Arnold Wesker, considered to be a key-figure in 20th century playwriting, was born on May 24, 1934, in the East End of London into a family of communist Jewish immigrants. His father, Joe Wesker was a good singer, but worked as a tailor’s machinist, the work he hated the most. His mother, Lee Wesker, was born in Gyeryozentmiklos, Transylvania. His elder sister Della’s motherly affection has got great influence on the highly unmanageable young Arnold. He had a younger brother named Marvin who died of meningitis when he was of six weeks.
At the outbreak of war on September 3, 1939, most children were evacuated from their schools. In the first day of the war, Arnold, Della and one other girl, were sent to Adelaide, just outside Ely. Any way, he returned home for the worst days and witnessed the first bombing raid.
Arnold had his early education from Christ Church School. He has its most vivid memory as it backed onto fashion street. He used to look at the playground from the back window, and wave to the back window from the playground. The schools in those days were mostly Jewish. At the top of one of the school’s drainpipes was a Magen–David, Star of David, the Jewish emblem. The teachers spoke Yiddish. He was crazy about one of his friend Lily Peltz. She looked like Barbara Stanwyck. Her parents owned a stall in Petticoat, which she subsequently took over. He used to see her in later life. A striking woman, she hated the name ‘Lily’ and insisted on being called ‘Terry’. They ended up living in Hackney neighborhood but shared no social times thereafter.
In 1942, they moved from Stepney to Hackney. In those days there existed five kinds of schools. The private school which had to be paid and could be attended regardless of intelligence; the grammar school which helped in achieving the highest examination marks possible at the end of elementary schooling; the secondary modern school in which if a person failed it was assumed that he had no power of thought, but was fit to be merely a laborer, perhaps a skilled laborer, and therefore could be apprenticed to a carpenter or electrician, then he could finish his education in the elementary school up to the age of 14. Arnold had a year more to do at one of them before taking the equivalent of the 11 plus. Northworld Road Elementary, a vast Victorian, dark-bricked building.
However, the system was credited for another category where a child might have failed in the examination but had manifested an intelligence, a spark, a ‘something’ which might benefit from exposure to a more demanding curriculum than that offered by the elementary school. Not a professor, scientist, or Prime Minister of a grammar school; not a bureaucrat or a school teacher of a secondary modern school; not a manual laborer, of a elementary school, perhaps a clerk, a shop assistant, a minor bureaucrat. If the teacher in elementary school recognized such qualities then the child could be recommended to a central school !
Arnold failed his examination but displayed the glimpse of a ‘something’ and was recommended to Upton Hoose Central School, where he went with his bad memory, an inability to spell right, a hazy comprehension of how the English language was constructed, and an appetite for reading. Arnold was bored with science, but history, dramatically unfolding, captured his imagination. Drawing maps for geography and shapes with ruler brought him great satisfaction and pleasure. He excelled in maths, especially geometry.
Arnold mastered in typing at Upton House Central School. Always crazy to type, his fingers flew over the keyboard, especially on a word processor, which enabled mistakes to be swiftly corrected. His greatest debt of gratitude, however, goes not to Miss Sylvia Webb, the typing teacher, but to Mr. Bill Walsh, for "fanning the flames of my imagination while cooling my cockiness and mocking my spelling."
In 1948, at the age of 16, he left Upton House, without getting his school certificate. For the next decade he pursued a variety of unskilled or semiskilled trades, including farm labor, carpenter’s mate, a seed sorter and a pastry cook, broken by a spell in the Royal Air Force (1950–52). Looking at his inclination towards writing, his uncle Perly found him a job in a bookshop run by Louis Simmond and his wife in the Fleet Street, so that he could be close to books. His job included, apart from selling books, to dust and keep the place and books clean, to rearrange the scattered volumes when the customers left and also to keep an eye over the shoplifters.
He changed three jobs, before he answered an advertisement in the Eastern Daily Press, for Kitchen Porter, £3 10s a week, live in, the Bell Hotel’. He first worked with a firm laying huge pipes in the road. The pay was good and he had fun working on one of those machines that jumped up and down thumping the earth back into place and sometimes on his feet. He met a girl named Dusty there who lived with her parents, Hilda and Edwin Bicker, and her brother, Sam and his family lived in Harleston, a few miles further up the road; and a sister, Bridget, lived with her husband and children in Pulham itself.
