Friday 25 May 2012

Happy Birthday, Sir Arnold Wesker.

Yesterday I celebrated your birthday at lunchtime by going to a rehearsed reading of I'm Talking About Jerusalem and in the evening I saw the same cast in Roots at Nottingham Playhouse.  And both plays are alive and well and kicking.  And full of passion and doubt.  The characters may be floundering around, they may not understand each other, but they never lose their humanity.  Watching Ronnie and Beatie and Dave and Ada was as powerful for me yesterday as when I first met them in my teens in between the green and yellow banded covers of the Penguin Wesker Trilogy O level text.  I'm still floundering like Ronnie and I'm still looking for my voice like Beatie, I'm getting on with the day to day and doing my best, but like Dave and Ada I'd give the world if my little shovel could help build a new Jerusalem.
When they did Chicken Soup at Nottingham I was in the unlikely position of sharing a platform with you and the other writers for the season's launch. You spoke with insight and generosity and read one of the Mother plays and I felt proud to be sitting next to you.  You signed my copy of Love Letters on Blue Paper.  You wrote a small inscription and signed your name Arnold and went to pass the book back to me, stopped, looked at what you wrote and then wrote Arnold Wesker at the top of the page, to make clear it was you.
It must be frustrating to have had so many premieres outside the UK and so much neglect at home.  You'd have enjoyed yesterday in Nottingham though.  You had a cast and a director who understood what they were doing, what you wanted, and an audience who responded enthusiastically to the demands you made.. But I bet you'd have said don't you think it's about time someone had a look at all my other plays nobody in this country has had a chance to see?  It is.  Starting with The Merchant.  (Your book The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel would make a bloody good radio play if anybody's listening.)
I felt refreshed yesterday.  Relieved that the passion I recognised in your characters at fifteen is still there in me.  And, okay, writing this is a displacement activity, but, I know what I want to do, what I'm meant to do, like you, sadly with only a fraction of your talent, I'm going to keep on working, keep waving my tiny tattered flag.  Right now.  As soon as I've finished this.  And made another coffee.  And possibly rearranged my bookshelves.
Happy BIrthday.

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