A scene from the National Theatre's new production of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen in the NT Olivier repertoire. Photo: Marc Brenner

As The Kitchen is revived at the National Theatre Robert Williams talks to Arnold Wesker.

There's no official retirement age in the writing profession. Just as well  - most of us could never afford to do it. You'd think, though, that when a man had been scribbling for half a century, when he'd written 50 plays and got himself a knighthood for it -  you'd think then that a person might be starting to take it easy. Not Sir Arnold Wesker. He's got a new play in the works (Joy and Tyranny), he's actively promoting another (Groupie), he's gearing up for major revivals of his first two plays (The Kitchen and Chicken Soup With Barley), he's just put out a collection of his theatre writings (Wesker on Theatre), and he's overseeing the publication by Oberon Books of several volumes of his collected plays.

   The latter project, it seems, is particularly close to his heart. He makes a point, when we meet at his house in Sussex, of showing me the proof copies and drawing special attention to the titles: Wesker's History Plays, Wesker's Love Plays, Wesker's Comedies. 'They're named like that,' he says, 'because I wanted to somehow break away from the image of kitchen sink drama and angry young playwrights and all that nonsense.' Ah yes, 'kitchen sink', 'angry young man', the terms that have for ever linked Wesker's name to that of John Osborne and certain other British playwrights of the mid to late 1950s. If forced to say what they were alleged to have in common, one might say it was a tendency to shun mindless escapism and stress the sparsity, a decade into the post-war peace, of the promised bluebirds hovering over the white cliffs of Dover. However you define them, though, the relentless use and re-use of these terms reinforces the impression that pre-'56 nobody ever used the stage to say anything serious  -  and, as Wesker justly observes, that's nonsense. But did he, I wonder, think it 'nonsense' at the time? 'Oh yes. I gave lecture after lecture in which I said there was no such thing as the Angry Young Man, it's a journalistic invention. But it's stuck ever since, it's been an anchor round our necks. We weren't angry young men, we were very happy young men; our plays were being performed, we were earning a lot of money.' Indeed, there was a time in the early '60s when Wesker's name was every bit as celebrated as those of Osborne and Pinter. In the space of three dizzying years he had five plays staged in London, all under the baton of John Dexter at the Royal Court. First there was the The Wesker Trilogy (Chicken Soup With Barley, Roots and I'm Talking About Jerusalem), staged at the Court after having been premiered by Dexter at the Belgrade in Coventry; then there was The Kitchen (actually Wesker's first play, though its full-length version only made it on in Sloane Square after the success of the Trilogy); and Chips With Everything, inspired by the playwright's national service in the RAF. Three years, five plays -  and all this before the age of 30. It's perhaps not surprising that Wesker's fortunes since have, as he put it in his autobiography, As Much As I Dare, 'struggled through the normal vicissitudes early fame brings'.

    Since that early avalanche of success, his productivity has been undimmed, but though his reputation has continued to grow on foreign soil, his achievements have been less consistently appreciated at home. For instance, he recalls the time a French company performed the entire Wesker Trilogy 'one after the other, with just an interval between the plays, not an interval between the acts; that was quite demanding but very exciting; I think it finished round about 3 o?clock in the morning'. Contrast that with the time he found himself suing the RSC for breach of contract, when, having scheduled the premiere of his play The Journalists, the company bottled out in the face of a cast that refused to perform it. Then there was Shylock, his original re-working of the stories on which Shakespeare based The Merchant of Venice. Despite successful stagings in many other countries, Wesker has sought in vain to get it produced by any of the major companies at home. 'I think they want their Jew to be Shakespeare's Jew,' he reflects.  

