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Unit 30: Arnold Wesker—Introduction to the Author and the Text

boyfriend. The story, briefly, is about Beatie Bryant, the daughter of Norfolk farm labourers who Notes
returns for a short holiday from London, where she has fallen in love with a young, Jewish, working-
class boy. This unit also introduces the text, drawbacks and problems of the play.

30.1 Arnold Wesker—Introduction

30.1.1 Life and Career
Sir Arnold Wesker was born on 24 May 1932 in Stepney, London, the son of Leah, a cook, and
Joseph Wesker, a tailor’s machinist. He was delivered by the father of Oliver Sacks and is a prolific
British dramatist known for his contributions to kitchen sink drama. His early plays Roots, The
Kitchen, and Their Very Own and Golden City were staged by The English Stage Company at the
Royal Court Theatre under the management of George Devine and later William Gaskill.

The inspiration for The Kitchen came when Arnold Wesker was working at the
Bell Hotel in Norwich. It was while working here that he also met his future wife
Dusty. Roots are also set in Norfolk. He founded the Roundhouse’s first theatre,
called Centre 42, in 1964.

Wesker’s play The Merchant (a play which he also called Shylock) tells the plot of Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice from Shylock’s point of view. In this retelling, Shylock and Antonio are fast
friends bound by a mutual love of books and culture and a disdain for the crass anti-semitism of the
Christian community’s laws. They make the bond in defiant mockery of the Christian establishment,
never anticipating that the bond might become forfeit. When it does, the play argues, Shylock must
carry through on the letter of the law or jeopardize the scant legal security of the entire Jewish
community. He is, therefore, quite as grateful as Antonio when Portia, as in Shakespeare’s play,
shows the legal way out. The play received its American premiere on November 16, 1977 at New
York’s Plymouth Theatre with Joseph Leon as Shylock, Marian Seldes as Shylock’s sister Rivka and
Roberta Maxwell as Portia. This production had a challenging history in previews on the road,
culminating with the death of the exuberant Broadway star Zero Mostel, who was initially cast as
Shylock. Wesker wrote a book chronicling the entire process from initial submissions and rejections
of the play through to rehearsals, Zero’s death, and the disappointment of the critical reception for
the Broadway opening called The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel. The book reveals
much about this playwright’s relationship to director John Dexter, to criticism, to casting, and to the
ephemeral process of collaboration through which the text of any play must pass.

In 2005, Arnold Wesker published his first novel, Honey, which recounted the
experiences of Beatie Bryant, the heroine of his earlier play Roots. The novel broke from the
previously established chronology. Roots was set in the early 1960s and Beatie is 22, in Honey
she has only aged 3 years yet the action has been transplanted into the 1980s. Other oddities
are that the timeframe includes the Rushdie affair and John Major’s fall as recent events and
yet the action is concerned with the dotcom boom.

He was knighted in the 2006 New Year’s Honours list. He was the castaway on Desert Island Discs,
BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 17 December 2006. In 2008 Arnold Wesker published his first collection of
poetry, All Things Tire of Themselves. The collection dates back many years and represents what he
considers his best and most characteristic poems. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of

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