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Piques and troughsin a rocky crevice of the Welsh Black Mountains, at the edge of the Brecon Beacons, lies Blaendigeddi, home of the playwright Arnold Wesker. There could not be a better example of the remote, windswept cottage. The approach is little more than a muddy track, intersected by untidy hedgerows and clanking metal gates, which have to be laboriously opened and closed to let visitors through. The surrounding fields fall away like grassy cliff-faces and flocks of tatty sheep seem to cling on for dear life or risk toppling into the valley below.
In his heyday during the 1950s and 1960s, Wesker and his wife Dusty also kept a London base in Highgate, where theatrical glitterati gathered round the table: Kenneth Tynan, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench. Now that they have sold up in London, Dusty has retired to Hove and Wesker has withdrawn to this wilderness in Wales. The isolation and solitude makes his eagerness to welcome visitors, as he darts gracefully around the Blaendigeddi kitchen, all the greater: "Living out here gets too much, occasionally," he says, dishing out the lemon sole, "I spend a lot of time not talking to anyone. Proficient in: Culture
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But when you have email and fax and the telephone, you can't really talk about being a recluse. I'm certainly not that, but I do live reclusively."
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As we tuck into the main course, the conversation moves on to the reluctance of British theatres to stage his later plays: "You get used to the rejection," he says. "There have been times when I would get desperately depressed and hurt. I would get angry and want to throw things at the wall. But I've bounced back, either because of some new production or some new idea. I still feel my masterpiece has yet to be written". As he approaches his 70th birthday this month he is fairly upbeat, with London productions planned in the autumn for Longitude, an adaptation of the Dava Sobel book on the life of the clock-maker John Harrison, and Groupie, about a woman's devotion to a once- famous but now neglected painter.
Wesker ranks among the seminal figures in British theatre history. With John Osborne and Harold Pinter, he was one of the Angry Young Men who, from the stage of the Royal Court, led the revolution against the vacuity of drawing room theatre with a more visceral, working-class model. The Wesker trilogy, long a staple of the school syllabus, has sold more than 500,000 copies, propelling it into modern theatre's top-10 bestseller list. "In terms of his role among the defining generation of writers who emerged from 1956 onwards, Arnold has a key place," says Stephen Daldry, who directed the revival of The Kitchen in 1994. "The plays are extremely personal. They are an obvious expression of left-wing ideas and dreams and hopes, but he is never for a moment dogmatic, and more in that Royal Court tradition of liberal humanism."
When he emerged in 1958 with the first instalment of the trilogy, Chicken Soup With Barley, an account of his communist east London upbringing, he was hailed by Kenneth Tynan as "potentially a very important playwright". This expectation was fulfilled by the second instalment, Roots, an explosive story of peasant enlightenment, and quickly followed up by I'm Talking About Jerusalem, which dealt with an experiment in rural living.
Wesker's credentials as a politically engaged playwright were consolidated by The Kitchen, a painstakingly realistic evocation of life in a restaurant kitchen, and Chips With Everything, an autobiographical tour de force that drew heavily on his national service in the RAF: "This is the left-wing drama's first real breakthrough," wrote Harold Hobson in the Times in 1962, "the first anti-establishment play of which the establishment has cause to be afraid. This is something to be discussed and re-discussed, admired, feared".
However, Wesker's moment in the sun proved relatively brief. The Four Seasons in 1965, Their Very Own And Golden City in 1966 and The Old Ones in 1970 all received hostile receptions. There was bad luck, too, when a cast rebellion scuttled the National Theatre production of The Journalists in 1972, and the death of leading actor Zero Mostel in 1976 brought down the Broadway production of Shylock, Wesker's reworking of The Merchant Of Venice. To vent his frustration, Wesker has shifted his aim from the political to the theatrical establishment: critics, directors, producers. "Why don't you just retire?" Wesker railed at 68- year-old Harold Hobson in 1972. "It can't be all that pleasant to devote a whole lifetime to earning a living, scavenger-like, from the dead flesh of a living literature which you slaughter."
