Arnold Wesker
Roots
Arnold Wesker is one of Britain’s seminal post-war playwrights. His varied writings include essays, short stories, poetry, journalism and forty-nine plays, which have been translated into eighteen languages. His plays include The Kitchen (1957), Roots (1959), Chips with Everything (1962) and Shylock (1976). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of East Anglia, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, Denison University, Ohio, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London. He was knighted in the 2006 New Year’s Honours list.
Arnold Wesker
Roots
Contents
Introduction
Cast
Characters
Act One
Act Two
Scene One
Scene Two
Act Three
Introduction
It was Roots that was voted on to the National Theatre’s list of the hundred most important twentieth-century English-language plays, and which represents Arnold Wesker’s work there, rather than the equally well-known The Kitchen or Chips with Everything. As well as being a favourite among Wesker’s works, Roots (1959) is a seminal play in the British new wave of realist, socially aware drama of the fifties and sixties. At that time, the themes and settings of these plays – social division, youthful challenges to apathy, distinctive regional lifestyles and speech patterns, the foregrounding of ordinary routine – made a strong impact on audiences. Roots itself is a many-layered play. The second play of a trilogy, it moves away from the political idealists and activists of the other two plays, Chicken Soup with Barley and I’m Talking about Jerusalem, to focus on the low-paid agricultural workers of Norfolk. It not only shows us the life problems and humour of struggling farm labourers, it also penetrates to the underlying social unfairness that paralyses them, just as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger attacked the immovability of the Establishment and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance dramatised the destructiveness of violent protest. But in spite of some outrage and bewilderment among traditionalists, audiences were intrigued by these plays, and although Wesker has become known for his confrontations with reviewers, from the first Roots gained critical recognition, as in Bernard Levin’s claim that ‘I have now seen this great and shining play three times and it seems to have grown visibly in stature each time’ (Daily Express, 20 June 1959).
Of course, this does not mean that the elements of the new wave were totally unfamiliar, in spite of the mythology that London theatres had previously produced only light comedies and thrillers. Most decades of the twentieth century probably could show a regional or socially rebellious play or two, either by British writers such as Galsworthy or by European or American dramatists from Gorky to Odets. Yet somehow the context in the late fifties and early sixties seemed to be different. Post-war Britain was changing, and rather than plays addressing single issues in isolation there was a feeling that more change was needed, everywhere, faster. Similarly, there had always been working-class, regional activists who identified with their local culture and did not wish to be absorbed into the Establishment, but now there were far more and they could recognise themselves in plays which addressed their concerns.
Roots, then, was central to a movement in theatre that partly stemmed from new social pressures in the fifties and was partly fostered by specific theatrical cultures, such as that of the Royal Court Theatre, where Wesker among other young playwrights took part in workshops and discussions. Clearly Roots expresses the common concerns of the fifties and sixties younger generation – awareness of class divisions, economic exploitation, anti-colonialism, inadequacy of educational and health provisions, apathy among the exploited, censoriousness, anti-nuclear and anti-militaristic activism. Most of the issues associated with this period of great change can be detected either overtly or, often, gently slipped between the lines or behind a joke. Like his contemporaries, Wesker smacks at a range of abuses, then probes beneath to the basic cause of them – their roots, we might say – namely, the disconnection of the majority of the people from control of their own society.
So it is actually the characters’ connections, or lack of them, to the society they live in which are the ‘roots’ of the title. This is not terribly obvious at first glance, and was not what audiences expected of a play set in rural Norfolk. Early critics found the implications of the title counterintuitive, and tried to wring a different kind of sense out of it. Reviewers wondered if the play meant that our roots needed to be grubbed up at once, or that a country girl can only escape her roots by staying in town. Yet the key idea of the play is the opposite of this: rootlessness applies to town and country alike, as the main character, Beatie Bryant, spells out in her climactic closing speech: ‘Something’s cut us off from the beginning. I’m telling you we’ve got no roots’ (Act Three). The great majority have no roots in their own society, and are merely passengers, partly from ignorance, partly from apathy, partly from a feeling of disempowerment.
It is through the much-mentioned realism – or, as one critic noted, ‘old-fashioned naturalism’, in the sense of strong emphasis on the material conditions of daily life – that the dislocation theme is developed. Beatie Bryant arrives back from London to stay first with her married sister Jenny, then with her mother and father. Jenny’s primitive cottage, without electricity or any other modern conveniences, is the background to Beatie’s confidences about her rocky relationship with her London boyfriend Ronnie, and these confidences are interspersed among scenes of eating and tidying up, often lapsing into silence. As a stage direction in Act One explains: ‘this is a silence that needs organising. Throughout the play there is no sign of intense living from any of the characters – Beatie’s bursts are the exception . . . The silences are important – as important as the way they speak, if we are to know them.’ Beatie makes it clear to Jenny and to the audience that Ronnie’s lifestyle, as a political and social radical, deeply involved in cultural activities, is profoundly alien to the taciturn, slow-moving though affectionate existence of Jenny’s family.
