Word: wesker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Chips With Everything, by Arnold Wesker. George Orwell's image of the future was that of a boot unendingly stamping on a human face. Socialist-minded Playwright Wesker's image of the present, in Britain at least, is that of sheep endlessly being sheared and slaughtered by the Establishment without raising a baa of protest. Wesker calls his play "a kick up backside, with love" aimed at the British working class, and one of his characters scornfully berates the unimaginative, undemanding docility of that class: "You breed babies and you eat chips* with everything...
...Wesker's chip is on his shoulder, and in heavier hands his play might have been doctrinaire agitprop-wash. It escapes that dreary fate, thanks to the playwright's good humor, dramatic interplay and irony, together with Director John Dexter's drillmasterly pacing. It is, in its own lingo, a scorching fine evening of theater...
...Achilles' heel right into the officers' ranks. Played out to the anthem of God Save the Queen, the final scene is an ironic blend of parade-ground smartness and mocking bitterness. Pip has been broken, and the conscripts are to be shipped out as clerk fodder. Though Wesker probably intended something more hopeful, his play says in sum that you can't change the bloody upper classes-or the bloody lower classes either...
...both his wife and mistress for betraying his class (Sept. 23). British Playwright Terence Rattigan's Man and Boy stars Charles Boyer as a Wall Street operator who creeps off to Greenwich Village to live in the pad of his apostate son during the Depression (Nov. 12). Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything, hugely successful in London, deals with the operation of the class system in the R.A.F. (Oct. 1). Sidney Michael's Dylan, starring Alec Guinness, is based on Dylan Thomas' visits to America (Jan. 21). And Hugh Leonard's Stephen D., an adaptation...
...massive overdose of Nembutal, Stephen Ward-liar, drug user, pornographer, libertine and convicted pimp-was cremated in the London suburb of Mortlake. Though his solicitor had asked that no flowers be sent, there was a wreath of two hundred roses from, among others, Playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, Critic Kenneth Tynan, Novelists Angus Wilson and Alan Sillitoe, Jazzman Acker Bilk (who later withdrew his name). With the flowers came a note: "To Stephen Ward, victim of British hypocrisy." Explained Tynan: "British society created him, used him, and ruthlessly destroyed him. The Establishment has closed its ranks around its body...