In his 1994 autobiography, entitled As Much As I Dare, Wesker includes a bizarre imaginary conversation with Richard Eyre, accusing the former artistic director of the National Theatre of personal caprice in his decision not to produce the later works: "The 'powers-that-be' give you the power to be, not us," he berates his fantasy adversary, "no one judges your work before it has been seen by a public as you judge ours before the public has seen it."
The real Eyre counters today: "I would have to say that the later plays are simply not as powerful. It's very difficult to live with rejection and the only compliment that is relevant to a playwright is in having his new plays produced. It is precious little reassurance to be told that the play you wrote 10 years ago is better". Wesker insists that the struggle goes well beyond personal animosities and extends to a struggle for the rights of the playwright against the philistine encroachments of the director: "No play is safe from his [the director's] often hysterical manipulations.
The playwright's vision of the human condition has become secondary to the director's bom bastic striving for personal impact." His favourite topic is the intrusive, egomaniacal theatre directors who have discarded or disfigured his work: "The function of the director, particularly with new plays, is to hand over his understanding of what the writer wants," he fumes. "Any changes he makes should be to achieve what the writer intends. The problem is that there are so many directors with second-rate imaginations".
On first meeting Wesker in the depths of Wales, the scourge of directors and the critic's ogre couldn't be less in evidence. Trundling in his Wellingtons along the muddy approach to capture a roving lamb or fussing in the kitchen, he comes across as warm and welcoming. However, as conversation develops, it is easy to understand how his constant railing and occasional prickly defensiveness might antagonise, even if Wesker himself didn't regularly allude to the fact: "I seem to be someone that people want to put down," he says. "It seems to be a sense of hostility towards my joy and ebulliance. I detected it early".
Wesker has a monumental sense of grievance, as demonstrated by one of the most unguarded passages in his autobiography: "It is the queerest of sensations, this literary leprosy," he writess. "I write at least a play or long story or major adaptation every year, the press has been generous with space given at regular intervals and yet I sense within the profession a kind of nervous terror of me. What is this plague which I fail to recognise, but obviously marks me like Cain? I search around as one does for stains on a shirt, shit clogged in a shoe, a torn pocket. Does my breath smell? Are my armpits unwashed? I don't remember murdering anyone. I've fulfilled all professional commitments, turned up on time, directed and made stars of actors... What could be my crime" Of course, the past few decades have not all spelled career gloom.
In the UK, the 1990s saw successful revivals of The Kitchen at the Royal Court (with Daldry directing) and Chips With Everything at the National (Peter Hall directing). His later plays, while largely overlooked here, are regularly performed from Mexico to Denmark to Japan. In eastern Europe, Wesker is a theatrical phenomenon, with productions of The Kitchen, and later plays such as 1992's Wild Spring, enjoying extended two to three-year runs and accolades that would be the envy of a West End musical.
In the early days of Hay on Wye's literary festival, Wesker, the town's most venerated near-neighbour, was a regular fixture, giving readings and masterclasses. And there are many who admire him for continuing to demand attention: "I think it is the job of writers, when they are out of fashion, to shout and scream," says Daldry. "I daresay there will be a time when he comes back into fashion. In the meantime, it is perfectly acceptable to make a fuss." However, others also feel that his vociferous stance towards directors is counterproductive: "Most of my friends and relatives would feel that way," he says. "They call it different things: tactless, unpolitical or just plain bloody stupid.
Their point is that if you want them to put on your plays, then you just don't talk that way". His wife Dusty feels his isolation is part of the problem. She says, "He wanted to live in Wales and work and work and work. And now he has got his wish I think that hasn't helped. When he gets back into the flow of things he can only talk about himself. He doesn't know what is going on. He sees the odd piece of theatre but not enough. He is out of contact." In many areas of his life, Wesker has been the architect of his own misfortune. Many times he has brought his marriage and family to the brink of destruction.
