Word: wesker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...room is teeming with people, employees of a Boston restaurant, each of them moving in a proscribed pattern, oblivious to the others, looking very much like puppets whose strings have been cut. Now their voices are competing with the music and you realize that author Arnold Wesker has unwittingly blown the cover on his melodramatic portrayal of working-class life. It was a nearly flawless imitation, yet no more human than that electronic melody. Wesker found himself with puppets on his hands, and he had to invent an improbable murder scene at the end to lend some dramatic force...
...WESKER'S characters are not individuals, but representatives, always hard to believe in. And they are too easily recognizable: you can guess what they will have to say, if not just how or when. With a cast of 31 exchanging crumpled lists of life's ingredients in a single kitchen, there's probably not much way of avoiding caricature. On the other hand, the necessity of shifting abruptly from one worker to another in order to let each piece together his neat characterization by installment, and the perpetual interplay of the remaining characters, camped on the edges of your attention...
Although the stylized performances director Peter Frisch elicits from actors conflict with the social realism Wesker has tried too glibly to present, they are coordinated with finely controlled staging that sometimes resembles choreography. Each act builds to an accelerating crescendo of harried activity. Knots of people constantly break and re-form. Two men simultaneously take symmetrical, reclining positions on a table. And in the surrealistic climax every character turns one of his own gestures into a self-parody...
...complacent acceptance and lethargy, where life was guaranteed, but spirit was not. In Osborne's play, Porter's rage had no outlet, and was turned inward upon himself and his personal world. Osborne's impact, however, was felt throughout the island, and influenced not only such dramatists as Arnold Wesker and John Arden but the Free Cinema movement as well; as Lindsay Anderson put it, all were determined to "raise the red flag" once again, to realize that giving a man just enough bread to eat might be giving him the solace that sinks...