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Arnold Wesker

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49

first

2006-12-17

most recent

2006-12-17

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1

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podcast

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1. “Yes, as much as you want. Thank God And if the waves were to crash onto the shore and threaten to wash away your discs when you Is the one you'd run across the sands to save? I think it would have to be the gura leader of Schenberg. Arnold Wesker, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. It's been a great pleasure, thank you. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Disks Archive. For more podcasts Please visit BBC.co.uk.”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “No because I keep feeling there's that elusive masterpiece around the corner. There's more that has to come together. To make me write something really. I feel will be memorable and lust through all time. I think one or two of the plays might I think roots might, the kitchen might, the four seasons might. But that Balzacian novel eluded me, I feel So on this island then, of course, you have the complete works of Shakespeare. What other book would you like Alerches de Tom Perdeu. I can't live without writing, so can I have supplies of pens and paper? I mean, that can let me one thing pens and paper. I think it can be.”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “very ill in recent months, given that you were very ill, did you have inclination to think about your own mortality and to think about what you've achieved over all these years.”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “The last record is a surprise to me. I have an assistant called Jam Morris and she has brought up two sons on her own. One of them is now the youngest golf course manager in the world, I think, and the other one Justin is his name. One day woke up and said I want to play the guitar and one of the ways of encouraging him was to listen to him playing. And he played this piece of music by Satriani. I thought I liked that, and I said just in would you play that for me at my funeral? Said, yes, he would, and some months ago when I was very ill, he rang up his mum and said, Should I be learning the piece now? And as I'm obviously going to die on this desert island, I thought it would be nice to be able to play this Satriani with my last breath. Have you said that you had been”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “on your own. Well, sometimes with difficulty, but sometimes with great relief. Dusty has she's always wanted to live by the sea, so she bought a house, we sold the house in London, and with some of the money she bought a house by the sea, in Hove, and this house in the country in Black Mountains is a house that we bought in nineteen sixty eight, and it has space, and I desperately need space. But I am now getting too old for the winters, and so I spend the winters in Hove, with Dusty, so it's a really it's a good existence. She doesn't have to suffer me the entire year.”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I mean he talked about we can make the auditorium smaller we can bring the stage out and I thought well okay you know what you're doing and he sat on it for nearly two years that meant the play was not earning royalties for two years that you've been married for forty eight years, and at the same time you also”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “You want to buy that? Are you sure you do? There's something there that's stopping it. No, what happened, you see, I was right. What happened?”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “But why shouldn't I be in vot? I mean, I enjoy the whole process of seeing a play put together. I turn out to be right. Yes, but if you sell yourself.”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “No, but I'm hoping that my new play will be my pension. It's a two hander, which has just been bought by a commercial producer, it's been bought by three producers actually, it was bought by Duncan Weldon to begin with, and he dropped it after a year, and then it was bought by Kevin Spacey. And I said, You know, are you sure you want this because it's only a two hander, and the old vicar's much too large for a two hander. But you shouldn't be saying that if you want a commercial,”

