An interview with Arnold Wesker by Robert Williams Cohen
(This interview with Arnold Wesker [1932-2016] by Robert Williams Cohen was conducted in 2011. It has been revived from a print edition of Plays International to coincide with a production of Roots at the Almeida Theatre in 2024.)
There’s no official retirement age in the writing profession. Just as well – most of us could never afford to retire. You’d think, though, that when a man had been scribbling for half a century, when he’d written 50 plays and got himself a knighthood for it – you’d think then that a person might be starting to take it easy. Not Sir Arnold Wesker. He’s got a new play in the works (Joy and Tyranny), he’s actively promoting another (Groupie), he’s gearing up for major revivals of his first two plays (The Kitchen and Chicken Soup With Barley), he’s just put out a collection of his theatre writings (Wesker on Theatre), and he’s overseeing the publication by Oberon Books of several volumes of his collected plays. The latter project, it seems, is particularly close to his heart. He makes a point, when we meet at his house in Sussex of showing me the proof copies and drawing special attention to the titles: Wesker’s History Plays, Wesker’s Love Plays, Wesker’s Comedies.
“They’re named like that,” he says, “because I wanted to somehow break away from the image of kitchen sink drama and angry young playwrights and all that nonsense”.
Ah yes, “kitchen sink”, “angry young man”, the terms that have for ever linked Wesker’s name to that of John Osborne and certain other British playwrights of the mid to late 1950s. If forced to say what they were alleged to have in common, one might say it was a tendency to shun mindless escapism and stress the sparsity, a decade into the post-war peace, of the promised bluebirds hovering over the white cliffs of Dover. However you define them, though, the relentless use and re-use of these terms reinforces the impression that pre 1956 nobody ever used the stage to say anything serious – and, as Wesker justly observes, that’s nonsense.
But did he, I wonder, think it “nonsense” at the time?
“Oh yes! I gave lecture after lecture in which I said there was no such thing as the Angry Young Man, it’s a journalistic invention. But it’s stuck ever since, it’s been an anchor round our necks. We weren’t angry young men, we were very happy young men; our plays were being performed, we were earning a lot of money.”
Indeed, there was a time in the early 1960s when Wesker’s name was every bit as celebrated as those of Osborne and Pinter. In the space of three dizzying years, he had five plays staged in London, all under the baton of John Dexter at the Royal Court. First there was the “Wesker Trilogy” (Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots and I’m Talking About Jerusalem), staged at the Court after having been premiered by Dexter at the Belgrade in Coventry; then there was The Kitchen (actually Wesker’s first play, though its full-length version only made it on in Sloane Square after the success of the Trilogy); and Chips With Everything, inspired by the playwright’s national service in the RAF.
Three years, five plays – and all this before the age of 30. It’s perhaps not surprising that Wesker’s fortunes since have, as he put it in his autobiography, As Much As I Dare, “struggled through the normal vicissitudes early fame brings”. Since that early avalanche of success, his productivity has been undimmed, but although his reputation has continued to grow on foreign soil, his achievements have been less consistently appreciated at home.
For instance, he recalls the time a French company performed the entire Wesker Trilogy “one after the other, with just an interval between the plays, not an interval between the acts; that was quite demanding but very exciting; I think it finished round about 3 o’clock in the morning”.
Contrast that with the time he found himself suing the RSC for breach of contract, when, having scheduled the premiere of his play The Journalists, the company bottled out in the face of a cast that refused to perform it. Then there was Shylock, his original re-working of the stories on which Shakespeare based The Merchant of Venice. Despite successful stagings in many other countries, Wesker has sought in vain to get it produced by any of the major companies at home. “I think they want their Jew to be Shakespeare’s Jew,” he reflects.
Coming bang up to date, behold the fate of Groupie, one of the dramatist’s current projects-in-hand. The tale of a curmudgeonly artist and the vivacious admirer with whom he becomes inadvertently entwined, it was originally done on BBC radio with Barbara Windsor and Timothy West; however, though the stage version has been seen already in Italy, Denmark and Austria, things have moved rather more slowly at home.
“It was bought – you shouldn’t get me onto this as it makes me very angry – it was bought initially by Duncan Weldon, who rang me up and said: ‘I usually read plays in two sessions, I read this in one, I want to do it …’ – and he bought the rights for a year, sat on it and really couldn’t put it together, so it was free to be bought by someone else; and Kevin Spacey bought it for the Old Vic, and I said: ‘Are you sure you want this play? Because it’s a two-hander, and the Old Vic is a very large theatre,’ and he said: ‘Don’t worry!’ – so he held onto it for another two years and didn’t do anything with it; then another young producer bought the rights – everybody reads it, buys the rights and does nothing with it; and the last people were Chichester, and I’m really very angry with Jonathan Church, who has held onto it for two seasons and failed to put it together.”
