Arnold Wesker

Fragments and Visions

Anne Etienne, Graham Saunders, Anne Etienne, Graham Saunders

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789383669
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

This new collection will add significantly to the body of scholarship on this important dramatist. This is the first study of the whole body of Wesker's work, and will create new interest in this partly forgotten key figure in post-war British theatre.

A new study of Wesker's work is overdue. The editors are recognized scholars in the field with a track record of publication on British theatre. An impressive list of contributors comprises important scholars of post-war theatre – including John Bull and Chris Megson – alongside practitioners such as Edward Bond and Pamela Howard, who bring professional insights to bear.

Arnold Wesker was hailed in the press as 'one of the great overlooked' of British drama when he died in April 2016. Despite his pivotal engagement with the cultural politics of 1960s Britain and his international career, only a fraction of Wesker's dramatic output tends to be studied. He is still remembered and discussed as the author of The Trilogy, three plays staged between 1958–60 that fail to reflect the daring aesthetics of his later work, thereby perpetuating an incorrect image of a naturalist playwright.

This important new book aims to remedy the recent critical neglect of the dramatist, building on existing scholarship and introducing new insights and perspectives. It examines the whole body of Wesker's work for the first time, including some of his non-dramatic work, and considers it from a variety of perspectives. These include Wesker's reception in Europe, his Jewishness and his attitude to politics and tocommunity. Significant use is made of material from the Arnold Wesker archive, held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

It includes chapters on Wesker's representation of, and attitude towards, women, his relationship with his Jewish origins and identity, and his role in establishing Centre 42 following his imprisonment for participation in the Aldermaston March in 1959. Centre 42 was initially a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other working class towns of Britain, and arose from Resolution 42 of the 1960Trades Union Congress, which concerned the importance of arts in the community.

It will be of most interest to academics and scholars of post-war British theatre, and to those teaching theatre and drama. It is accessible for a student readership at all undergraduate levels, as well as postgraduates. It has potential for textbook and reading list use.

Wesker's significance in British theatre history of the 1950s and 1960s means that the book may find readers amongst the informed general public.

Part 1

Early Visions

1

Radical Chic? Centre 42, the Roundhouse and How Culture Countered Wesker in the 1960s

Lawrence Black

Centre 42 (C42) was Arnold Wesker’s 1960s’ odyssey – preoccupying his emotional and creative energies, and in the end ultimately draining them. The fame Wesker found in The Trilogy (1958–60) gave a platform to launch a bold cultural-political initiative. The Trilogy depicted working-class life and segued Jewishness, political belonging and socialism. Arguing that art and culture were central to the Labour movement’s progress in a 1960 Trades Union Congress (TUC) motion (no.42), Wesker’s initiative ran local festivals in 1961 and 1962. In 1964, it inherited the Roundhouse in North London, which became its spatial and symbolic home. By 1970, C42 came to the end of the line – struggling to synthesize and enhance working-class cultural life, failing to secure funding from the unions and Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) and superseded by other popular and counter-cultural activities at the Roundhouse.

Exploring C42’s diverse activities and volatile narrative in itself resembles in some ways a social history of the 1960s. In the opening piece of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), Tom Wolfe’s account of a Black Panther gathering with the liberal elite of Manhattan society at composer Leonard Bernstein’s apartment in 1970 is suggestive of the same contradictions inherent in C42 (Wolfe 1970). There was a similar air of ‘radical chic’ to C42: a socialist playwright wanting to take art to the workers but marooned in a London post-industrial building which was envisaged as C42’s base, together with a glamorous cast of (sometimes) supporters and (supposed) political and artistic allies. The argument here is that whilst C42 nurtured varied cultural activity, it was thwarted by countervailing tastes, practices and policy agendas. The wider culture – artistic, but also political, financial, personal and popular – also countered Wesker’s vision.