    Coming bang up to date, behold the fate of Groupie, one of the dramatist?s current projects-in-hand. The tale of a curmudgeonly artist and the vivacious admirer with whom he becomes inadvertently entwined, it was originally done on BBC radio with Barbara Windsor and Timothy West; however, though the stage version has been seen already in Italy, Denmark and Austria, things have moved rather more slowly at home. 'It was bought  -  you shouldn't get me onto this as it makes me very angry -  it was bought initially by Duncan Weldon, who rang me up and said 'I usually read plays in two sessions, I read this in one, I want to do it' -  and he bought the rights for a year, sat on it and really couldn't put it together, so it was free to be bought by someone else; and Kevin Spacey bought it for the Old Vic, and I said 'Are you sure you want this play? Because it's a two-hander, and the Old Vic is a very large theatre,' and he said, 'Don't worry'  - so he held onto it for another two years and didn't do anything with it; then another young producer bought the rights  -  everybody reads it, buys the rights and does nothing with it; and the last people were Chichester, and I'm really very angry with Jonathan Church, who has held onto it for two seasons and failed to put it together'.

    It's worth noting that, though he says he's angry (and I don't dispute it), Wesker puts over his anger in the mildest possible way, relating his sorry tale with what you might call a traditionally Jewish sense of the absurd. Perhaps that's just his style. Or, who knows, could be his anger is simply tempered by the knowledge that there are at least some of our theatrical potentates who think him worthy of respect. For this year, it must be noted, there are to be major revivals of both his first two plays, Chicken Soup With Barley and The Kitchen. The former, closely inspired by the people and politics of Wesker's Jewish East End upbringing, will return to the Royal Court this summer, in a production helmed by artistic director Dominic Cooke. Then, come October, The Kitchen will be making its South Bank debut at the NT, directed by Bijan Sheibani, who won acclaim last year for his production of Tadeusz Slobodzianek's Our Class.

    What is it about Wesker's plays, one wonders, that makes people want to keep reviving them? 'I would like to think it's because the plays' themes are universal and speak to new generations. Like good wine, they travel. Shylock, the rights have just been bought for Tokyo; that'll be the second time it's been performed in Japan. The Four Seasons is being done a second time in Mexico. Roots has just been done in Buenos Aires, alongside The Kitchen. They keep being performed in different countries at different times, so I must assume it's because they do carry universal values.' Of all his plays, says Wesker, The Kitchen has been the most performed. ?You wouldn't think that, with 31 characters in it, but it's just been everywhere, and all the time. The forthcoming Swedish production, that'll be about the fourth time it's been done in Sweden, and my Japanese director's done it six times in Tokyo. It's quite phenomenal ? it's just established itself in world theatre as a showpiece. I think it's the spectacle that challenges directors; to choreograph 31 actors on the stage is quite demanding.?

Wesker cheerfully admits to having not warmed to the last major British revival, directed by Stephen Daldry during his time at the Court. 'It was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It was noisy, spectacular and unsubtle. The kitchen is a sleeping monster and it has to wake up very gradually; he made it wake up too soon and too loudly, and it didn?t arrive at a climax; there was a climax half-way through the service. But it played to packed houses, and people queued up for ages trying to get returns.'

  What, then, I wonder, are his hopes and expectations for the forthcoming revivals? 'Well, I don?t expect anything, really. I just hope they'll follow the stage instructions and get the right rhythm. But the days are past when the play was the star , when people went to see a Bond play, a Pinter play, an Osborne play, a Wesker play; now they go to see actors, I'm afraid, sometimes directors.! '

  Arnold Wesker was twice accepted for RADA and twice failed to go, being unable to afford the fees. Harold Pinter went, though. 'We took the entrance exam at the same time, but he got the grant and I didn't.' Having established that he wasn't going to be an actor, young Arnold embarked on a four-year stint in the catering trade, first as a kitchen porter, later as a pastry chef. From those four years he gained a wife (Dusty, whom he met at a hotel in Norwich), and the inspiration for his first play. For his second, he looked back to the world in which he had grown up: a world of Jewish immigrants and immigrants' children, for many of whom communism had taken the place once occupied by religion. In a wafer-thinly disguised version of Wesker's own family, Chicken Soup with Barley followed the Kahn clan over a 20-year period between 1936 (when communism was all but synonymous with anti-fascism) and 1956 (the year of the Hungarian uprising and resulting Soviet backlash). The arguments between the disillusioned Ronnie and his die-hard mother closely echoed conversations between the author and his own mother, Leah. Not long afterwards, as he contemplated the advent of his fifth play, the RAF drama Chips With Everything, the young dramatist wrote in Transatlantic Review of 'trying to recreate the reality of my experience'. Fifty years on, is that still a guiding principle' 'Yes, that's what I think I'm doing when I'm writing plays. I actually think that's what all artists are doing, they're recreating the reality of their experience, and they recreate it in different ways: they recreate it naturalistically; they recreate it absurdly; they recreate the absurdity of the reality naturalistically... I mean, you can permutate that extensively, but, in the end, all artists have in common, I believe, the role of recreating the reality of their experience. I came to believe that realistic art is contradictory in terms. Reality is impossible to recreate, so what is it you're doing when you write a play or a novel? You're selecting from your experience of reality, in order to recreate it, and you are as good or as bad as your ability to select is good or bad.'