The second act, set in Beatie’s parents’ cottage, which does have electricity but has no bathroom, shows this again. Her mother’s slow ferrying in the water for the hip bath, Beatie’s making a cake, putting away the lunch things, emphasise for us the texture of daily living. Mrs Bryant’s repetitive dialogue parallels the routine as she narrates well-worn exchanges with neighbours – Beatie comments ‘it’s nearly always me listening to you telling who’s dead’, and ‘Do you know I’ve heard that story a dozen times. A dozen times’ (Act Two). Beatie explicitly blames her mother for her limitations in this act, yet the weight of Mrs Bryant’s monotonous isolation surely arouses our sympathy for her too. It is not usually noticed that she maintains her resentful relationship with her husband not for traditional or religious reasons, but because of economics: she snaps, ‘If I had a chance to be away working somewhere the whole lot of you’s could go to hell’ (Act Three). The economic strains on mean Mr Bryant are clear enough too – he stints his wife of housekeeping money (in the traditional way she doesn’t even know how much he earns), but he in turn is kept under tight pressure by his boss, the farm manager, who comes round to check on his claim to be ill, and, as Beatie notes, under his smooth manner is issuing a threat.
So by the time the Bryant family assemble in the third act to await Ronnie’s arrival, tension has built up in expectation of how this articulate and perhaps opinionated Londoner is going to interact with the defensive Norfolk folk. The afternoon begins badly with Mr Bryant revealing that he has been put on ‘casual labour’ by his manager, at half wages. The family’s grim, defeated acceptance of this blow rejects Beatie’s outrage: they won’t discuss i
t; they never protest. This mirrors their reaction to the second and climactic blow of this act, when a letter arrives to tell Beatie that Ronnie has abruptly ended their relationship. Her hysterical despair is played against a background of resigned sympathy – it is assumed again that nothing can be done, in emotional as much as social terms. The exception is Mrs Bryant, who shocks her family and the audience by slapping Beatie’s face in response to her daughter’s accusations: complex emotions coexist with acquiescence. Beatie’s key speech, which ends the play, repeats the theme – that she and her family are unable to interact with the world outside their narrow limits, because of their own unwillingness to even try to interact. Her own sudden realisation that she has in fact started to reason for herself is the fascinating dramatic reversal which enables the play to end on a fragile note of hope.
At this point, a question may arise in the audience’s or reader’s mind: is a girl in Beatie’s situation, with all her problems, really likely to make a breakthrough to articulacy and perceptiveness about herself and the culture she is part of? Yet in spite of her self-criticism, the play shows her as open to new ideas. She parrots Ronnie’s words, but she seems already to be making a start on applying them to Jimmy’s territorials, to her father’s work situation and to other incidents. She is intelligent and lively, and Ronnie’s influence has given her the incentive to see connections and make parallels which are analytic. The fresh gaze she brings to her old home prompts new thoughts, and finally experience of rejection and hurt makes her look for answers beyond the immediate and personal.
This relates to a recurrent theme in Wesker’s plays: self-discovery, in the form of the emergence of a new side of a character’s personality. Beatie repeats Ronnie’s mantra, initially formulated by his father in the earlier Chicken Soup, that ‘you can’t change people . . . you can only give them some love and hope they’ll take it’ (Act Two). Yet if people do take this love – or if they undergo some more unpleasant learning experience – it is possible for them to change themselves. Wesker’s characters do this through self-discovery – finding hidden resources within themselves – and Beatie discovers that she has strengths she had previously ignored.
Both the style and the message of Roots have retained their importance into the new century. After Roots, the smell of onions or bacon floated over many auditoriums as other playwrights put real cooking on stage, and the naturalistic depiction of a slice of regional working-class life, for instance in the plays of David Storey, became a genre which was accepted without further critical indignation. Roots itself was not only successful in London, it was successful wherever it was put on. The central role was a desirable one for any actress, and reviews praise the leading ladies of provincial reps across the country for their triumphs as Beatie Bryant. In 1979 the play was revived at the National Theatre, and although the clothes and set were anchored in the fifties, it was noted that the attack on divisions in society were still valid. Today, after some delusional decades in which it was claimed that ‘everybody’s middle class now’, it is clear that social division has increased rather than reduced, and the distance between those in power and those at the bottom is greater than ever. There may be wider provision of electricity and indoor plumbing, but the Bryant family’s feeling of powerlessness is recognisable enough in the twenty-first century.
