Arnold Wesker

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Arnold Wesker (2008)

Arnold Wesker (born May 24, 1932 in Stepney , London , † April 12, 2016 in Brighton , England ) was a British writer who was best known as a playwright .

Life

Arnold Wesker was the son of the immigrant Russian-Jewish tailor John Wesker and his Hungarian wife Lea (née Perlmutter), an active communist . From a literary point of view, Wesker's later socialist commitment is probably already rooted in his parents' house; the autobiographical element is also clearly recognizable in all of his dramas. The theme of the wandering Jew is equally pronounced throughout his dramatic work. Wesker grew up on Fashion Street in Spitalfields in London's East End .

He attended the Jewish Infant School on Commercial Street and the Upton House School in Hackney . After finishing school, he worked in various companies and served in the Royal Air Force from 1950 to 1952. In Chips with Everything he later used this very venue. Before he started writing after his release, he worked in odd jobs in the 1950s, including as a carpenter, carpenter, harvestman, plumber and kitchen assistant, and finally as a pie baker for two years in London and nine months in Paris. The work enabled him to save money to study at the London School of Film Technique .

Wesker was a participant in various stage performances. For example, he played the role of the young poet Marchbanks in Shaw's Candida as an occasional actor .

In 1956 he took part unsuccessfully in a drama competition of the Observer with his first drama The Kitchen (dt. The kitchen ) ; the piece was rejected as "not full-length".

Young playwrights like John Osborne motivated him to write his first plays, which quickly gave him a breakthrough and, for the first time, broader recognition. This created in 1958, funded by the London School of Film Technique, had turned to the Wesker with a request for support, Chicken Soup with Barley (dt. Chicken soup with pearl barley z). Partly under the influence of Osborne's Look Back in Anger (German look back in anger ). In the same year Wesker married the waitress Doreen Cecile Bicker.

Together with Osborne and other critical playwrights of the time, he is regarded as a representative of the so-called Kitchen Sink Realism and the Angry Young Men movement.

The kitchen , chicken soup with pearl barley , next year in Jerusalem and day after day were his most important works from that time. Many of his pieces are socially critical in terms of their subject matter and take the perspective of the “little people” from the working class . Chicken soup with pearl barley and roots from 1959 and next year in Jerusalem form the so-called Wesker trilogy .

At Wesker's instigation, a trade union congress in 1960 decided to devote more attention to the arts. This decision took shape shortly afterwards with the establishment of Center 42 , which Wesker took over for ten years from 1961 to 1971. The Round House, an old tram shed at Chalk Farm in the London Borough of Camden , was acquired and expanded, primarily to offer artists the opportunity to experiment and at the same time to raise the cultural level of the working class in line with Wesker's socialist attitude .

The Four Seasons (1965) and Their Very Own and Golden City (1966) were great hits for Wesker, which were also performed in London's West End . In 1972 he managed to convince the Royal Shakespeare Company to perform his drama The Journalists , but the actors refused to perform the play. A legal battle broke out in which Wesker was awarded £ 4,250 in damages in 1980 . His drama The Merchant (1976) based on motifs from William Shakespeare's Shylock had its world premieres in Stockholm and, together with Blood Libel (1996), forms Wesker's examination of anti-Jewish prejudices in British society.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s he wrote a number of one-person pieces, Annie Wobler (1984) also performed in London's West End, but Wesker's dramas remained mostly the fringe after its initial success well into the 1990s -Theater reserved.

Wesker's own development as a playwright took place with a few central themes, often autobiographical . Essentially, three different lines of development can be identified: a “change in the social milieu in which his characters are located; a shift in the ideological foundations on which his thinking is based; and ultimately a change in his poetic and dramatic means. "

Is it in The Kitchen primarily a wide blazoned description of the worker milieu and the world of work, so address the later plays Wesker - probably analogous to his own development - increasingly the problems of dedicated intellectuals and its identity difficulties .

Wesker's central theme was the "tension between a belief aiming towards the utopian , that far- reaching changes in society and a unity of life can be achieved through solidarity and a pessimistic assessment of the feasibility of such changes."

According to Wesker's own statements, influences on his dramatic work went from Seán O'Casey , Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett ; John Osborne's look back in anger encouraged him to break with the existing conventions of English theater and to express his "love of living" with the same "unashamedness" (ie, "concealment") , to which Dylan Thomas had already made up his mind as a poet.

Later, Wesker's dramas were followed by prose works , film scripts , poems and radio plays - his main work, however, remains connected to the drama ; his plays have been translated into 17 languages.

Wesker was beaten to a Knight Bachelor in 2006 .

Arnold Wesker was married to Doreen Blicker ("Dusty") from 1958 until his death. The couple had a daughter and two sons. Wesker had another daughter with the Swedish journalist Disa Håstad. He was the grandfather of the Swedish rap musician Yung Lean .

Publications

  • The trilogy. [Chicken soup with pearl barley. Day after day. Next year in Jerusalem]. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, ​​1967.

literature

  • Martin Seletzki: Arnold Wesker · The Old Ones in: Klaus-Dieter Fehse and Norbert H. Platz: The contemporary English drama . Athenaeum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1975, ISBN 3-8072-2096-8
  • Horst Oppel: Arnold Wesker: The Chicken Soup Trilogy . in: Horst Oppel (Ed.): The modern English drama · Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, 2nd rev. Edition, Berlin 1966
  • Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights Arnold Wesker . Heinemann Verlag, London et al., 2nd edition 1974, ISBN 0-435-18415-6 .
  • Blockade (Denial) Or - get involved with the British playwright Arnold Wesker . Radio feature - length 54:18. Manuscript and direction: Regina Leßner . Production: WDR July 2002.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Julia Pascal, Sir Arnold Wesker obituary in The Guardian, April 13, 2016, accessed April 13, 2016
  2. ^ Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights Arnold Wesker . Heinemann Verlag, London et al., 2nd edition 1974, ISBN 0-435-18415-6 , p. VIIf.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Martin Seletzki: Arnold Wesker · The Old Ones in: Klaus-Dieter Fehse and Norbert H. Platz: The contemporary English drama . Athenaeum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1975, ISBN 3-8072-2096-8 , pp. 299-315
  4. ↑ Glenda Leeming and Simon Trussler, The Plays of Arnold Wesker , Gollancz Publishing London 1971, pp 205-207
  5. ↑ a b c d e Horst Oppel: Arnold Wesker: The Chicken Soup Trilogy . in: Horst Oppel (Ed.): The modern English drama · Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, 2nd rev. Edition, Berlin 1966, pp. 344-370
  6. ^ Ronald Hayman: Contemporary Playwrights Arnold Wesker . Heinemann Verlag, London et al., 2nd edition 1974, ISBN 0-435-18415-6 , p. VIIf.
personal data
SURNAME Wesker, Arnold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British novelist and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Stepney , London , England , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 2016
Place of death Brighton , England , UK