"The Kitchen," Arnold Wesker's sizzlingly angry play about youthful discontent in postwar Britain, opened a two-week run in Tokyo's Shibuya last week for only its third major staging in Japan since its London premiere in 1959.
Then, in 1956, John Osborne gave a powerful new voice to the frustrations of working-class youth with his play "Look Back in Anger," which was followed two years later by Alan Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning," the 1960 adaptation of his book, which exposed the country's class constraints and increasing "generation gap."
By the time "The Kitchen" opened -- at the Royal Court Theater in the West End -- the trend that had given birth to the concepts of "youth" and "teenagers" as new social identities had become an unstoppable movement dubbed "Angry Young Men" -- although Wesker himself still balks at the label.