Wesker’s 1960s: Cultural and Political Context

Wesker’s sixties celebrity was notable. He was close to Arts Minister Jennie Lee and Prime Minister Harold Wilson as well as a member of the government’s Youth Service Development Council from 1960 to 1966. Tatler profiled him in 1965 and by 1967 Roots was an A-level text. During the tumultuous summer of 1967, Wesker was offered and declined a CBE. Roots’ off-Broadway run in 1961 had critics comparing Wesker to Clifford Odets (Anon. 1961b). His play Chips with Everything was a Broadway hit in 1963 – ‘as rollicking as Sgt. Bilko’ and casting Wesker as part of ‘the British invasion’ (Anon. 1963c: n.pag.). The buzz was such that Wesker sold the film rights for £10,000 in 1964 to kick-start the Roundhouse appeal by sponsoring a pillar and some bricks (AW 1963b).

Wesker was the personification, a cliché even, of the 1960s radicalism. Active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and a founder of the Committee of 100 in 1960 along with Doris Lessing, Lindsay Anderson, Shelagh Delaney and John Osborne, Wesker marched to Aldermaston, was arrested on a sit-down protest and served a month in Brixton Prison in 1961 (AW 1960a; Wesker 1995: 610, 619). While critical of the Soviet Union, Wesker visited Cuba in 1964 and 1968, and although he condemned Castro’s persecution of homosexuality, the British-Cuba Association headquarters was situated at the Roundhouse (Wesker 1969: 15, 21).¹

C42 and the Roundhouse were part of the 1960s’ DIY ethos of social innovation and underground entrepreneurialism (Curtis & Sanderson 2004: 1) and the stages for the dramas and debates about popular, elite and counter-cultural content: London and the regions, the role of the state and the post-industrial use of buildings. Longer-term, it can be argued that they became the model for arts centres and for forging ‘culture’ as a political terrain.

In another register, C42 cast itself as a cultural wing of the New Left – an intellectual-activist political formation that from 1956 proposed an alternative vision of socialism to both social democracy and Soviet communism. Culture was the New Left’s keyword, and C42 assumed that culture, in both content and practice, should be political. Yet, most accounts of the New Left point to a waning of this ideal in its ‘second’ generation, where it turned from 1962 to theory rather than such practice as the Soho Partisan café, Left Clubs, new wave cinema or Wesker plays at the Royal Court (Rustin 1989: 117–28).

This relationship can be found in the May Day Manifesto movement (1967–68), a revival of the ‘first’ generation New Left – Wesker was a signatory of the original 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto (Ponnuswami 1998: 138). Yet, despite being edited by Raymond Williams, it said little about ‘culture’. This extended to its critique of ‘Labourism’, in which it argued that it was not just a hostile culture that marginalized the left in national life, but that the British Labour Party and trade unions by comparison with European social democracy were too narrowly focused on parliament and wages, lacking a broader presence in civil society or ideological strategy for cultivating this. Yet, Jennie Lee as Minister for the Arts (1964–70), 1962’s Festival of Labour (Black 2016) and modernizing Labour MPs like Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins indicate that it was not lack of interest, resources or will but rather popular cultural preference and the wider political culture that constrained Labour’s cultural progress (Black 2007: 149–62).

The Labour Party, like Wesker, were firm believers in a cultural hierarchy that it trusted Britons might be enticed to ascend. As with much of the permissive legislation enacted in the 1960s, arts policy was at odds with popular opinion; distinctively, it endeavoured to not only modernize traditional arts but also promote access to it, particularly in the regions. Jazz, much in evidence at the Festival of Labour and made eligible for Arts Council funding in 1967, was about as modern as its tastes ran to. Lee’s 1965 Arts White Paper extolled how ‘in the world of jazz the process has already happened; highbrow and lowbrow have met’ (Cmnd. 2601 1965: para. 71). This agenda was challenged by self-made commercial pop culture, not to mention the counter-culture that emerged in late 1960s Britain.

By contrast, C42 was less permissive and more prescriptive, defending folksy-proletarian culture as well as elite forms such as classical music. Contemporary critics such as John McGrath and later critics like Mulgan and Worpole felt that for C42 ‘the problem was of taking existing art to the workers, not trying to create new forms of art’ (Mulgan & Worpole 1986: 28–29).

