Arnold Wesker
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
BBC
4.4 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2006
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy. |
| 0:05.4 | My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:10.7 | The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that. |
| 0:17.4 | With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to helping |
| 0:22.7 | you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put together |
| 0:28.7 | by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life, |
| 0:34.9 | check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:41.3 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:44.3 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006. |
| 0:48.3 | Music My castaway this week is the playwrights Sir Arnold Wesker. |
| 1:08.6 | One of the key figures in 20th century drama, his output has |
| 1:12.1 | spanned five decades and seen him penned 42 plays along with numerous books and essays. His first |
| 1:17.4 | novel, Honey, was published last year. The son of Jewish communists, he burst onto the scene in the |
| 1:22.9 | late 50s and was quickly bracketed along with other working-class writers of the day as one of the angry young men of British theatre. |
| 1:30.2 | It's not a label he's comfortable with. |
| 1:32.2 | Indeed, he prides himself in his standalone reputation |
| 1:35.1 | and has been described as the unique outsider in British theatre. |
| 1:40.0 | Arnold Wesker, what do you think that description means the unique outsider? |
| 1:43.8 | Well, I would like to think that it means that I'm different, that I haven't gone with the crowd, |
| 1:48.6 | that I haven't risen to the temptation to shine as a so-called working class writer. |
| 1:56.4 | I've always worried about people who wear cloth caps to show where they come from, |
| 2:02.5 | because where they come from doesn't really matter. |
... |
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