Wesker: Don't write me off

Being "well-known" is a curious thing. In 1976, when I was a mere 44 years old, The Wesker Trilogy was being revived at The Shaw Theatre. A brave venture; three plays from one playwright. One day, coming away from rehearsals, I approached the box-office on my way to the front door just in time to hear someone who'd purchased tickets ask the ticket-lady: "Excuse me, but is Arnold Wesker still alive?" Being so well known, one couldn't possibly still be alive, surely?

But I was and still am. I've survived. What is it though - the question has to be asked - that has been survived? Why, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune", of course. But the Hamlet quote prompts the question: what slings? Which particular arrows?

There is one that would have pierced deeply had I allowed it: the arrow that glories in the end of things, the passing of this and that. "He's had his day," the arrow says with false sadness, hiding the glee of a dried-up heart. Expect no more from him, the arrow says as it whistles through the wind.

I remember being told of a remark made by Glenda Jackson in 1965, coming out of the theatre where my sixth play, The Four Seasons, was showing - a love story utterly unexpected because it was lyrical and different from my earlier, more naturalistic plays. She was overheard saying, "Well, that's the end of Wesker, isn't it?" And I recall a review in 1970 for my collection of lectures, Fears Of Fragmentation, that began: "A plot is afoot to rehabilitate Arnold Wesker." At the time I'd written eight plays, three film-scripts, sundry collections of prose and a copious diary, all followed over the next 30 years by 34 plays, more books of prose and the equivalent in diaries of more than 50 novels.

The "end", aged 33. In need of rehabilitation, aged 38. Dead by 44!

Whence comes this need to cry "Dead, gone, over-and-done-withnever-to-return"? What is there in the human psyche that rubs its hands and smacks its lips at the thought of the mighty brought low? Tyrants, oppressors and charlatans, yes, but why the wish to diminish the talented?

Well, talented or not, I have, with a little help from my friends, survived to 70, and they can choke with glee for, though they have an arrow to deflate, I have a pen that seems unable to dry up. I have even written my own obituary that will appear on www.arnold wesker.com, to counter those newspaper obituaries based on brown old cuttings filed and waiting for "gloat day", for "what-a-pity day", for "Alas, poor Yorrick day".

In 1986 I wrote a 45-minute play called Whatever Happened To Betty Lemon, claiming it as a self-portrait of myself as an old woman of 75. Lady Betty Lemon possesses an electrically driven wheelchair that develops a life of its own. Even something designed to help her seems determined to complicate her life more. She cries out to it:

"You want to get the better of me, don't you? Decrepit, malfunctioning, full of wheezes, but I go on and on and on and on and it makes you mad, eh? She should be dead, you're thinking. Why does she linger? Who's interested in her? Who cares what she does, what she feels, what she thinks. Get it over and done with! Sing praises! Bury her! Give the barmy old battleaxe a tomb and flowers. Goodbye, Betty Lemon. Farewell, you irritating old fart."

"Amazing," people say to me, "that you keep writing." It's not amazing that I keep writing, that I keep going "on and on and on and on", but that there's so much in life that keeps asking to be written.

I look in the mirror each morning and start the day lamenting the passing of youth, asking, as my Jewish mother used to ask her mirror, "Where, where did I get such a face?" and warning myself: beware of them. My mother always feared for me. "They'll get you in the end," she warned. Who? Who were this nebulous "they"? Those who wish you ill, screw up their sour faces when they see that you're still around, surviving and writing. How unhappy it makes them feel, those who would drain joy from a nightingale, dampen your sun, lay waste the best in you.