Sir Arnold Wesker obituary
Playwright who presented a vibrant view of working-class life in his celebrated trilogy, and championed proper recognition for Jews in British cultureArnold Wesker, who has died aged 83, shot to fame as one of the wave of British playwrights spearheaded by John Osborne and John Arden. His three most renowned works made up what became known as The Wesker Trilogy.
Chicken Soup With Barley (1958) tells the story of the Kahn family, antifascist East End Jews fighting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in 1936. Roots (1959), set in a Norfolk family, celebrates the gradual move towards independence of Beatie Bryant, an early feminist prototype. Both opened at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry and the Royal Court in London. The trilogy was completed at the latter when the first two were presented alongside I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960), in which Ada Kahn, the daughter of the Chicken Soup family, engages in a back-to-the-land experiment in Norfolk.
The trilogy plays were steeped in the socialism of Wesker’s childhood, hymning mass education and attacking fascism. They also reflected his experience of London and life outside it: Beatie was inspired by Doreen Bicker, a chambermaid at The Bell Hotel, Norwich, where Wesker was working as a kitchen porter. He gave her the nickname of Dusty, because of her “gold-dust” hair, and an Arts Council bursary of £500 covered the cost of their marriage in 1958.
Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
Wesker became known for his social optimism: he was the nearest Britain had to a Clifford Odets. Later, he was to move towards lyricism, with monologues in smaller venues, and then further into the personal.
Critics lauded Wesker’s epics and, although the plays were seen to be occasionally didactic, they were praised as realistic celebrations of working-class life. They presented areas of Britain that had never been seen on the stage.
The Kitchen (1959) is a reflection of Wesker’s time spent working as a pastry chef in the Paris restaurant Le Rallye. It points to the dehumanising effect of highly pressurised, underpaid labour, and in her 1967 Paris production Ariane Mnouchkine presented it as an attack on capitalism. Chips with Everything (1962) attacks the class system, ending provocatively with the national anthem before a seated audience conditioned to stand for God Save the Queen.
Wesker’s texts were revolutionary for their time. He was the young, working-class Jewish writer, lionised by a middle-class theatre in a state of flux. He rejected the label of “angry young man”, saying of this period that he was “a happy young man”. There was money, there was recognition, there were audiences hungry for his work but, as he was soon to admit, he would become an angry old man.
To his generation belonged Bernard Kops and Harold Pinter. All three came from Jewish immigrant families. But whereas Pinter found recognition within the theatre establishment, Wesker felt himself to be outside it.
Born in Stepney, he grew up in Fashion Street, Spitalfields, in a working-class family. His mother, Leah (nee Perlmutter), a passionate communist, was born in Transylvania. His Ukrainian father, Joe, was a tailor’s machinist. Wesker was devoted to his mother and had great sympathy for his father, a little Chaplin of a man with a strong tenor voice, who detested tailoring. As a teenager, Wesker wrestled and boxed with his father. His Yiddish-speaking parents influenced his development as a self-taught writer, and inspired the Kahn family in the trilogy.
Wesker always had trouble with authority, and this caused problems in his career. His mother taught him that humility was not a trait to be encouraged. “Somebody says something you think is silly, you don’t sit back,” he said in 1994. “You say something. It is not very wise, especially in the theatre.” He inherited Leah’s fierce personality: it fuelled his life-force and his anger with the theatre establishment.
He was educated at the Jewish infants school in Commercial Street and at Upton House school in Hackney. In 1948, he started what was to be a long line of jobs. He was apprentice to a furniture maker, a carpenter’s mate and a bookshop assistant before undertaking his national service in the RAF (1950-52). During this period he started an unpublished novel, The Reed That Bent, which was used as the basis for Chips With Everything. Over the next six years, Wesker was a plumber’s mate, a seed-sorter and a farm labourer. Through working at Le Rallye, he saved up to study at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
In 1959, Wesker was named the most promising playwright of the year by the Evening Standard. A single-act version at the Royal Court that year of The Kitchen was followed in 1961 by a full two-act production and a film version by James Hill, with James Bolam making his movie debut. In 1966, The Kitchen became a hit off-Broadway, starring Rip Torn. It was the first play that Wesker wrote, in 1957: eventual performances in 50 centres around the world included a musical version in Japan in 2000.
Alan Bates and Diane Cilento had roles in Wesker’s West End success The Four Seasons (1965), and Their Very Own and Golden City (1966) starred Ian McKellen.
However, in the next decade Wesker suffered several professional catastrophes. The Journalists (1972), set on a Sunday newspaper, an epic, with 30 characters, was offered to the Royal Shakespeare Company and David Jones was to direct. It went into rehearsal, but, amazingly, the actors refused to perform it.
Wesker was furious. He wrote widely in the press attacking Trevor Nunn, the RSC’s artistic director at the time, and filed a suit claiming £25,000 damages. The foreign rights for the play were dependent on a London production. Wesker was losing earnings at home and abroad because of the aborted production. The case dragged on until 1980, when Wesker was awarded damages of £4,250, winning the battle but not the war. In 1981 Wesker was still writing lengthy articles about his disappointment, detailing every moment of the play’s life and death.
Wesker said he was told that the actors were unhappy because there were no starring roles in The Journalists. Seemingly they objected to the cast being composed of many small parts. His analysis was quite different: he believed the actors’ rejection was because they hated the creation of four intelligent Tory cabinet ministers as characters in the play, at a time when Thatcherism was at its height. Wesker opined that the company was in thrall to the Workers’ Revolutionary party. In his articles, he took on the theatre establishment, blaming it for siding with the actors and not the playwright.
