Comparison between "Look back in Anger" & "The Kitchen"

In this paper we will compare the passing of time in the plays “Look back in Anger” by John Osborne and “The Kitchen” by Arnold Wesker, where we will see the differences and similarities of these two plays.

 In Look back in Anger, the time runs slow, with scenes like Jimmy and Cliff reading the papers and smoking in a boring Sunday afternoon, while Allison is ironing in silence. The conversations between Jim and Cliff are also long and  a lot of times they have conversations that don’t make sense, like discussions that started about little things, which only make the reader think the time doesn’t advance.

The characters (Jimmy makes it a lot of times) talks about the situation of the country, about the government and he complains about his life, about his wife, and about his wife’s family, very especially about his father-in-law.

With these monologues, the author makes the time slowest and stressful situations that always end in rage attacks against her wife.

When he has discussions with her wife and also with Cliff, the time runs faster, because the conversations are shorter, and, not reading the plays, but in a representation the action turns faster with shorts sentences and more movement, something that we can’t understand reading the play.

We can say that rhythm in “Look back in Anger” is employed to give the spectator a sensation of monotony and to obtain stressful situations.

Using the time, the author employs some jumps on the it, to get the scene two months after, in this case.

 Comparing with “The Kitchen”, we can say that both plays have similarities in the use of the time although we can see some differences.

This play talks, like the other one, about monotony and stressful situations (in this play we can see more stressful situations than in “Look back in Anger”).

We see that rhythm is slow, Arnold Wesker makes the scenes slow and boring in some moments, to obtain a sensation of monotony and that they are working in a mechanical job. Even the author explains that a concrete scene has to be interpreted slowly, to give the sensation that the action happens in a long portion of time.

On the other hand, there are some moments, a lot of moments, where the action runs and runs with fast dialogues, made with short sentences.

It happens when they start to work really hard, when there are more customers and the kitchen is a crazy place, and between all that noise and orders, the characters continue talking about their own problems, their lives’ problems and their dreams and thoughts, making for the reader, in this case, for me, a stressful and sometimes incomprehensible situation, because all the things are mixed, and at this time you don’t know what are they talking about neither what time is it or how much time has passed.

 We can say, to sum up, that in both plays, the authors use the time to give a sensation of continuity, of mechanical situations, reading newspapers all Sundays or working at the kitchen, and to get a sensation of strain that in the two plays ends with very angry situations, discussions and “every-day-problems”.

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