There was an affair that in 1964 led to him being named as one of the adulterous parties in the divorce of his friend, the painter John Lavrin. There was another in the early 1970s that produced a daughter, Elsa, and another in the late 1980s, when his relationship with a Norwegian journalist resulted in temporary estrangement from Lindsay and Tanya, his son and daughter with Dusty. "He did have a roving eye, right from the beginning," says Dusty. "This is the price if you marry someone like Arnold, who needs experiences to write about."
Though financial restraints led to the sale of their London property, with Dusty moving to a modest house in Hove and Wesker to Wales, they are in daily contact and insist that their relationship remains strong and intact. Wesker admits that many of the confrontations that have led to him being dubbed the Angry Old Man of British theatre are of his own making: "I have a foolish feeling that a quality of honesty will be understood and appreciated," he says. "I think it's very Jewish that you argue.
Harold Hobson once advised me in a roundabout way to keep my mouth shut because that would be the sensible, almost gentlemanly thing to do. It's part of public-school upbringing to take your punishment. But I never felt I had a choice. Part of me relishes being an outsider". Arnold Wesker was born on May 24 1932, at Hackney Road, Bethnal Green, the only surviving son of Joseph Wesker and Leah Cecile (né Perlmutter.) Just weeks after Arnold's birth, the family settled in Stepney's Fashion Street in east London. Wesker's parents, both tailoring machinists, were of eastern European Jewish extraction, Joe from Ukraine and Leah from Hungarian Transylvania.
For the most part, Wesker's recollection of his childhood is overwhelmingly positive: "It was always happy," he says. "I had a wonderful time as a youngster. My sister tells me I broke the bars of my cot. I like that image - right from babyhood I was breaking the bars." However, the more rosy aspects of Wesker's recollection are disputed by his older sister, Della: "We were extremely poor," she remembers. Relations between Joe, whose relaxed attitude towards authority made holding down a job difficult, and the uncompromising, forthright Leah, were never good. Della says: "They argued very badly. Arnold was a baby at the time and I shielded him from it.
There was a conflict of personalities, exacerbated by the fact that there was so little money coming in." However, what they lacked in domestic tranquillity, the Wesker parents, both members of the communist party, more than made up for in political commitment and stimulation. Ralph Saltiel, a regular fixture in the Wesker household, and later Della's fiancée, says: "There was singing - lots of revolutionary songs around the fireplace. Although my parents were Jewish, they had somehow been absorbed into the English working class.
Della and Arnold's parents were first-generation immigrants. Their household was very continental. There was a much more liberal and open atmosphere".This potent combination of influences seems to have come together in Arnold's character, to produce a boy who was headstrong, stubborn and, at times, willful: "He was a lovely child," says Della, "But he had this streak - if he wanted to do something, he had to do it. When it came to my mum and dad, they didn't have the patience to deal with him and he would rub them up the wrong way. There is a Yiddish world eingeschpart, which means obstinate but is a much better word. Well, he was eingeschpart."
At Upton House Central School in Hackney - just around the corner from Grocer's Grammar school where Harold Pinter was enrolled - Wesker's stubborn nature led to conflicts with teachers, including a temporary "expulsion" at 15. By this time, however, much of his education was taking place outside the classroom, in the Habonim, a young Zionist organisation, in the Young Communist League, which he joined briefly, but most importantly, at home: "My mother's friends were all communists," he recalls. "They were the Jewish rank and file of the party. And for them it meant protesting on marches, engaging in animated political discussions."
Though he himself was never a party member, he began calling himself a socialist. Wesker's literary ambitions first surfaced through correspondence with Saltiel, who was conscripted into the RAF during the second world war. Saltiel says: "In his letters to me, he would include flights of fancy and short poems, none of which I kept, unfortunately. But I remember being quite impressed".However, Wesker's first attempts to travel a creative path met with disappointment. He failed to get into Rada and was twice turned down for the council funding that would have made other acting options possible. Instead, he decided to take a "break from ambition" and worked in a number of menial jobs, including bookseller's assistant, plumber's mate, and finally as a kitchen porter in The Bell Hotel in Norwich.
