THE CHARACTERS OF “PARTY TIME” BY HAROLD PINTER AND

“THE KITCHEN” BY ARNOLD WESKER

We are going to study the characters of two plays: “Party Time” by Harold Pinter and “The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker. In these two plays we find easily the differences about the characters. The most important difference is that the characters are from different social classes.

Firstly, in “Party Time” we deduce from the marginal notes, from the things that the characters talk about and from the way of acting, how the characters are. The characters are in groups where they talk about themes like clubs, golf, boats and other (for example when Terry talks to Gavin about a club, the Real class, when Gavin says “I’m a golfer. I play golf” or when Dusty says “I love boats”). Taking references of these examples, we can guess that the characters are upper class people. In addition the action takes place in a party, a characteristic environment of this social class.

Secondly, the characters of “The Kitchen”, I think are lower class. There are many situations that we can take to defend this idea, for example, the space of the play is the place of work of all of the characters, this characteristic is common in lower class because these people have to work a lot to nourish their families. In other situations some characters have got a confrontation (for example between Peter and Gaston there is a confrontation that Anne asks for it: “Hey, Raymond, tell me, what happened to Peter in the end, you know, last night?”). Also at the beginning the characters are described, for example the description of Peter is : “He is boisterous, aggressive, too mery, and yet good-natured”. And physical descriptions (into other), for example of Bertha: “Large woman, coarse, friendly, narrow-minded, Jewish.” Also there are other kinds of adjectives like “young” and “adolescent” wich describe the age of some characters. The characters of this play have a point of psychology, that is to say, they share psychologic situations.

In conclusion, in these two plays the characters do not have any aspects in common, because each one belong to a different social class and each one have different kind of life.