   The reality depicted in many of Wesker's plays is of an individual striving to remain an individual in the face of pressure from the mass. At least, that's my perception, and it's one Wesker's happy to endorse. 'Interestingly I had a letter a couple of weeks ago from a woman who said, "Do you remember being an evacuee in Llantrissant? I lived two doors away from you, and even then you were doing plays that you'd conceived and we acted in them -  and I remember," she said, "that there was always a victim." And I can't remember doing plays as an evacuee, but I was fascinated to discover I did -  I organised these kids into plays, and there was always a victim. Can't think what plays they were. So, a victim, an individual who stands out against... more, to use current jargon, they're not politically correct. ...'

   Really right from the beginning, even Roots, which has encouraged commentators to claim that Wesker was a socialist playwright, even in Roots there's a line where Beatie Bryant says, "It?s all our fault; we want the third rate; we've got it." That rather went against the prevailing left-wing view that it's not the fault of the individual, it's the fault of society. But no, Beatie Bryant says it's our fault, we get what we ask for. So, right from the beginning there were attitudes that went against the current thinking. I'm not a very English playwright, I?ve come to the conclusion. There's something,  I don't know whether it's European or Jewish or both...' Is it, I wonder, his increasingly unfashionable tendency to see things in shades of grey, rather than in absolute black and white, which people are uncomfortable with? 'Yeah, I think there's a lot of discomfort when watching my plays.'

   By the sound of it, Wesker's current play continues the theme of the individual fighting for individuality. 'Joy and Tyranny is about the way anything joyous or achieving or artistic is intimidating to tyrants. So when the revolution comes the first people to go to the gulags are the poets and the thinkers and the artists  -  as it was in Russia, as it certainly was in Germany, as it was in the Chinese cultural revolution. Wherever tyrants grow, artists suffer  -  and I make a stretch of the imagination and believe that the destruction of the Twin Towers was an act of bringing down something that reached up to the heavens. Again controversial because other people will say the Twin Towers were symbols of thrusting, greedy capitalist society, but I didn't see it like that; they were rather wonderful buildings, and I can see those essentially adolescent minds saying 'Let's bring down the Twin Towers, that'll show them'.

   ' In the film business they make jokes about the writer's lack of status  - y'know: "the starlet who was so dumb, she slept with the writer", that kind of stuff. The sad truth, however, is that it's not always that much better for writers in the theatre. Wesker has oft written about this phenomenon, nowhere with more poignancy than in his book The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel. As the title implies, the 1977 Broadway production of Shylock was torpedoed by the death of Mostel, the show's star, after just one out-of-town try-out performance in Philadelphia. Mostel, however, was not the only casualty (though, admittedly, no-one else died). The show fought on with understudy Joseph Leon, making it onto Broadway only to be defeated by a couple of lukewarm reviews. In the process, relations became increasingly strained within the company, Wesker seeming to become a lightning rod for the frustrations and growing contempt of producers, certain cast members, and, most woundingly, director John Dexter.

   Near the end of the ordeal the playwright found himself writing to his oldest and once most cherished collaborator, saying, 'John, I'm not only shocked by each new line I discover is cut, but that you have done it daily with no consultation, knowing that I will not rock the boat. ... The humiliation for me though, is the [company] joke: 'You don't like your line? Change it! Everybody does!'.  'They were exciting times,' muses Wesker, to my surprise, before adding, 'and deeply distressing by the end.'