He became a farm hand next and found himself back in the Middle Ages, huddling with others before the farmer early morning at 6:30, to be informed of the day’s tasks. He shared sugar-beet fields with a couple of other experienced hands, who shamed him by the speed they could move along rows of beet which had been churned in by a machine ahead of them; and stayed bent lifting two beet, knocking them together to displace the earth, putting one down, with a sharp knife slicing the end and of the other, flipping it in the air, catching it to slice the other end and dropping it. They left him standing in pain. He wrote a story about it. ‘Sugar Beet’ – a lyric according to him capturing the expansive landscape, his misery, the dry mocking humor, the craggy personalities of the farm labors, and the gorgeous Norfolk dialect with which he fell in love and used in four other plays. The third was a job of a seed-sorter in the malting of Pulham St. Mary. At the same time he unwarily moved closer to Dusty.
Seed sorting, though it involved halving heavy sacks on his back, was a cushy job. The task was to sort out oat, wheat and barley seeds had from which chutes dropped into ‘shakers’. Beneath were attached empty sacks to catch the shaken and sieved seeds. Along with a couple of others he halved the heavy loads upstairs, poured the contents down the chutes, descended again to wait as the sacks filled, then dragged them to the waiting lorries.
Never listening anyone Arnold was a dead-end kid, always getting himself lost, and the policeman used to bring him home. The Weskers lived in two-room house in Fashion Street blocks, where he began his first essay into theatre. Tucked away in the dark beneath a conical divet, talking through a megaphone made from newspaper. It was his first empty step into a life of theatre.
While earning his living, he started acting with Query Players. He played young Gobbo when he was 15. By November 1948 he was 16 and old enough to play Corporal Hodgson in Somerset Maugham’s Rain. Candida was scheduled for November 1949 with Patrick Corrigan playing Reverend Morrel, the striking Elizabeth Mills playing Candida, and the unworldly Arnold Wesker playing the eager, petulant, romantic, unworldly poet, Eugene Marchbanks.
The year 1950 brought him the roles in Thornton Wilder’s play and the role of Taplow in the Rattigan, which he thought to be brilliant. He failed dismally in the role of a swashbuckling lover, Captain Carvallo, by Denis Cannan, performed at Taynbee Hall in July 1953. At 21, he imagined himself to be charming, debonair, courteous, able to skip down stairs sidewise, raise his left eyebrow, dress with Byronic flamboyancy, yet he was not sophisticated enough to perform Cannan’s officer.
However, he used the playhouse offer as a reason for extricating himself from His Royal Air Force two months before the demob date. He had created a drama society with officers and men at RAF Moreton in the Marsh, and directed his second production; the first being a heroic play about the French Resistance written especially for a school arts festival which he organized. He couldn’t continue running the drama group as he was posted elsewhere and had to move every three months. The officers protested and made representations that he be kept at Moreton.
In 1958, while his film career was about to launch with Chicken Soup with Barley, his personal life also took a turn. He wrote a letter to Dusty promising her all the happiness and thanking her for positive reply of his marriage proposal. They got married on November 14, 1958 in the registry office of Hackney Town Hall.
They invited their guests at the Primrose Jewish Youth Club for food drink and entertainment. A projector was organized to show cartoons and animated films, Irish dancers and fiddles were also hired. The Norfolk crowd drove through fog to get to London and enjoyed the marriage party. It was attended by over 250 guests, relatives and friends.
The Norwich Film Society advertised for actors. He took up the film career, and his first play, The Kitchen, was produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1959 and filmed in 1961.
There is no curtain… the kitchen is always there. It is semi-darkness… The night porter, MAGI, enters. He stretches, looks at his watch… it is seven in the morning… with a taper he lights the ovens. Into the first shoots a flame… MAX enters… then BERTHW… one by one the waitresses...
The Kitchen – Stage Directions
His plays Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1958), and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960) from a trilogy about a family of Jewish Communist intellectuals that echoes the march of events, before and after World War II, were first performed at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, and subsequently at the Royal Court (1959-60). His socialist point of view is reflected in his later plays, notably the Kitchen (1961), Chips With Everything (1962) and The Four Seasons (1969). Chips With Everything (1962) was his first West End success and was produced on Broadway the following year. These plays established Wesker as an important force in the British theatre.
His last role as actor in this short career was in 1961 at Rome. Between 1961 and 1970 Wesker has the director of Center 42, an institution based on labor movement support, aiming to enable the art to reach beyond their traditional middle-class audience. In 1961 at the time of the first 42 Festival in Wellingborough, he gave a lecture. He pinpointed and explained the mistrust between artists and the working class : "it should not matter where the hell artists come from, the fact that we come from where do not make us better artists… a working-class background is not a halo he can wear with any privilege. One’s background is an accident…" a sentiment that confused his admirers.
