” which opens at the playhouse on Friday. Part of a repertory season called “Angry and Young,” it will run in tandem with Arnold Wesker’s 1958 “Roots,” directed by Diyan Zora.

“Look Back in Anger,” teeming with fury and frustration at the hidebound British class system, sparked the Angry Young Men movement in literature and theater in the 1950s. (The writers Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Alan Sillitoe were also associated with it.) “A watershed in the history of modern drama,” Martin Esslin wrote in The New York Times on the tenth anniversary of the play’s West End premiere, which was followed the next year by a Broadway run.