   Has he ever wished he'd self-directed more of his plays? Or would the artistic satisfaction have been offset by having less time to write? 'No, I?ve always been able to manage the two. Yes, I think I would like to have directed more. I'm not sure that I'm the world's best director, mainly because I do believe that actors have to be talked to in a special way. Every actor is different, so you have to talk to them about their performance and their roles in a different way from the next actor, and I don't know that I was good at that; I tended to talk to actors in the same way, regardless of their personality and what they may need. But I'm a very good assistant director, so I prefer, I think, on balance, to be the writer at rehearsals; I've had a lot of experience of being the writer at rehearsals, and with a good director you can establish a rhythm. John Madden, who directed Caritas, was absolutely terrified with me being at rehearsals, he wouldn't let me talk to an actor at all; I had to wait until the end of rehearsals and give him my notes in a pub. It was kind of silly, because actors did come to me - and it's a short cut; why take the actors through the problem of speaking to a director when two words from me will answer their questions? But I'm very good, I know how to behave as a writer, and if you get a good relationship they will turn to you. Dexter always used to turn to me and say, 'OK?'. And usually it was.'

RATTIGAN AT 100

John Russell Taylor looks at the man and his work as the centenary anniversary of Terence Rattigan's birth is celebrated with a flurry of revivals which promise to restore his reputation

For someone who was for years regarded as the acme of conventionality and conservatism, Terence Rattigan had the most extraordinary career. Who would have thought, after his early succession of lightweight successes in the field of comedy verging on farce, that he would end up as the stage's unchallenged laureate of humiliation?

   It was perhaps more likely that the years of despite and neglect following, or even by some estimates preceding, his death - especially since he died at the, for our times, relatively early age of sixty-six -  would be followed eventually by a considerable revival in reputation. After all, fashions, intellectual as much as haute couture, seem inevitably to go in cycles, and there are not so many good, commercially revivable plays around that we can afford to neglect any of them.

   Of course, professionals have always maintained a healthy respect for Rattigan. I cannot resist quoting something I wrote in 1966, if only to show how prescient I  -  but not only I  -  was at the time. My theatre book succeeding Anger and After, The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, came in for a lot of denunciation in its own right, because one was then supposed to be either totally for or totally against the 'New Drama' of Pinter, Osborne, Wesker et al, so obviously I was betraying the cause by finding something to admire in Coward, Rattigan and others with a similar cast of mind. In anticipatory self-defence, perhaps, the final paragraph of the book was: Towards the end of 1966 I took part in a symposium on 'The New Drama -  Whither' or some such subject at a theatre club meeting of advanced inclinations. The others involved were an avant-garde playwright [Ann Jellicoe] and a director of one of our major subsidised companies [Clifford Williams]. During the discussion a lady in the audience announced that she represented the philistine spectator who just wanted a good laugh, a good cry and either way a good story in the theatre: she berated us for not caring about the needs of such people, and clearly did not believe our protestations that we did, very much. But when the audience had gone and the speakers were relaxing over a cup of tea conversation turned to what had first got us excited by the theatre: A Streetcar Named Desire, volunteered one, Ring Round the Moon ventured another. There was an appreciative pause. Another piped up. 'The Deep Blue Sea - now there was a play for you'.

   All the same, in the heyday of this New Drama stuff Rattigan was almost universally despised and rejected. He continued to write stage plays with a measure of popular success, especially if they featured important stars in their cast, as did Man and Boy with Charles Boyer - in addition to which, in that play Rattigan for the first time explicitly confronted the subject of homosexuality, which many felt had long been the elephant in the room of his drama. (The New Drama, of course, was more likely to feature a weasel under the cocktail cabinet.) For some time people who knew of Rattigan's own homosexuality had speculated on the existence in his oeuvre of first drafts with all-male casts, subsequently rendered more acceptable to the Lord Chamberlain by a rapid sex-change. Was that true? I first met Rattigan, briefly and peripherally, as part of the film set-up which surrounded the producer Anatole de Grunwald and Anthony Asquith in the early 1960s, though at that time Rattigan was ill with leukaemia and rarely put in an appearance, while by the end of the decade he had taken refuge in Bermuda, not appreciating the Swinging Sixties at all: an attitude which was heartily reciprocated.