This period was important, both in sowing the inspirational seeds for The Kitchen, and in introducing him to a waitress named Doreen Bicker, soon christened Dusty, "because her hair was like gold dust". A relationship developed: "We spent afternoons in his room listening to music and making love," Dusty says. "He introduced me to classical music because my upbringing hadn't involved contact with really good music. We would go to Sunday afternoon concerts together."
After leaving Norwich at the end of 1954, Wesker and Dusty spent some time working in London and then headed to Paris in May 1956: "We had just over £100 between us," says Wesker. "I promised her adventure." Dusty became an au pair and Wesker worked as a pastry chef at a restaurant called Le Rallye, which would provide the bulk of the material for The Kitchen. Despite the lack of money, Paris proved a suitably romantic experience: "Arnold would come back from the restaurant and say, 'I thought you might fancy a veal escalope for supper.' And he would pull one out of his pocket, and then an onion would come out of the other pocket." Back in 1950, Wesker had written a semi-autobiographical play, And After Today. Since then, he had bombarded publishers with stories and poems, most of which were rejected.
Then, January 1957, he was accepted by the London School of Film Technique. With savings from Le Rallye he took up his place while Dusty worked as a waitress at Butlins in Skegness. However, Wesker's attention was diverted away from film and towards theatre after a trip to see Tony Richardson's original production of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger: "The impact cannot be understated," he says. "Not only did I realise that theatre was where important things were happening but that it was something I could add to." He immediately settled down to work on The Kitchen, a loosely structured treatment of labour and aspiration, which he entered in the Observer Playwriting Competition.
That summer, he spotted Richardson outside the National Film Theatre: "He seemed amused, content, and pleasantly approachable," Wesker says, "so I approached." He promised to send Richardson a copy of The Kitchen, but when it didn't feature among the Observer winners, he decided it would be best to substitute a new work and produced Chicken Soup With Barley in six feverish weeks. It dealt with his family's communist credentials and his own wavering belief, which had been underscored by the Soviet invasion of Hungary the year before, but the play failed to impress Wesker's mother: "Who's going to be interested in any of it, silly boy?" she said. "It's about us, it's between us. It won't mean a thing to anybody else."
Richardson disagreed: "Thank you very much for letting me read the play, which I enjoyed very much, and think is important as well as very good," he wrote to Wesker. "Can I send it to George Devine to read for the Court? It seems to me exactly the kind of play they should be doing." Devine was less convinced, but recommended that the play open at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in June 1958 before going to the Royal Court. The production, directed by John Dexter, was an immediate critical success. Kenneth Tynan wrote in the Observer: "Mr Wesker confronts us, as sanely as the theatre has ever done, with a fundamental issue: is there a viable middle course between welfare socialism and communism? He has written a fair, accurate, and intensely exciting play".
Shortly after the premiere, Wesker proposed to Dusty, who was still working at Butlins in Skegness: "One day I got a telegram and it said: 'Miss you very much. Will you marry me? I was having a wonderful time and I wasn't sure, so I didn't reply. So a second one arrived which said 'Will you marry me, for Christ's sake" The wedding took place on November 14 1958. After Chicken Soup, the Royal Court commissioned Wesker's next play, Roots, which was based largely on Dusty's Norfolk family.
Initially, Devine wasn't happy, but Wesker pressed ahead with a production in Coventry, with Joan Plowright in the lead. Again, it was an immediate hit and transferred to the Court: "I have seen this great shining play three times, and it seems to have grown visibly in stature each time," wrote Bernard Levin, the Daily Express critic. "Beatie Bryant's betrayal by her Ronnie is still poignant beyond the reach of anything but the very greatest poetry, and her final triumphant budding is still the most heart-lifting single moment I have seen upon a stage." In 1959, The Kitchen was finally produced at the Royal Court as one of the Sunday performances without decor: "It achieves something that few playwrights have ever attempted," wrote Tynan, "it dramatises work."