In 1976, Wesker’s The Merchant had its world premiere in Stockholm. It was a controversial work, in which Wesker’s Shylock bids for his pound of flesh, not as a revenge act against Christian society, but as a joke with his philosemitic friend Antonio, against antisemitic Christendom. The play marks a radical challenge to Shakespeare’s infamous Jewish fantasy figure of Shylock.
Zero Mostel was to lead the Broadway production, but he died suddenly during the Philadelphia try-out in 1977, and the Broadway show never happened. Apart from a production at Birmingham Rep, the play, later renamed Shylock, has never been staged in Britain. As a result, Wesker wrote Dark Suspicions, a pamphlet alleging subconscious antisemitism in the British theatre establishment.
He was exiled to the margins of the London fringe, where he turned away from his epic style to create a cycle of one-woman scripts, including Annie Wobbler, which transferred to the Fortune theatre in the West End in 1984. In 1990 he wrote Letter to a Daughter for the Norwegian jazz singer Susanne Fuhr.
There must have been some pleasure when the Royal Court’s director Stephen Daldry directed The Kitchen in 1994 and the National Theatre revived Chips With Everything in 1997. The establishment showed an attempt at partial reconciliation, but, if the young Wesker would have been pleased at these revivals, the mature Wesker was enraged at the exclusion of his later works. Even as the Court was restaging The Kitchen, he told the Independent: “They should have picked something else.” As he got older, he spoke more about being marginalised.
In 1996 he wrote Blood Libel, a Norwich Playhouse commission. This play, together with The Merchant, explored a Christian society infected by antisemitism. Blood Libel is about William of Norwich, a 12-year-old whose murder in 1144 was attributed to the Jews. This rumour resonated throughout medieval Europe. As Wesker sought to underline with this drama, the medieval Christian fantasy of the Jew as child-murderer was an element that contributed in part to the Holocaust. In his review of The Merchant, Michael Billington wrote, “Wesker’s point comes across clearly: that anti-Jewish prejudice is ingrained in English life.” Both plays examine the past and also seem to suggest that little has changed.
Despite his early success, by 1997 his new work was still on the margins: When God Wanted a Son had its premiere at Hampstead’s tiny New End theatre. This play hinted at what was happening in his own life. As a result of Wesker’s affairs, Dusty and Wesker were estranged and Wesker went to live in Wales.
Throughout his career, Wesker continued to have international success. He delighted in directing his own texts, believing that plays belonged to writer-directors and not to autocratic artistic directors. But, an outcast in his own country, it was a bitter life for the playwright who once was the Royal Court’s golden boy.
There were other disappointments, such as the failure in the 1960s of his arts organisation Centre 42, planned to have a home in the Roundhouse, in north London. This arts initiative was intended to commit the trade unions to culture. Wesker, as founder-director, had “the aim of finding a popular audience for the arts, not an audience for popular art, as was its frequently mistaken description”. Funding difficulties were overwhelming and the idea was shelved.
Although he never joined any political party, and admitted to never having read Marx or Lenin, Wesker was clearly of the left. As he wrote in his autobiography, As Much As I Dare (1994), the Jewish youth movement Habonim was his only political involvement apart from a few teenage months in the Young Communist League. He joined the antiwar group Committee of 100 and, after a demonstration, was imprisoned with Bertrand Russell.
Wesker was a European self-made intellectual who refused to flatter the theatre elite. Had he learned diplomacy, his career might have suffered less. However, had he sought to please he would never have written texts that were so challenging to the dominant English historical narrative. His distinctive achievement lay in reminding audiences that Jews are an essential part of British history and in presenting a vibrant working-class dynamic that was radical for its time.
He was welcomed back in his later years, and in 2006 was knighted. In 2011, the National Theatre revived The Kitchen and The Royal Court restaged Chicken Soup With Barley. Wesker reacted with pleasure and fury. He was happy to return to the top table, but angry that his later work was neglected by a new generation of directors.
Speaking on a BBC Radio 4 interview before the National Theatre premiere he refused to show gratitude, saying: “I don’t feel I’m known. I’m frozen in the trilogy of the 1960s.” Wesker was chagrined that his later dramas (he wrote more than 40 plays) were not staged by the Court or the National.
In 2013, the Donmar Warehouse, London, produced Roots, with Jessica Raine as Beatie. At the end of the play, Beatie finds her ability to voice her individual opinions after being educated by her urban boyfriend Ronnie, a version of the playwright.
In his autobiography, Wesker comes across as an emotional, impulsive man with high nervous energy and an elevated libido. Yet, despite the marriage fracture, Dusty remained Arnold’s wife, and his carer in his final years. He had three children with her: Lindsay (named after the director Lindsay Anderson, who championed Wesker’s work), Tanya and Daniel. He also had a daughter, Elsa, with a Swedish journalist, Disa Håstad. Towards the end of his life, he lived peacefully with Dusty at their home in Hove, East Sussex.
Tanya died in 2012. Wesker is survived by Dusty and his three other children.
Arnold Wesker, playwright, born 24 May 1932; died 12 April 2016
- This article was amended on 14 April 2016. It originally said that Arnold Wesker, Bernard Kops and Harold Pinter were all the children of Jewish immigrants. However, Pinter’s parents were born in Britain, his grandparents having been Jewish immigrants. The sentence now says that all three came from Jewish immigrant families.
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