   I really got to know him at all well in the early Seventies, when he had a Paris flat in the Seizieme, where he professed to feel at home because it was full of well-heeled lesbians walking small and vicious dogs. For some reason I seemed to see most of him there, and one day I actually dared to ask him if, as legend had it, The Deep Blue Sea had begun life as a queer drama. 'You seem to know my work as well as anyone,' he replied; 'What do you think?' I told him that I doubted it, because the story of the separated wife living in a back street with a jolly, affectionate but limited hearty seemed to make full sense only in a heterosexual context. 'And,' I added, 'Surely it has the same relation to Anna Karenina that Variation on a Theme has to La Dame aux Camelias. Closer, in fact, because the triangle between the detached, conventional husband, the estranged wife wholly devoted to a life of passion, and her boyfriend, who really loves her but still wants the run off sometimes and have a drink or play soldiers with the boys is exactly the same.' He said that was just what he originally had in mind, and he couldn't understand why no one else seemed to have noticed.

   Every worthwhile dramatist is expected nowadays to be what in the cinema we would call an auteur. That is, he (or she) should have an obsessive theme that underlies everything they do. If that is a benchmark, then Rattigan clearly lives up to it: a subject that at least hovers in the background of all his plays is humiliation. Think of The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, Separate Tables, Ross, Man and Boy, A Bequest to the Nation. One could even make a case for comedies like French Without Tears or While the Sun Shines as being based on humiliation. But then, find a comedy that absolutely isn't.

   Even so, it would be very difficult to find another dramatist with similar preoccupations so intensely, consistently present. Rattigan was very discreet about his private history, and though there are now two biographies that I know of, neither of them throws much light on the origins of his evidently strong feelings about humiliation and, unmistakably, close identification with the humiliated. Possibly, considering when Rattigan was born (1911), it may have had something to do with his being gay, though when he was a schoolboy at Harrow he was a successful cricketer, he seems to have done well at Oxford, and had his first big success as a playwright, with French Without Tears, when he was only 25, a year younger than Osborne when Look Back in Anger made him the sensation of the moment. Admittedly Rattigan's first attempt at 'serious' drama, After the Dance, was scuppered, not by vicious reviews, but by the outbreak of war: unfortunate, but hardly humiliating. No doubt the contemptuous dismissal of his first plays after the advent of the New Drama must have been humiliating to someone who, moments before, had been top of the heap. But by then he had anyway staked out humiliation as his special territory: the humiliation of Crocker-Harris at the hands of his wife, the boys he teaches and the world at large; the humiliation of Major Pollock as a result of whatever he did in the cinema (to a boy in the original version, to a respectable woman in the West End); the general humiliation of Hester in The Deep Blue Sea.

    In any case, why he wrote about what he wrote about, once a certain consistency is recognised, is really beside the point. What is important is how well he did it. And at least in this centenary year it looks as though we shall have plenty of opportunities to re-evaluate, what with Trevor Nunn's West End revival of Flare Path (1942), a new production of Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, at the Old Vic, and a whole Rattigan Festival at Chichester, including The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea, as well as the world premiere of Nijinsky, an unproduced television script from 1974, and rehearsed readings of five lesser-known plays, among them First Episode, his first play, apparently not seen since 1934.

    Nijinsky may even throw some more light on Rattigan's psyche - or, more precisely, the new play by Nicholas Wright in which the Rattigan script is embedded may, as Wright speculates on the reasons why Rattigan suddenly withdrew the script from production or publication without ever explaining his actions. What is certain is that Rattigan was a consummate craftsman, closing the whole well-made-play movement with a worthy final flourish. Though one may well wonder whether reports of the movement's demise have not been greatly exaggerated: who doubts that when it comes down to it, Pinter knew and practised all there is to know about dramatic construction? And what was good enough for Aristotle, not to mention Rattigan, is surely still good enough for the rest of us. As for the depth of Rattigan's inspiration as well as the precision of his craft, well, if there were not something more than a soigné surface to the plays, I hardly think we would be still considering the question a hundred years after his birth and nearly 40 after his death.