   2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Well, one of the things I regret most in my life is that I can't dance, and on this island, where no one will be able to watch me, I need something to dance to. So I thought”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yes. I mean, when we walked into the restaurant with my children, we were applauded. My children were so proud we walked through the doors of Sadi, and everybody there applauded. But once this review came out with this dreadful last line, the people were queuing to get out. Sir it ran for ten days and came off. And We went into overdraft again.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “We suffered from hubris, actually. Dexter wanted to prove that he could make a play work without a star, and I wanted to prove that my play was the star. Mistake You can't work on Broadway without a star. We used the understudy, we turned down Danny K, and the reviews were very good. I mean, in England, they would have been superlative reviews. But the New York Times, which is the all important review, had an unfortunate last sentence which said something like this is an extraordinary play, but not wholly successful. Well, you know, whatever is wholly successful.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Zeromastell, who's famous for that wonderful film's producers, and many other things, he played four thousand performances of fiddler on the roof. An Edicolundus the English side of the production flew me to Chicago to see zero in Fiddler, and we ate afterwards and he said Well, well. Am I acceptable? Can I do it? And I said, Zero, you're perfect for it, but it would be great if you could lose some weight. And he did he lost something like sixty pounds. but it affected his heart, which I think he was already suffering from. I don't know the correct medical term whether you die from an aneurysm or you're suffering from an aneurysm. But it was there, waiting to happen. And he gave one performance out of town in Philadelphia, fell ill, and died. And we had to go on”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Yeah, I think everything has to be earned in art. I think everything has to be earned in life, but in art I think of my mother, inch it with barley. She was very proud of me, but she was also a little upset that I'd shown her quarrelling with my father, and I had to say to her mum around the world where this play is performed the character of Sarah comes out as a heroine. But heroines aren't perfect. Their flaws have to be revealed so the heroicness of the character of Sarah has to be earned and the flaws have to be shown. So that's the kind of thing I mean. Is that clear?”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Well this I choose for just sheer beauty it's the presentation of the rose from Richard Strauss's D Rose and Cavalier and it has a sublime duet and when I listen to it I am just reminded of human genius.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “We will never really know I have a suspicion that it was because my play the journalist had four intelligent Tory cabinet ministers in it. The left tends to think the left in the arts tends to think that you should always make your enemy stupid, and the one thing a writer must not do is make it easy for himself.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think I know exactly where it came from. The Royal Shakespeare Company at one point commissioned a play that I was in the middle of writing called The Journalists. It is a long story, but the bottom line is that the actors refused to perform the play, and the RSC dropped the play. They did, in my opinion, break their contract, and I sued them.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I think we have lived most of our life on an overdraft. The plays weren't made into films like Look Back in Anger or the Entertainer, so I never got any big film money. I just had plays performed around the world, and that's what kept me going, thank God for the foreigners, I used to say.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yes, I was, but you talk about those five hits they weren't really the only play out of all those five that ran for any time was chips with everything which transferred to the vaudeville and ran for a year, but all the rest only ran for a few weeks.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “What's not known about lots of things not known about me is that I have a passion for musicals, and I developed an ambition that I wanted a famous composer to compose music to any lyric that I wrote, but no one turned up until I met Ben Till, and then one day I said to Ben Why don't we do something for the European song contest? Your vision, yes,'cause so many of the British entries are just silly. I wrote this song with a sun. He composed the music, and we made a demo of it, and sent it to the powers that be, and they, of course, turned it down. But it's such a good song, and I'd like it on my desert island just to remind me that I had a sort of talent.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “So I didn't take it too seriously, and I did like him. He really was a very attractive personality, and I think he liked me too, bit disappointed that I wasn't gay.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Then he wrote an article in which he said something like what an insult our plays were to all those people from the provinces who came to be entertained, and they were being offered what was it?”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Do we have time Well, at that time I was trying to set up an arts organization to find a popular audience for the arts, and I was looking for money, and I was looking for famous people, and I rang Noel Card up once in Switzerland, and said, Can I come and see you? And he said, Yes, of course you can, dear boy, of course you can. And I said, Will you book a hotel for me? And I'll No, I will not book a hotel, you'll stay at my house, you'll stay at my house, and I went, and he took me away at her room and he said, Right now, dear boy, you must tell me all about yourself. Are you married? Do you have children? Are you gay? And yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, yes. And then he said I would never dream of helping you with centre forty two, all those dreary people from the provinces and you shouldn't be wasting your time. You have bags of talent. You're like me. You've got bags of talent. Why are you wasting your time with it?”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Well, he was mischievous was Null. I mean, we liked each other very much, but he was mischievous. He did anything for a headline. Do you know the story of me and Nell Cart?”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “You must ask them maybe there's a tone to my writing that isn't English. I mean I feel very English I feel fiercely English, I feel as fiercely English as I do Jewish. But it's perhaps not in my writing. Perhaps there is an intellectual European continental tone which sits uncomfortably on the English scene.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “One of the reasons behind the choice of these records is to remind me of places where I've been for my plays, and Germany is a country that performed a lot of my plays in Scandinavia, and it was in Scandinavia that I made lots of friends, one of whom introduced me to The Gur Leader by Schoenberg, which I would love to have with me on a desert island.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “It was more an aspiration than No that's not true. Yes there was a sea change, and there was this extraordinary coming together of people who wrote about experiences that were quite different from plays that had been written before, and they were from a millier that could be described as the working class and along with it came directors like Lindsay who didn't direct my plays, I mean he didn't ever get an opportunity to but John Dexter, who came from a working class background, who directed my first five players, and there were the actors to play the parts. But I don't think any of us wrote plays in order to fit into the climate everything that other writers wrote and I went on to write was because we wanted to write them.