It’s worth noting that, though he says he’s angry (and I don’t dispute it), Wesker puts over his anger in the mildest possible way, relating his sorry tale with what you might call a traditionally Jewish sense of the absurd. Perhaps that’s just his style. Or, who knows, could be his anger is simply tempered by the knowledge that there are at least some of our theatrical potentates who think him worthy of respect. For this year [2011], it must be noted, there are to be major revivals of both his first two plays, Chicken Soup With Barley and The Kitchen. The former, closely inspired by the people and politics of Wesker’s Jewish East End upbringing, will return to the Royal Court this summer, in a production helmed by artistic director Dominic Cooke. Then, come October, The Kitchen will be making its South Bank debut at the NT, directed by Bijan Sheibani, who won acclaim last year for his production of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class.
What is it about Wesker’s plays, one wonders, that makes people want to keep reviving them?
“I would like to think it’s because the plays’ themes are universal and speak to new generations. Like good wine, they travel. Shylock, the rights have just been bought for Tokyo; that’ll be the second time it’s been performed in Japan. The Four Seasons is being done a second time in Mexico. Roots has just been done in Buenos Aires, alongside The Kitchen. They keep being performed in different countries at different times, so I must assume it’s because they do carry universal values.”
Of all his plays, says Wesker, The Kitchen has been the most performed. “You wouldn’t think that, with 31 characters in it, but it’s just been everywhere, and all the time. The forthcoming Swedish production, that’ll be about the fourth time it’s been done in Sweden, and my Japanese director’s done it six times in Tokyo. It’s quite phenomenal – it’s just established itself in world theatre as a showpiece. I think it’s the spectacle that challenges directors; to choreograph 31 actors on the stage is quite demanding.”
Wesker cheerfully admits he didn’t warm to the last major British revival, directed by Stephen Daldry during his time at the Court. “It was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It was noisy, spectacular and unsubtle. The kitchen is a sleeping monster, and it has to wake up very gradually; he made it wake up too soon and too loudly, and it didn’t arrive at a climax; there was a climax half-way through the service. But it played to packed houses, and people queued up for ages trying to get returns.”
What, then, I wonder, are his hopes and expectations for the forthcoming revivals?
“Well, I don’t expect anything, really. I just hope they’ll follow the stage instructions and get the right rhythm. But the days are past when the play was the star – when people went to see a Bond play, a Pinter play, an Osborne play, a Wesker play; now they go to see actors, I’m afraid, sometimes directors.”
Arnold Wesker was twice accepted for RADA and twice failed to go, being unable to afford the fees. Harold Pinter went, though. “We took the entrance exam at the same time, but he got the grant, and I didn’t.”
Having established that he wasn’t going to be an actor, young Arnold embarked on a four-year stint in the catering trade, first as a kitchen porter, later as a pastry chef. From those four years he gained a wife (Dusty, whom he met at a hotel in Norwich), and the inspiration for his first play. For his second, he looked back to the world in which he had grown up: a world of Jewish immigrants and immigrants’ children, for many of whom communism had taken the place once occupied by religion. In a wafer-thinly disguised version of Wesker’s own family, Chicken Soup with Barley followed the Kahn clan over a 20-year period between 1936 (when communism was all but synonymous with anti-fascism) and 1956 (the year of the Hungarian uprising and resulting Soviet backlash).The arguments between the disillusioned Ronnie and his die-hard mother closely echoed conversations between the author and his own mother, Leah.
Not long afterwards, as he contemplated the advent of his fifth play, the RAF drama Chips with Everything, the young dramatist wrote in Transatlantic Review of “trying to recreate the reality of my experience”. Fifty years on, is that still a guiding principle?
“Yes, that’s what I think I’m doing when I’m writing plays. I actually think that’s what all artists are doing, they’re recreating the reality of their experience, and they recreate it in different ways: they recreate it naturalistically; they recreate it absurdly; they recreate the absurdity of the reality naturalistically … I mean, you can permutate that extensively, but, in the end, all artists have in common, I believe, the role of recreating the reality of their experience. I came to believe that realistic art is contradictory in terms. Reality is impossible to recreate, so what is it you’re doing when you write a play or a novel? You’re selecting from your experience of reality, in order to recreate it, and you are as good or as bad as your ability to select is good or bad.”
