Page 341 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

Unit 31: Roots: Detailed Analysis of the Text

Two weeks have passed. It is Saturday, the day Ronnie is to arrive. One of the walls of the kitchen is Notes
now pushed aside and the front room is revealed. It is low-ceilinged, and has dark brown wooden
beams. The furniture is not typical country farm house type. There may be one or two windsor-type
straight-back chairs, but for the rest it is cheap utility stuff. Two armchairs, a table, a small bamboo
table, wooden chairs, a small sofa, and a swivel bookcase. There are a lot of flowers around—in pots
on the window, ledge and in vases on the bamboo table and swivel case.
It is three in the afternoon, the weather is cloudy—it has been raining and is likely to start again. On
the table is a spread of food (none of this will be eaten). There are cakes and biscuits on plates and
glass stands. Bread and butter, butter in a dish, tomatoes, cheese, jars of pickled onions, sausage
rolls, dishes of tinned fruit—it is a spread! Round the table are eight chairs. Beatie’s paintings are
hanging on the wall. The room is empty because Beatie is upstairs changing and Mrs Bryant is in
the kitchen. Beatie—until she descends—conducts all her conversation shouting from upstairs.

Roots, written about 30 years ago, is part of the Wesker trilogy and is, by consensus,
among the playwright’s best works. A slice of England in the 1950’s, it was also
an acute study of a woman’s liberation before that phrase was devalued by overuse.

The production at the Jewish Repertory Theatre is intelligent, if not inspired. The mood, emphasized
by Geoffrey Hall’s domestic sets and Edward M. Cohen’s direction, is realistic. Much of the slow
first act is given to Beatie’s tidying of sister Jenny’s living room and their conversation about Jimmy’s
back pains. Mr. Wesker saves his big revelations for the end, tossing in a couple of false leads along
the way as though trying to hold our attention while we get comfortable with the characters. The
play begins with the crying of a baby, who we learn is Jenny’s illegitimate child, but we never find
out who the father is. And there are entirely mystifying references to a dispute between Mrs. Bryant
and her daughter-in-law, Pearl, over the labor tote, which the program informs us is a pool. The
point is to show up the triviality even of their feuds.
Gradually, Beatie’s irrepressible energy and her striving toward ideals she scarcely understands
win our affection and concern. By the second act, we are caught up in her confusion at belonging
neither in the family that she now sees through Ronnie’s eyes nor among the self-made intellectuals
back in London.
If Mr. Wesker says too little in Act I, he says too much in Act III. The family is gathered to meet
Ronnie; Beatie is on edge. I don’t want Ronnie to think I come from a small-minded family, she
confesses—a generous estimate of people whose conversation is confined mostly to town gossip,
bits from the tabloids and jokes about sex. Members of the audience who do not glance at the cast
list may be surprised when Ronnie does not appear. Beatie realizes that now she is on her own, and
her final soliloquy, though rousing, sounds as though Mr Wesker had taken over as her ventriloquist.

Analyse the fact that Arnold Wesker says too little in Act I, but too much in Act III.

Nealla Spano develops her portrayal of Beatie carefully. She is full of affection for her family but
exasperated at their self-satisfied ignorance; watching them, she becomes Ronnie watching her.
You didn’t open a door for me! she cries desperately to her mother. Miss Spano’s dialect, like those
of the other players, has never been heard in the North Country, but Mr. Wesker’s dialogue is so
flavorsome that after the first moments, the accents don’t jar.
Gloria Barret as Mrs Bryant comes on rather more stylishly than her words or her condition allow.
Even so, the Act II give-and-take between Beatie and her mother about music is the play’s most

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