Page 338 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes • His inspiration for The Kitchen came when he 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 2005, he 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.
• 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 Jewish Renaissance magazine.
• Wesker joined with enthusiasm the Royal Court group on the Aldermaston March in 1959.
Another of the Royal Court contingent, Lindsay Anderson, made a documentary film about
the event.
• Roots is the second play by Arnold Wesker in The Wesker Trilogy. The first part is Chicken
Soup with Barley and the final play I’m Talking about Jerusalem.
• Roots focuses on Beatie Bryant as she makes the transition from being an uneducated working-
class woman obsessed with Ronnie, her unseen liberal boyfriend, to a woman who can express
herself and the struggles of her time.
• It is written in the country dialect of the people on which it focuses, and is considered to be
one of Wesker’s Kitchen Sink Dramas.
• The story, briefly, is about Beatie Bryant, the daughter of Norfolk farm labourers who returns
for a short holiday from London, where she has fallen in love with a young, Jewish, working-
class boy.
• Her spirit is effervescent and sunny, but her words are not hers, they’re Ronnie’s.
• Her stern but hospitable mother gathers the family to meet him.
• The effect upon Beatie and her family is at first numbing, then humiliating. They are incensed
to have been left standing like fools. The ensuing anger with which they turn on Beatie, her
self-defence, her halting, hesitant stumble upon fluency, the discovery of her own voice
deliriously reaching high C as she uses her own words instead of Ronnie’s all take up the last
15 minutes of the play.

30.4 Keywords

Playwright : A person who writes plays. Or The texts of plays that can be read, as distinct
from being seen and heard in performance.
Machinist : A person who operates machinery, especially a skilled operator of machine
tools.

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