The value of Wesker’s work relates in part to his perceptiveness about this situation. He is the longest surviving member of the new-wave dramatists of the fifties and sixties, and his best known plays of that period – The Kitchen, Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots, Chips with Everything – are not mere realistic vignettes of different mid-century lifestyles: all of them pinpoint the uncomfortable conflicts, the complicity, the lethargy, that enmesh the struggling lives of Wesker’s marginalised fellow-citizens. Amongst other themes, Roots is a forerunner of some of Wesker’s later, lesser known plays, such as The Friends and Annie Wobbler, in depicting the experiences of women characters. Conversely, the Jewish identity of offstage Ronnie and his family, central to the other parts of the trilogy, is hardly mentioned in Roots (Jimmy remarks ‘a strong socialist . . . and a Jew boy? . . . Well, that’s a queer mixture then’ (Act Three)), but this identity is important to Wesker, whose reworking in his Shylock of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has been and still is enormously popular with audiences and scholars across the world. Unlike his contemporaries Osborne and Arden, who wrote less as they grew older and met with persistent discouragement, Wesker has always continued to write, including for radio, television and local commissions. When he was awarded a knighthood in 2006, it was for services to drama, which particularly included his work in making London’s Roundhouse into a theatrical venue, work which strongly influenced the development of arts centres opening up in cities across the country. Other contemporaries are known to have declined honours for ideological reasons, but Wesker considered the recognition was deserved. And he did deserve it.
Glenda Leeming, 2013
Roots
For Dusty
Note to actors and producers
My people are not caricatures. They are real (though fiction), and if they are portrayed as caricatures the point of all these plays will be lost. The picture I have drawn is a harsh one, yet my tone is not one of disgust – nor should it be in the presentation of the plays. I am at one with these people: it is only that I am annoyed, with them and myself.
Notes on pronunciation
This is a play about Norfolk people; it could be a play about any country people and the moral could certainly extend to the metropolis. But as it is about Norfolk people it is important that some attempt is made to find out how they talk. A very definite accent and intonation exists and personal experience suggests that this is not difficult to know. The following may be of great help:
When the word ‘won’t’ is used, the ‘w’ is left out. It sounds the same but the ‘w’ is lost.
Double ‘ee’ is pronounced ‘i’ as in ‘it’ – so that ‘been’ becomes ‘bin’, ‘seen’ becomes ‘sin’, etc.
‘Have’ and ‘had’ become ‘hev’ and ‘hed’ as in ‘head’.
‘Ing’ loses the ‘g’ so that it becomes ‘in’.
‘Bor’ is a common handle and is a contraction of neighbour.
Instead of the word ‘of’ they say ‘on’, e.g. ‘I’ve hed enough on it’ or ‘What do you think on it?’
Their ‘yes’ is used all the time and sounds like ‘year’ with a ‘p’ – ‘yearp’.
‘Blast’ is also common usage and is pronounced ‘blust’, a short sharp sound as in ‘gust’.
The cockney ‘ain’t’ becomes ‘ent’ – also short and sharp.
The ‘t’ in ‘that’ and ‘what’ is left out to give ‘thaas’ and ‘whaas’, e.g. ‘Whaas matter then?’
Other idiosyncrasies are indicated in the play itself.
Roots was first presented at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on 25 May 1959, with the following cast:
Jenny Beales
Patsy Byrne
Jimmy Beales
Charles Kay
Beatie Bryant
Joan Plowright
Stan Mann
Patrick O’Connell
Mrs Bryant
Gwen Nelson
Mr Bryant
Jack Rodney
Mr Healey
Richard Martin
Frankie Bryant
Alan Howard
Pearl Bryant
Brenda Peters
Directed by John Dexter
Designed by Jocelyn Herbert
The play transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 30 June 1959, and subsequently to the Duke of York’s Theatre on 30 July 1959. At the Duke of York’s the part of Mr Healey was played by Barry Wilsher.
Roots was revived at the Donmar Warehouse, London, on 3 October 2013, and featured the following cast and creatives.
Jenny
Lisa Ellis
Jimmy
Michael
Jibson
Beatie
Jessica Raine
Stan Mann
David Burke
Mrs Bryant
Linda Bassett
Mr Bryant
Ian Gelder
Mr Healey
Nic Jackman
Frank Bryant
Carl Prekopp
Pearl
Emma Stansfield
Director James Macdonald
Designer Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer Guy Hoare
Sound Designer Ian Dickinson for Autograph
Video Designer Dick Straker
Casting Director Alastair Coomer CDG
Characters
Beatie Bryant, a young woman aged twenty-two, a friend of Ronnie Kahn
Jenny Beales, her sister
Jimmy Beales, her brother-in-law
Mrs Bryant, her mother
Mr Bryant, her father
Frankie Bryant, her brother
Pearl Bryant, her sister-in-law
Stan Mann, a neighbour of the Beales
Mr Healey, a manager at the farm
Act One An isolated cottage in Norfolk, the house of the Beales
Act Two, Scene One Two days later at the cottage of Mr and Mrs Bryant, in the kitchen
Act Two, Scene Two The same a couple of hours later
Act Three Two weeks later in the front room of the Bryants
Time: 1958
Act One
A rather ramshackle house in Norfolk where there is no water laid on, nor electricity, nor gas. Everything rambles and the furniture is cheap and old. If it is untidy it is because there is a child in the house and there are few amenities, so that the mother is too overworked to take much care.
Roots (Modern Plays) Page 1