Wesker began directing his own plays, with The Four Seasons in Cuba in 1968 and the world premiere of The Friends in Stockholm in 1970. In The Four Season Arnold’s friend John’s wife Beba played Arnold’s lover. She played same politics and attempted to get Arnold dismissed as 42’s artistic director. As a result Arnold asked her to resign and John sued her for divorce. Arnold was named with others. The play was held as an evidence against Beba. The judge judged The Four Seasons as a beautiful work, to support John’s claim.
Arnold’s first published story Pool waited three years to be printed in the Jewish Quarterly, and then became a part of the collection Six Sundays, published by Cape in January, 1971. His later plays include The Wedding Feast (1974) and The Old Ones (1922), which describe the enforced isolation of the elderly.
In 1971, Arnold spent some months in the office of The Sunday Times gathering background material for his play The Journalists. As an offshoot he wrote an extended essay about his experience among journalists, and offered it to The Sunday Times. The editor, Harry Evans, wanted to print it but was overruled by the Managing Editor. When Wesker’s publisher, Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape, suggested it would made a good slim volume Wesker sought and obtained the blessings of Harry Evans. A contract was also signed but due to some objection by a few journalists, the script went through a round of corrections. Another journalist blamed the material to be a forged one. The author withdrew the book – a self-imposed restriction. Five years later, in a TV interview about freedom of the press, the interviewer Melvyn Bragg asked Harry Evan. "What about the Wesker Book?" Evans turned to camera and said. "You can go ahead and publish, Arnold."
Arnold’s plays reflect his real life. He got the inspiration for his plays through the people living around him; his neighbors, his relatives, his aunts. His Four Portraits, published in 1982 was inspired by his father’s sister, Aunt Annie, and her unfulfilled desires to marry and have children. She was a ‘laughter lady’, even up to her last days, she used to find something to laugh about. She cared for Arnold very much, talking to him of the past whenever he became curios to know it. In 1979, Arnold recorded a conversation with her in which he probed her about his mother as a young woman.
Arnold says "I was never an angry young man, but I am an angry old man." This angry old man now lives alone. While directing The Merry Wives of Windsor in Oslo, he fell in love with a Norwegian friend from 11 years, Mona Levin. Though he didn’t fall out of love with Dusty, their 35-year-old marriage went reeling. The repercussion is distressing. While writing he knew that neither the love affair can be sustained as pain has been created, nor can one return home as a sense of something unfulfilled would haunt.
His wife Dusty lives in the London house and he lives in the Welsh cottage. His younger son, Daniel is a photographer and is married to a German teacher of Art in Leipzig; his daughter, Tanya Jo, conducts English conversation in Ceske Budejovice, a town in the Czech Republic where the first-ever foreign production of his play Roots took place in 1958. His second daughter, Elsa, a Swedish journalist, is married to a Cossack dancer and lives between Moscow and Stockholm studying Russian and anthropology, while working for the Swedish Embassy.
His professional fortunes have struggled through the normal vicissitudes brought by early fame. The volumes of writing – ephemeral or not – are gratifyingly numerous.
Arnold Wesker, a British playwright, has penetrated through the prevailing social strata by attaining the heights of name and fame. Coming from a working class Jewish immigrant family, Wesker appeared on the center stage of the world theater. The boy from Hackney has rose up to the Royal Theater, London.
Mounting his real life experience into plays and film-scripts, Arnold Wesker has presented the world of literature with 37 plays, including The Kitchen (1957), Chicken Soup with Barley, The Four Season (1965), Shylock (1976), When God Wanted a Son (1986), Denial (1997). He is also known for founding the Theatre Project Center 42 (1961-70).
His work, which includes scripts for TV, radio and film is continually performed worldwide, and is translated/published in 18 languages. They have won international acclaim. Over the last 40 years, Penguin has published seven paperback volumes of his collected plays and one collection of his stories. These are now gradually being taken over by Methuen Books.
He has directed his plays in Havana, Stockholm, Munich, Aarhus, London, Oslo, Madisen and Renison Universities (USA), and at Rome.
May 24, 1932
Born in London, UK.
1939
Due to war they were sent to Adelaide, just outside Ely.
1947
Played a role of young Gobbo.
1948
Worked as an apprentices to a furniture–maker.
Played Corporal Helgson in Somerset Maugham’s Rain.
1949
Appointed as District Organizer
Played Eugene Marchbarks in Candida.
1950
Played Taplow in The Rattigan.
Wrote his first play And After Today for Query players.
1957
Took up a film career with The Kitchen.
November 14, 1958
Married a simple country girl named Dusty.
