Word: wesker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...because the kitchen in question is a ferocious attack on what's left of the profit system in Britain, a shocker in the sense that a steaming tureen of stew is a shocker when flung full in a customer's face. Adapted from a play by Arnold Wesker, a soapbox socialist and onetime pastry cook who at 29 is currently the fashionable prole among Britain's angry young dramatists. The Kitchen describes with stupendous drive a day in the help's half of a big London restaurant...
Confined to the prison hospital on a liquid diet prescribed by his physician, Russell issued a gloomy statement: "I am to be silenced for a time, perhaps forever, for who can tell how soon the great massacre will take place?" Fellow Prisoner Arnold Wesker, one of Britain's more promising and depressing new playwrights (Roots, Chicken Soup with Barley), was less pessimistic. Sentenced to one month, Wesker asked for and received pencils, paper and a partly finished manuscript. His request for a typewriter and secretary as well was turned down...
...Reports (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A por trait of Britain, including talks with such nouveaux riches angry young authors as Novelist Alan Sillitoe, Playwrights Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker...
Among the better evenings: Roots, Angry-Young-Man Arnold Wesker's honest but limited slice of lifelessness; Call Me By My Rightful Name, an interracial-triangle drama; The Connection, Jack Gel-ber's graphic re-creation of a junkie's pad; The American Dream, Edward Albee's surrealistic situation comedy; The Zoo Story, Albee's famed mano a mano between Natural and Ivy League Man, running on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's lucid monologue, Krapp's Last Tape; Hedda Gabler, another excellent production in the Fourth Street Theater's Ibsen...
...Wesker uses a slice-of-life technique to convey a slice of lifelessness. Small, dun-colored, repetitious detail is ladled out till the audience is saturated in it. There is a certain mild humor in the repetitions, whether of the family's deadness or the offstage boy friend's didactic, doctrinaire lust for life. The humor turns grim when he rejects the girl, herself now lost between two worlds, too low for a hawk and too high for a buzzard. An honest but limited method, Wesker's leads to truthful but limited effects, and to believable characters...