Arnold Wesker

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Although known mainly for his stage plays, Arnold Wesker has also written poetry, short stories, articles and essays, television plays, and film scripts. His poems have appeared in various magazines. Collections of his short fiction include Six Sundays in January (1971), Love Letters on Blue Paper (1974), Said the Old Man to the Young Man: Three Stories (1978), and Love Letters and Other Stories (1980). A number of his articles, essays, and lectures have been published; representative collections include Fears of Fragmentation (1970), The Journalists: A Triptych (1979), and Distinctions (1985). His autobiography, As Much as I Dare, was published in 1994.

Two of Wesker’s television plays have been presented by British Broadcasting Corporation television: Menace (1963) and Love Letters on Blue Paper (1976, adapted from his short story). Wesker also wrote the script for the film version of The Kitchen (1961).

Achievements

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Arnold Wesker presents the disheartening spectacle of a playwright who was an immense success at first but has since fallen from grace—a socialist angel with clipped wings, at least in his own country. With John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Arden, and others, Wesker was a leading figure in the New Wave (or New Renaissance) of English drama centered on London’s Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. The New Wave quickly swept the provinces and universities. Wesker was a star, for example, of the 1960 Sunday Times Student Drama Festival at Oxford University, where he gave an enthusiastic talk and where there was a rousing performance of The Kitchen. Wesker was the theatrical man of the political moment—a playwright of impeccable working-class origins whose naturalistic, socialistic drama seemed to define the true essence of the New Wave. In Wesker, a dynamo of commitment incarnate, there was no suspicious vagueness or wishy-washy wavering: The conditions, dreams, and frustrations of the working class were clearly laid out in The Kitchen and in subsequent dramas that rolled off Wesker’s pen.

A quieter presence at the 1960 Sunday Times festival was Arden, a dominating presence at the next year’s festival in Leeds, where a Leeds University production of Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (pr. 1959) won the first prize. Students were beginning to discover Arden, Bertolt Brecht, and even William Shakespeare; Wesker was already fading from memory. As for Wesker himself, his commitment began to take the form of direct social action, ranging from demonstrations against nuclear weapons to management of vast projects to bring the arts to the working class. When new plays finally came from him in the mid-1960’s—The Four Seasons and Their Very Own and Golden City—the old Wesker, who served Chips with Everything, had disappeared. Critics and audiences alike were shocked at not being able to recognize Wesker in these works; Wesker’s very own and golden moment had ended. The final indignity was Malcolm Page’s 1968 article entitled “Whatever Happened to Arnold Wesker? His Recent Plays.”

In the mid-1960’s, Wesker began struggling to recapture his original success. He tried various kinds of plays—first, plays about interpersonal relationships such as The Four Seasons, The Friends, and The Old Ones, and later, plays based on other literary works such as The Wedding Feast, The Merchant, and Love Letters on Blue Paper. At times he had trouble getting his plays produced in the British professional theater, although productions on the Continent, where his reputation has grown, have usually taken up the slack. He seems to have made a modest comeback in the English-speaking theater with The Wedding Feast, The Merchant, and Caritas. Caritas , about a fourteenth century anchoress who has herself immured in a cell,...

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could be a harrowing allegory of Wesker’s own career as a committed playwright.

Despite the ups and downs of Wesker’s reputation, there is more continuity in his work than at first appears. He has been both the beneficiary and the victim of theatrical and political fashions. As a new, young playwright, he was at first overpraised, though some early critics, noting his autobiographical material and kitchen-sink realism, accused him of lacking imagination. His writing and stagecraft were also called awkward. Ironically, by the time Wesker developed his imagination, writing, and stagecraft, his reputation had diminished. Wesker has continued to survey the working class in modern Britain, but a working class dissipated and fragmented by the consumer society. He has also continued to explore questions of class conflict and commitment, but with more subtlety—or with a subtlety that was always there, although earlier audiences did not recognize it.

Many of Wesker’s major awards came early in his career. In 1959 he won the London Evening Standard Award for the most promising playwright and also an Encyclopedia Britannica award. In 1962, Chips with Everything was voted the best play of the year, while Their Very Own and Golden City won the Premio Matzotto Drama Award in 1964. There was a long gap until, in 1987, a production of Roots won the Goldie award for the best play of the year in New York, presented by the Congress of Jewish Culture. In 1990, Four Portraits of Mothers and Yardsale won the Georges Bresson Prize.

Although Wesker is reported to have turned down the civil award of a companion of the British Empire (CBE), he did consent to becoming a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and received an honorary doctor of letters (Litt.D.).

Bibliography

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Alter, Iska. “‘Barbaric Laws, Barbaric Bonds’: Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant.”Modern Drama 31 (December, 1988): 536-547. Traces some of the intertextual ambiguities, especially concerning the insistent use of the law by Shylock. Wesker’s historical research is noted to shift the play from Romance to political realism.

Brown, John Russell. Theatre Language: A Study of Arden, Osborne, Pinter, and Wesker. London: Allen Lane, 1972. Brown analyzes the language of Roots, The Kitchen, and Chips with Everything, dealing particularly with the way Wesker maintains theatricality by substituting talk for action in his drama.

Dornan, Reade W. Arnold Wekser Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1994. An overview of the critical reception of Wekser’s major works, biographical chapters, and a useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Dornan, Reade W., ed. Arnold Wesker. New York: Garland, 1998. One of the Casebook series, it consists of eighteen essays on various aspects of Wesker’s plays by an international array of critics.

Hayman, Ronald. Arnold Wesker. 3d ed. London: Heinemann, 1979. This volume in the Contemporary Playwrights series includes chapters on specific plays, two interviews with Wesker, and a clearly written, informative introduction to the earlier Wesker. Bibliography, biographical outline, and photographs.

Leeming, Glenda. “Articulacy and Awareness: The Modulation of Familiar Themes in Wesker’s Plays of the Seventies.” In Contemporary English Drama, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981. Leeming reviews the development of Wesker’s drama from The Old Ones through The Merchant. She sees particularly an interiorization of a number of themes. The protagonists’ awareness of their own suffering is located as the axis for the development.

Leeming, Glenda, ed. Wesker the Playwright. New York: Methuen, 1983. This volume is probably the fullest account of Wesker’s work written up to the date of its publication. Contains a chapter on each of his plays, an appendix, a select bibliography, an index, and photographs.

Leeming, Glenda, ed. Wesker on File. New York: Methuen, 1985. This invaluable small collection consists both of reviewers’ and Wesker’s own comments on his plays as well as on his work in general. Chronology and select bibliographies.

Wilcher, Robert. Understanding Arnold Wesker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. An analysis of the plays and stories. Originally a series of lectures by the Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, England.

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