In 1960, Wesker produced the third part of his trilogy, I'm Talking About Jerusalem, based on an experiment in rural living in Norfolk by his sister Della and her husband Ralph. Suddenly, Wesker was a sensation: "There was a feeling of inevitability about it," he says now of his fame. "I don't think that I ever felt that it wouldn't happen. But at the same time it was exciting and exhilarating... I felt myself capable of taking on the world". He joined the Committee of 100 in 1961 for a show of civil disobedience in Trafalgar Square. That led to a month in jail. He also persuaded the TUC to adopt a resolution that promised greater commitment to bringing the arts to the "working people", leading to the foundation of Centre 42, an organisation to do just that.
At first, Centre 42 enjoyed considerable success, organising festivals and generating funding to turn the Roundhouse in London into a venue for theatre that might be accessible to all social classes. However, funding difficulties led to an erosion of the original ideals, and by the end of the decade Wesker wound it up: "He was inspirational, but now looking back on it he was not the greatest organiser," says writer and producer Michael Kustow, who worked with Wesker on the centre By this time, Wesker's career was also beginning to lose its sheen. After the heady success of the early works, The Four Seasons, a rather stiff and artificial love story, was treated coolly by critics when staged at the Royal Court in 1965: "O what a gruesome, tiresome twosome is this wordy pas de deux which Arnold Wesker inflicts on the faithful," wrote critic Philip Hope Wallace.
The Very Own And Golden City, a socialist morality tale in which an apprentice draughtsman and his friends dream of creating six utopian cities, fared little better the following year: "Tedium set in early for me and I suspect for quite a few others," Hope Wallace wrote. However, Wesker's problem's escalated with The Friends, in which a group from working-class backgrounds reconvene to assess the impact of their success. Whatever the play's merits, it was Wesker's decision to direct that proved most unfortunate, resulting in a personality clash with the actor Victor Henry: Roy Marsden, who played the role of Crispin, says "Henry challenged Arnold in rehearsals one day with a gun and said that he was going to shoot Arnold's children." The production, first performed at the Roundhouse in 1970, was mauled by the critics. There was worse to come.
In 1972, Wesker's The Journalists, which had been researched in the Fleet Street offices of the Times, was abandoned at the National Theatre after a revolt by the cast: "The actors at that time were influenced by the Workers Revolutionary party," Wesker says, "and I don't think they understood the irony. The characters included four intelligent Tory cabinet ministers. That was absolutely verboten". In 1976, the closure of Shylock after just a few performances was a second great blow: "That was a very critical period, aged 40," Wesker says. "I'd been on the fringes and suddenly two major theatres were going to do my plays. When they didn't happen, the momentum was lost". Wesker has continued producing work at the same prolific rate that characterised his early career.
Though many remain unknown in the UK, and some have gone unproduced, he is quick to point out that this is more than compensated for by their international impact: "Groupie is having its world premier in Naples in July," he beams, "Annie Wobbler due to open shortly in Turin. Denial is in production in Mainz in Germany and Shylock can be seen at the State Theatre in Ankara. Meanwhile, productions of The Kitchen will soon be running concurrently in Gothenburg, Milan and Paris."
Now that he is entering his 71st year, with the London productions of Longitude and Groupie coming up, he believes that he is finally on the verge of a real breakthrough at home: "I'm on a high," he says. "I've written a number of things that please me. I'm in the middle of a new work which is a very lucrative commission. I don't own a yacht and I don't go on long holidays. But I couldn't be more upbeat about my lot." The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Tuesday May 28 2002We said that the actors' revolt that stopped the production of The Journalists was at the National Theatre. In fact, it was at the RSC.
Wesker's play Chips With Everything at the National Theatre was directed not by Peter Hall but by Howard Davies.
Life and Work of the British Playwright Arnold Wesker. (2023, Mar 19). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/life-and-work-of-the-british-playwright-arnold-wesker-essay
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