1959
Death of his father Joe.
1960
Birth of Tanya Jo his daughter.
1961
His last acting role
1961-70
Director of ‘Center 42’.
1976
Death of his mother Leah
1982
Wrote first one-woman play Annie Wobbler.
1989
Received first honorary degree (D. Litt) from the University of East Anglia.
1992
To commemorate his 60th Birthday, BBC TV broadcast a new production of Roots.
1994
His autobiography As Much As I Rare was published.
Chicken Soup with Barley
The play spans for 20 years – 1936 to 1956 in the life of the communist Kahn family Sarah and Harry, and their children, Ada and Ronnie. Beginning with the anti-fascist demonstrations in 1936 in London’s East End, the play ends with Hungarian uprising in 1956, it explores the theme of political disillusionment paralleled with disintegration of a family.
It is the son, Ronnie, who is the most deeply affected and turned to his mother when insisted on remaining a communist. Her reply "if you don’t care, you’ll die" is one of the most famous last lines in 20th century drama, ending the play on a note of desperate optimism.
Roots
Roots explores the theme of ‘self-discovery.’ Beatie Bryant has fallen in love with Ronnie Kahn, the son of the ‘Chicken Soup’ family. She returns from London to visit her family. During the two weeks waiting period Beatie is full of Ronnie’s thoughts.
At the end of the two weeks the family gathers for a huge, specially prepared Saturday afternoon tea to greet him. He doesn’t turn up, instead a letter arrives with the afternoon post, saying he doesn’t think the relationship will work. The family turns to Beatie. In the process of defending herself she counter attacks and instead of using Ronnie’s words she finds, to her delight, that she’s using her own voice.
I am Talking About Jerusalem
Ada Kahn, daughter of the ‘Chicken Soup’ family marries Pave Simmonds. They move to an isolated house in Norfolk where they struggle to live through a ‘back-to-the-land’ experiment, Dave making furniture by hand. Friends and family visit them throughout their 12 rural years, charting and commenting on their fortune.
The Four Seasons
The Four Seasons depicts the recreation of a passionate love that goes wrong. The failure of marriage, the impossibility of sustained love, the changing needs of couples who can not help but grow apart, it’s all there. It received mixed reviews that he had been typecast as a playwright of ‘social realism’, a label founded on the misreading of the first five plays. What he really wanted to write was a play about love.
The Four Seasons is a lyrical play musically structured and with heightened language. The challenge is to act against the heightened language, not drawn it with heightened acting; to find the music in the structure, not smother it with extraneous melodies.
Annie Wobbler
Annie Wobbler is a story about a lady living in the Fashion Street and used to ‘do’ for Wesker’s. She became a portrait in East and Sketches, Arnolds’s one of earliest literary attempts. She was old and shaggy, used to wear a mass of skirts and petticoats with all kinds of things hidden in them : tin mug, cutlery, and paper bags. Arnold portrayed her in the first of his one-women play Annie Wobbler in 1982.
Annie Wobbler, part-time tramp part-time cleaning woman, is finishing scrubbing the kitchen. Her actions are meticulous. She enjoys the actions. The ritual satisfies her.
• "When I compare the intellectual experience to the theatrical one it is like moving from the adult world to kindergarten."
• "A man should see to it that all his actions are a Torch and that he himself becomes so entirely a Torch that one can learn from his life."
• "The playwright always will be presumed to have written a play, and any protest will be distorted or dismissed as sour grapes. Nothing can alter that. It’s the relationship of teachers and pupil, parents and child, critic and artist, the one is cloaked with authority, the other positioned for ineluctable submission."
• "There’s no better education than life. "
• "There exists a myth that misery drives creation. It is not my myth. I need joy in order to write. Yet despite rejection and this Joy souring I do somehow find the energy, even the delight, to shape new works."
• "I was never an angry young man, none of us were. On the contrary we were all very happy young men and women. Who would not have been happy ? Discovered, applauded, paid, made internationally famous overnight ? But I am an angry old man."
• "I suffer from nostalgia like some people suffer from heartburn. They instantly turn food into painful acids, I instantly turn hours into painful past, not necessarily because the past was painful but painful for being past."
In 1989, Wesker received his first Honorary Degree (D. Litt.) from the University of East Anglia. The second one from Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, was awarded in March 1995. Doctor of Humane Letters was awarded from Denison University, Ohio, May 1997.
In 1950, he received a Silver Medal honor for Education from LAMOA.
In 1999, the ‘Last Frontier Lifetime Achievement Award’ was presented to him ‘For Distinguished Service in The Theater by Edward Albee in Valdez.
