Includes the plays The Four Seasons, Love Letters on Blue Paper and Lady Othello Spanning three decades of impassioned and inspiring work, the three plays in this volume show in cross-section Arnold Wesker's development as one of the key figures of late-twentieth-century drama. Each play grapples with the timeless problems accompanying two people in love. The most intimate and personal of relationships are placed under uncompromising scrutiny. Bold, elemental and structurally satisfying, The Four Seasons (1964) depicts the ebb and flow of a couple's relationship, its power games and its politics, over the course of its year-long life. In Love Letters on Blue Paper (1977) we witness the late-blooming love of a woman for her dying husband in a drama of memory and companionship. Playful, witty and continualy surprising, Lady Othello (1987) gets right to the heart of an urgent, all-consuming, passionate affair.
In The Friends (1970), Esther is diagnosed with leukaemia, causing her friends to reassess their working-class identity, their imagined achievements as well as their own mortality. Bluey (1993) is a play about repressed memory resurfacing and three imagined futures that the protagonist cannot muster the courage to confront. In Men Die Women Survive (1990) a trio of estranged wives gather around the dinner table. As they conduct a post-mortem on their failed relationships a tale of betrayal and revenge emerges. Telling the story of a 44-year-old actress Gertie and her influence on Sam, a black teenager working as a car-park attendant, Wild Spring (1992) explores acting as a metaphor for the false images of ourselves with which we fall in love.
Includes the plays The Kitchen, The Rocking Horse Kid, Denial and When God Wanted a Son This volume of Oberon Books' Wesker series includes the author's most performed work The Kitchen (1957) produced in sixty cities from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo, from Paris to Moscow, from Montreal to Zurich. This volume also contains Wesker's latest play The Rocking Horse Kid, about a black boy who wants to go round the world on a horse; the magical play for children Voices on the Wind and one of his most controversial plays Denial about 'the false memory syndrome' declared by an irate French critic of the Paris production '...a dangerous play.Wesker is a dangerous playwright.' He has also been described as 'a melancholy optimist' as evidenced by another of the plays in thisvolume When God Wanted a Son which explores the possibility that anti-Semitism like stupidity is in the bloodstream of human nature and here to stay. Few playwrights dare be as politically incorrect as Wesker.
The only collection of essays on one of Britain's Angry Young Men, this book contains discussions of most of Wesker's published plays with an emphasis on the more recent works. Essays reevaluate the plays that made Wesker a household name in Britain (the Trilogy, The Kitchen , and Chips with Everything). Clive Barker, co-director of Centre 42, gives a fresh account of that movement, and playwright Paul Levitt provides a previously unrecorded history of Caritas, Blood Libel, and Shylock. A personal profile of Wesker by novelist Margaret Drabble is reprinted from an earlier article. Original essays cover the theory and practice of theatre-Wesker's in-text stage directions, British television's adaptation of his plays, and an actor's and a director's perspectives on working with the playwright. Major international Weskerian critics are assembled here: Klaus Peter Mÿller and Heiner Zimmermann from Germany; Rossana Bonadei, Angela Locatelli, and Alessandra Marzola from Italy; Keith Gore, Glenda Leeming, Martin Priestman, Jeremy Ridgman, Margaret Rose, and Robert Wilcher from Great Britain; Menakshi Ponnuswami from India; Robert Gross, Kimball King, and Robert Skloot from the United States. These essays take a wide range of critical approaches from an exploration of gender, to semiotics, biography, and the New Historicism. This is the most comprehensive collection of criticism on Arnold Wesker to date. Every major Weskerian scholar writing in English has contributed a piece to this casebook. Originating in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, India, and the United States, their essays create an international cultural context for Wesker's plays. They also position his work among his contemporaries, in his historical era, and in the political and theatrical environment that defines his world. Furthermore, they form a biographical profile of Wesker, often giving us firsthand accounts of turning points in his career. Finally, some essays evaluate and interpret the major plays, dissecting and scrutinizing the formal elements that make them distinct. Their critical approaches are varied in that they make liberal use of semiotics, Bakhtinian and communication theory, cultural studies, and traditional readings. Their contributions compose a multi-faceted view of Wesker's life and work setting out fresh arguments for all his plays.
In The Wedding Feast an idealistic, altruistic shoe manufacturer arrives at an employee’s wedding, with disastrous consequences. One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round features a comic plot involving academics who get high on a hash birthday cake, a recalcitrant daughter, and the appearance of an illegitimate son who is a magician. In Groupie 61-year-old Mattie Beancourt is shocked to discover her idol, the famous painter Mark Gorman, living alone in near poverty. She is sunny, he is curmudgeonly and the impact of their friendship is startling. Set against a scene of defiant old age, The Old Ones examines the eccentric rituals of old age and plays out the conflict between the optimistic and pessimistic spirit.
Arnold Wesker's plays, written over a period of more than fifty years, offer actors, male and female, a remarkable source of monologues covering themes such as friendship, death, old age, political disillusion, failed love, and self-discovery fuelled by emotions ranging through anger, joy, hope, fear, outrage, love, bewilderment, guilt, and comic irony. This is Wesker's own selection of them. In addition to definitive versions of famous monologues such as Paul’s speech from The Kitchen and Beatie Bryant’s triumphant speech from the end of Roots, this volume constitutes an introduction to an unknown Wesker. To those already familiar with The Wesker Trilogy and other plays, this volume contains further evidence of this author's power and passion.The volume also includes synopses of the plays from which the monologues come.
A broad reference on London Jewish playwright Wesker (b. 1932) and his work, considering the politics in his plays, biographical aspects, historical perspectives, critical approaches, and the critical response. The 18 original essays discuss the failure and promise of socialism as personal contact in Roots, writing for radio in Yardsdale, the modernity of The Kitchen, women in his later plays, and other topics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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This comprehensive study formulates an original theory that dramatic song must be perceived as a separate genre situated between poetry, music, and theater. It focuses on John Arden, Margaretta D'Arcy, Edward Bond, Peter Barnes, John Osborne, Peter Nichols, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and John McGrath.
The first of its kind, this companion to British-Jewish theatre brings a neglected dimension in the work of many prominent British theatre-makers to the fore. Its structure reflects the historical development of British-Jewish theatre from the 1950s onwards, beginning with an analysis of the first generation of writers that now forms the core of post-war British drama (including Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker) and moving on to significant thematic force-fields and faultlines such as the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel/Palestine. The book also covers the new generation of British-Jewish playwrights, with a special emphasis on the contribution of women writers and the role of particular theatres in the development of British-Jewish theatre, as well as TV drama. Included in the book are fascinating interviews with a set of significant theatre practitioners working today, including Ryan Craig, Patrick Marber, John Nathan, Julia Pascal and Nicholas Hytner. The companion addresses, not only aesthetic and ideological concerns, but also recent transformations with regard to institutional contexts and frameworks of cultural policies.
