In this era of celebrity casting and musical adaptations, punchy writing combined with commanding performance is vanishingly rare in theatre. That sense of experiencing these near forgotten ingredients pervades this engrossing revival (with additions) of Sir Arnold Wesker’s cycle of one-woman plays.
Wesker, the Jewish playwright whose pressure-cooker work The Kitchen (1957), followed by his trilogy Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots and I’m Talking about Jerusalem, placed him at the forefront of British theatre’s Angry Young Men revolution, died a decade ago.
However, Nichola McAuliffe, the actor for whom he wrote these one-woman monologues is very much with us. Forty-five years after she played the roles and took them to the West End, McAuliffe has breathed new life into the works, first by performing them at the Edinburgh Festival and now here at one of London’s most venerable fringe stages.
The evening is comprised of three monologues. The first sees McAuliffe as a working-class young woman preparing to see her older Cambridge-educated classicist boyfriend. However, whether intentional or not, today she comes across more as a pensioner looking back at her life with regret and nostalgia.
Yet themes emerge – working-class intellectual aspiration – that chime strongly with Wesker’s Beattie in Roots. Anna is proud of her BA Hons in French but ashamed it is from a polytechnic. She is in a constant battle with her own imposter syndrome. Yet like Beattie she has the wit and intelligence to recognise the failings of the men around around her, in this case the misogynistic snobbery of her beau who prefers his women to be less clever than he is.
Next is Annabella, a cynical yet always candid successful novelist. She can be disarmingly self-deprecating and makes no claims for her literary achievements. She even confesses to her interviewer – the voice of Radio 4’s Jim Naughtie – that her success is down to flattering her readers into believing they are intellectual, even though there is little of intellectual substance in her books.
The evening ends with the eponymous Annie Wobbler, an ageing illiterate and homeless cockney who is prone to outbursts about foreigners and “Jew people”. Yet so painfully aware is she of the limitations of her life she generates nothing but sympathy.
McAuliffe has modernised Wesker’s script with modern references such as tech bros who have never read a book but could write one with AI, but Wesker’s themes and even language belong to the era in which he wrote them and McAuliffe’s additions feel oddly out of place and time. Better to have revived it as a period piece.
Annie Wobbler (Revisited) is at Finborough Theatre
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