The reality depicted in many of Wesker’s plays is of an individual striving to remain an individual in the face of pressure from the mass. At least, that’s my perception, and it’s one Wesker’s happy to endorse.
“Interestingly, I had a letter a couple of weeks ago from a woman who said: ‘Do you remember being an evacuee in Llantrissant? I lived two doors away from you, and even then you were doing plays that you’d conceived and we acted in them – and I remember,’ she said, ‘that there was always a victim’. And I can’t remember doing plays as an evacuee, but I was fascinated to discover I did – I organized these kids into plays, and there was always a victim. Can’t think what plays they were. So, a victim, an individual who stands out against … more, to use current jargon, they’re not politically correct …
“Really right from the beginning, even Roots, which has encouraged commentators to claim that Wesker was a socialist playwright, even in Roots there’s a line where Beatie Bryant says: ‘It’s all our fault; we want the third rate; we’ve got it.’ That rather went against the prevailing left-wing view that it’s not the fault of the individual, it’s the fault of society. But no, Beatie Bryant says it’s our fault, we get what we ask for. So, right from the beginning there were attitudes that went against the current thinking. I’m not a very English playwright, I’ve come to the conclusion. There’s something – I don’t know whether it’s European or Jewish or both …”
Is it, I wonder, his increasingly unfashionable tendency to see things in shades of grey, rather than in absolute black and white, which people are uncomfortable with?
“Yeah, I think there’s a lot of discomfort when watching my plays.”
By the sound of it, Wesker’s current play continues the theme of the individual fighting for individuality. “Joy and Tyranny is about the way anything joyous or achieving or artistic is intimidating to tyrants. So when the revolution comes the first people to go to the gulags are the poets and the thinkers and the artists – as it was in Russia, as it certainly was in Germany, as it was in the Chinese cultural revolution. Wherever tyrants grow, artists suffer – and I make a stretch of the imagination and believe that the destruction of the Twin Towers was an act of bringing down something that reached up to the heavens. Again controversial because other people will say the Twin Towers were symbols of thrusting, greedy capitalist society, but I didn’t see it like that; they were rather wonderful buildings, and I can see those essentially adolescent minds saying ‘Let’s bring down the Twin Towers, that’ll show them!’”
In the film business they make jokes about the writer’s lack of status – y’know: “the starlet who was so dumb, she slept with the writer”, that kind of stuff. The sad truth, however, is that it’s not always that much better for writers in the theatre. Wesker has oft written about this phenomenon, nowhere with more poignancy than in his book The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel. As the title implies, the 1977 Broadway production of Shylock was torpedoed by the death of Mostel, the show’s star, after just one out-of-town try-out performance in Philadelphia. Mostel, however, was not the only casualty (though, admittedly, no-one else died). The show fought on with understudy Joseph Leon, making it onto Broadway only to be defeated by a couple of lukewarm reviews. In the process, relations became increasingly strained within the company, Wesker seeming to become a lightning rod for the frustrations and growing contempt of producers, certain cast members, and, most woundingly, director John Dexter. Near the end of the ordeal the playwright found himself writing to his oldest and once most cherished collaborator, saying: “John, I’m not only shocked by each new line I discover is cut, but that you have done it daily with no consultation, knowing that I will not rock the boat. … The humiliation for me though, is the [company] joke: ‘You don’t like your line? Change it! Everybody does!’.”
“They were exciting times,” muses Wesker, to my surprise, before adding, “and deeply distressing by the end.”
Has he ever wished he’d self-directed more of his plays? Or would the artistic satisfaction have been offset by having less time to write?
“No, I’ve always been able to manage the two. Yes, I think I would like to have directed more. I’m not sure that I’m the world’s best director, mainly because I do believe that actors have to be talked to in a special way. Every actor is different, so you have to talk to them about their performance and their roles in a different way from the next actor, and I don’t know that I was good at that; I tended to talk to actors in the same way, regardless of their personality and what they may need.
“But I’m a very good assistant director, so I prefer, I think, on balance, to be the writer at rehearsals; I’ve had a lot of experience of being the writer at rehearsals, and with a good director you can establish a rhythm. John Madden, who directed Caritas, was absolutely terrified with me being at rehearsals, he wouldn’t let me talk to an actor at all; I had to wait until the end of rehearsals and give him my notes in a pub. It was kind of silly, because actors did come to me – and it’s a short cut; why take the actors through the problem of speaking to a director when two words from me will answer their questions? But I’m very good, I know how to behave as a writer, and if you get a good relationship they will turn to you. Dexter always used to turn to me and say, ‘OK?’. And usually it was.”