Roots and knots

Wesker’s animus and the impetus behind C42 was that theatregoing was a minority pursuit compared to mass audiences for cinema and television. ‘Is anybody listening?’ he wondered in The Modern Playwright or O, Mother, Is It Worth It?, the 1960 pamphlet he sent to every Trade Union leader (Wesker 1970: 13). In this, Wesker railed against the industrial relations satire film I’m Alright Jack (1959) and condemned the Labour movement for offering little alternative to cultural habits – ‘a neglect […] almost immoral’ – and instead focusing its efforts almost entirely on material improvement for its members (Wesker 1970: 17).² For Wesker this was an impoverishing outlook, since ‘if we are not to be materially exploited neither should we be culturally exploited’. Wesker saw exemplars of cultural well-being in ‘the Gorkis, Chekhovs, Millers, the Balzacs and Steinbecks, the Beethovens and the de Sicas, the Van Goghs and the Louis Armstrongs’ (Wesker 1970: 18). Socialism, for Wesker and the writers of his generation (Rebellato 1999: 11), meant ‘not merely an economic organization of society but a way of living’, and Labour and the unions were perpetuating the fragmenting of work and leisure (Wesker 1970: 17).

The birth of C42 is well documented (Black 2010). At the 1960 TUC, a motion drafted by Wesker and Bill Holdsworth, active in the Hemel Hempstead Left Club, called for the involvement of trade unions in cultural activities (Wesker 1960c: 67). The motion was moved by Ralph Bond, who told of attending an International Confederation of Trade Unions Film Festival, featuring Scandinavian, West German, Austrian and American films – but not a single British contribution, he was ‘sad to say’ (TUC 1960: 435). When a speaker backing the motion was interrupted by the Congress President – ‘I hope delegates will be brief as I want to take the economic section after this’ – this served to demonstrate the motion’s critique of dominant materialist outlooks and coalesced support for it (TUC 1960: 438).

C42 posters proclaimed that ‘All Art should be Free – it is an experience not a commodity’ and reasoned that ‘the principle of free art, like free education and medicine, would be accepted within a couple of decades’ (AW n.d.a: n.pag.). Novelist Doris Lessing told the first C42 council of management how ‘[u]‌nder the glossy mask of false prosperity which is the face of Britain now, people are being starved […] 95% of the people are educated away from art’ (AW 1961c). Wesker proved relentless in urging Harold Wilson to consider the arts as a way of improving Labour’s image during the 1964 election campaign (AW 1964c). Wilson responded that his famous 1963 ‘white heat’ speech had really been about technology generating the potential for leisure (AW 1964d: n.pag.). Jennie Lee, the Minister for Arts and Culture, initially endorsed Wesker’s ‘brave idea’ that if politicians and economists had ‘failed to rescue us from the torpor of a subtly totalitarian culture, the only thing left is to give the poet his chance’ (Lee 1962: 95–96).

Yet, Wesker and C42 were often seen as patronizing to working-class cultural tastes. Wesker once told the Finsbury Theatre Society in 1963 ‘that the British public was philistine’ (Anon. 1963a: n.pag.); in 1970, John McGrath, founder of the radical 7:84 theatre company, and briefly a member of C42’s council, condemned Wesker’s crusade, claiming that ‘the idea […] that culture is a product to be sold by culturally-conscious (therefore superior) artists and intellectuals to a culturally starved (therefore inferior) workers, is based on the bourgeois concept of culture’ (McGrath 1970: n.pag.).

Such attitudes were implicit in C42’s cultural repertoire and preferences. Wesker’s pet hates included the furore around the Beatles and intellectuals who ‘pretend to like Elvis’ (Wesker 1971: 5). In Youth Service Magazine, he explained: ‘that the music of Bach is superior to the music of Elvis Presley […] an indisputable fact that Presley himself would admit’ (Wesker 1964: n.pag.). In Chips with Everything (1962), we see the Wing Commander’s chagrin when the men chose folk music in preference to Elvis – an echo of Beatie in Roots trying to educate her mother to appreciate Bizet.

Commentators like Richard Hoggart were similarly wary of American mass culture. Yet, C42 also exhibited what, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart warned was a ‘middle-class Marxist’ tendency found in the early New Left type: ‘a nostalgia for those “best of all” kinds of art, rural folk-art or genuinely popular urban art, and a special enthusiasm for such scraps of them as he thinks he can detect today […] part-...