Arnold Wesker: 14 books

Ambivalences is a document of Arnold Wesker in conversation with the Italian academic Chiara Montenero. Here he discusses his ideas on art and drama with a particular focus on some of his most enduring characters. Betraying his reputation as theatre's perennial outsider Ambivalences finds Wesker in...

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,...

Presented here are four epic history plays from Sir Arnold Wesker, which touch on the age-old conflicts caused by religion, science and the Establishment. Set in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, 1563, Shylock (1972) is based on the same three stories from which Shakespeare wove his play, The Merchant...

Spanning three decades of impassioned and inspiring work, the three plays in this volume show in cross-section Arnold Wesker’s vdevelopment 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...

Includes the plays The Kitchen,*The Rocking Horse Kid*, Voices on the Wind, 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,...

Wesker On Theatre is a collection of essays by one of Britain's most well-known, prolific and controversial writers, which explores his thoughts on drama and the theatre gained from a writing career that spans fifty years. Wesker brings together for the first time an assortment of theatre pieces exploring...

Includes the plays Chips With Everything, Their Very Own and Golden City, The Journalists, Badenheim 1939 and, published here for the first time, Phoenix Phoenix, Burning Bright. Described variously as ‘a dangerous playwright, ‘a melancholy optimist’, and ‘the unique outsider in the...

‘My preoccupation,’ says Arnold Wesker in his interview/portrait Ambivalences (published by Oberon Books) ‘with-violence-stemming from-perceived-intimidation-by-the-bright-ones who dare to be clever or simply different, began with an incident at school. While queuing for a school meal, one of...

1950s London. In the kitchen of an enormous West End restaurant, the orders are piling up: a post-war feast of soup, fish, cutlets, omelettes and fruit flans. ‘Fifteen hundred customers an’ half of them eating fish. I had to start work on a Friday.’ Thrown together by their work,...

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...

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...

It's 1958. Beatie Bryant has been to London and fallen in love with Ronnie, a young socialist. As she anxiously awaits his arrival to meet her family at their Norfolk farm, her head is swimming with new ideas. Ideas of a bolder, freer world which promise to clash with their rural way of life. Roots...

Mattie Beancourt, a 61 year old woman, reads the autobiography of Mark Gorman, a famous painter. Having grown up in the same London East End streets as the painter she writes him a fan letter. He replies briefly, apologising he can't write at length as he's busy preparing for a new exhibition and...

The kettle boils in 1936 as the fascists are marching. Tea is brewed in 1946, with disillusion in the air at the end of the war. Twenty years on, in 1956, as rumours spread of Hungarian revolution, the cup is empty. Sarah Khan, an East End Jewish mother, is a feisty political fighter and a...