By, Jenni Frazer
1 min read
ByJenni Frazer, Jenni Frazer
The extraordinary career of playwright Sir Arnold Wesker, who died in April this year, was celebrated in poetry, song, art, and, above all, extracts from his works, in a starry gathering at his beloved Royal Court Theatre on Sunday.
As Dominic Cooke, the former artistic director of the Royal Court, recalled, the central London theatre was Wesker's spiritual home. It was the place where his most important plays - Chicken Soup With Barley, I'm Talking About Jerusalem, and Roots - received their first outings.
The tributes ranged from praise from Dame Joan Plowright, who played Beatie Bryant in the original production of Roots in 1959, to a glorious concluding extract from Call The Midwife star Jessica Raine, who played Beatie in a triumphant revival of the play at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013.
In the audience, along with directors, actors and agents, was the playwright's widow, the legendary Dusty, on whom Beatie Bryant's character was famously based.
The East End-born Wesker, along with fellow Jewish playwrights Bernard Kops (who gave his own warm tribute) and the late Harold Pinter, helped to shape the so-called "kitchen sink" theatre of the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing on stage for the first time real, "ordinary" people whose experiences mirrored those of their audiences.
He was a great writer - It was a privilege to have known him
Samantha Spiro performed an extract from Chicken Soup with Barley, in which she appeared in 2011, while Henry Goodman and Sir Ian McKellen recreated Wesker roles they had played.
The most surprising contribution came from the director Mike Leigh, who reached back into his teenage years to speak of the Wesker of the Zionist youth movement, Habonim, a hero to Leigh and his friends in 1959.
On board the SS Artza, en route to Israel in the early '60s, Leigh recalled arguing "the relative merits of Chicken Soup with Barley and I'm Talking about Jerusalem, blown away by the fact that somebody was putting real people we recognised on the stage".
In the '90s, Leigh said, he got to know Wesker and corresponded with him. "I'll make you chopped liver and we can go on long walks and chew the fat," offered Wesker. Leigh admitted, he had never sampled the chopped liver. But he said Wesker was "a great writer, and it was a privilege to have known him."
The appreciation was organised by Lady Wesker, playwright David Edgar, publicist Anne Mayer, and designer and educator Professor Pamela Howard.
