Arnold Wesker

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2006

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the playwright Sir Arnold Wesker. He's a prolific writer and has penned more than 40 plays as well as books of poetry, short stories, children's tales and most recently a novel. But he first came to prominence in the late 1950s as one of the group of Angry Young Men; dramatists who made their art out of the stuff of everyday life.

He was the son of Jewish communists and was brought up in the East End of London in the 1930s. He remembers being taken on marches and demonstrations and says that memories of Cable Street, when Oswald Mosley was prevented from marching his blackshirts through predominantly Jewish areas of London, weighed heavily in his home. His background strongly informed his writing and his first five plays were all staged at the Royal Court Theatre. He says that even today, he must write something each day as a way of justifying his existence - even if it is only his daily diary entry.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The end of Gurrelieder by Arnold Schoenberg Book: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust Luxury: Supplies of pen and paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006. My castaway this week is the playwright Sir Arnold Wesker, one of the key figures in 20th century drama, his output has
0:35.2	spanned five decades and seen him penned 42 plays along with numerous books and essays.
0:40.3	His first novel, Honey, was published last year.
0:43.0	The son of Jewish communists, he burst onto the scene in the late 50s,
0:47.0	and was quickly bracketed along with other working class writers of the day
0:50.0	as one of the angry young men of British Theatre. It's not a label he's
0:54.3	comfortable with. Indeed he prides himself in his standalone reputation and has been
0:59.2	described as the unique outsider in British Theatre. Arnold Wesker, what do you think that
1:04.4	description means the unique outsider? Well I would like to think that it means
1:08.6	that I'm different, that I haven't gone with a crowd, that I haven't risen to the temptation to shine as a so-called
1:16.9	working-class writer.
1:19.6	I've always worried about people who wear cloth caps to show where they come from.
1:26.0	Because where they come from doesn't really matter.
1:28.1	You're not a good writer because you come from a working class background and you're not a good writer because you've
1:34.4	been through university you're a good writer because you're a good writer and it's the
1:37.7	work that matters not the labels that surround you.
1:41.2	And you famously say that you don't write from imagination, you write from experience.
1:45.6	Why is that important to you? It's not that it's important to me, it's a limitation.
1:49.2	I was going to ask you that actually, is it a limitation?
1:52.0	Does that make life as a writer
	...

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