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Well, I managed to save up enough money to pay for a six month course at the London School of Film Technique. I thought I will be a film director, and people were invited to lecture at the school, and one of them was Lynn's Yanderson, and I asked Lindsay whether he would read a story I'd written, because I wanted to make it into a film he did, and he liked it, and he said have you written anything else? And finally I showed him chicken soup with barley, and he wrote this extraordinary letter, saying You really are a playwright, aren't you? Can I have your permission to show this to the royal court? I said yes Of course and that was the beginning I named my first son after him.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Well, having failed to get into drama school, I went to Norfolk. There I was alone and I saw this advert for kitchen porter at the Bell Hotel in Norwich, where I could live in as well, so I thought that's it. I'm not a writer, I'm not an actor, I'm going to work in kitchens And one morning, as we were serving breakfast this extraordinary young blonde burst literally burst like the sun bursts through clouds, out of the dining room into the kitchen. And that was it, and we became lovers. And then I thought it couldn't work that it was crazy, it was a mismatch, and I went back to London and she followed me, and we took up being lovers again.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “It's a piece of music that's very little known. Another play I wrote called Lady Othello has in it an orgasm. The man has been trying to get the girl, the woman, to listen to this piece of music. There's always reason not to, but finally he manages to get it on and it coincides with this orgasm, I think the magnificat by CPE Bach just coincides wonderfully with his orgasm.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I really am talking about memory. I mean it's almost clinical with me. I forget the names of my characters, for example, in plays. I mean I sometimes forget my opinions about something people say have you seen this movie and I say yes and what did you think of it? Damn I've forgotten.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “I just failed exams. I didn't even pass my English exams when I write prose I keep my fingers crossed that I'm writing it as I remember having read it in good literature”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I'm not so much playing it as I'm speaking it, because there are rhythms, so I need to know that they can be delivered by an actor.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Well No, I mean if I did, I would think to myself What Osborne was an actor? Pinter was an actor but they went on to write plays and Pinter still acts well he has done so I might have been able to combine the two”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “me twice. I twice passed the auditions for Rada and twice failed to get a grant from the LCC, the London County Council. So I became a furnisher maker's apprentice instead”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Yes, I did. I mean, I wanted to be a writer from the age of twelve, but I concluded that you can be a writer whatever you're doing, and I'd been introduced to an amateur drama group at an early age, and so I was bitten, the bug.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “A country that's performed a lot of my players is Japan, and there I met a Japanese composer Shiaki Saigusa, and I think he's an extraordinary composer. This is a piece from an oratorio called Yamato Takaru, which I think is dynamic.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “thirteen fourteen I read a story once called The Man Who Would Never Write Like Balzac, which was based on my experiences of rejection.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Not in fashion street, but when we moved to Hackney Upper Clapton in an LCC flat there were four rooms, and I had a room to myself by that time my sister was married, but I had a room to myself, my own desk in which I ordered everything neatly, all my rejection slips and exercise books, so I had a room of my own.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “I'm afraid it was, yes. I mean I used to nag to be allowed to stay up late and if they didn't allow me to stay up late I would creep out of the bedroom just to be with people and they argued and discussed and sang My father had a good tenor voice and people would ask him to sing Sing Stenkarazin, Joe, come on, give us a song. There is of course a danger that as you grow older you romanticize your childhood. There were quarrels, and they were upsetting, but in a strange way there was so much love around that it overshadowed the distress.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “I might have been, but I really don't remember it. I remember much more being taken to Mayday demonstrations at Hyde Park and being carried shoulder high, watching those. But Cable Street now I don't remember.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “I was, but I was young, I was four years old in thirty six, so even though it's the first act of chicken soup with barley, I recreated that period from the way people talked about it. People talked about it all the time.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “No, not in the thirties, forties, and of course during the war when the Soviet Union was everybody's friend, but afterwards, after the Khrushchev revelations and Prague, it was all downhill the idealism splintered, and that's what you can suit with Barley's about, the disintegration of an ideology set against the background of the disintegration of a family.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, there were people I loved but who I think they loved each other but they didn't get on with each other. They were party communist party members. My father was a tailor's machinist when he worked. He didn't really like working he was a workshire man which was the cause of endless quarrelling between him and my mother.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Good music to get you up in the morning. Yes, isn't it? And glorious to wake up to it. It really you really can thrust yourself out of bed with that.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Well, I read Blake all the four seasons once its love story between two people, and it's been done in many languages around the world, but the best production ever was in Mexico, and there I met some wonderful theatre people, and I made friends with others, and was introduced to this music by the Mexican composers called Huapango Pablo Morquos.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “But my own life, yes, I wouldn't like to say I'm anything as grand as the experience of man. I never really write anything unless I feel it's more than itself. I read a play called The Kitchen, and the actual space is based on a kitchen I worked in in Paris. Now I also worked as a bookseller's assistant and a carpenter and a plumber's mate, and but I didn't write about those because I couldn't find anything in the material that was more than itself. So when I say I write about my own experiences, my own life, I still select, I still choose that from it which resonates, at least I like to think resonates.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Actually, is it a limitation? Does that make life as a writer difficult? Yes, it does, because it means I can't. I think I've retracted that and I've changed, and it's not that I don't have imagination. I do have imagination. My powers of invention are not strong, so I can't create plots. I've got a wonderful children's story that I want to write, that I started writing, but a third of the way through I found I really don't have a sense of plot. I don't know what happens next, I don't know where to take it so I regret that, because I love storytelling. But as Bashava Singha said, at the Nobel Prize winner, short story writer, I can't invent anything more extraordinary than what happens around me, he said, and I kind of feel the same way.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Well, I would like to think that it means that I'm different that I haven't gone with the crowd, that I haven't risen to the temptation to shine as a so called working class writer. I've always worried about people who wear cloth caps to show where they come from because where they come from doesn't really matter. You're not a good writer because you come from a working class background, and you're not a good writer because you've been through university. You're a good writer because you're a good writer and it's the work that matters not the labels that surround you.”

    2006-12-17 · Desert Island Discs · Arnold Wesker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source