Interviews With Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker

Interviews with Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker
Author(s): Karl-Heinz Stoll, Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec., 1976), pp. 411-432
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/440583
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Interviews with
Edward Bond and
Arnold Wesker
KARL-HEINZ STOLL
Edward Bond (born July 18, 1935) is one the most prominent and
controversial among the New British Dramatists. The Pole's Wedding (fir
performed in 1962) deals, in a still somewhat inexplicit way, with the
desperate attempt of a lonely young man to find a meaning in his existence.
Saved (1965) expresses the senseless brutality of modern life in the playf
stoning to death of a baby by a group of young London toughs. Early Mornin
(1968) portrays Queen Victoria as an obscene and murderous old lesbian; th
"cannibalism" of a corrupt society in which people devour each other is p
onto the stage by means of a blood-soaked, literally cannibalistic scene i
heaven. Lear (1971) has been described as one long scream of horror abou
man's corruptibility by power. The Sea (1973) depicts the infamous tortures o
everyday life in an Edwardian East Coast village. Bingo (1973) is a play about
the last months of a Shakespeare who is desperate about his failure to
practice the social justice he has-according to Bond-propagated in his
plays, and who commits suicide. By the example of the poor, lonely, and
finally, mad poet John Clare, The Fool (1975) questions the writer's role in a
class-conscious, unjust, and cruel society.
Edward Bond lives in a beautiful cottage at the edge of a village near
Cambridge. In conversation, the author gave the impression of being a very
articulate, tremendously tense, and serious person. When he said "I writ
plays ... to stop myself going mad" it did sound deeply convincing.
Stoll: Let's first talk about the way in which your plays come into being
You sometimes use rather sententious phrases. Do you "invent" them sepa
rately? Do you sometimes write them down without having a play to pu
them into and later on insert them somewhere?
411
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
Bond. Never. Plays begin with people and not ideas. To invent thin
people to say and then attach people to them would be a very des
thing to do.
S.: But what about sentences like: "Live is evil spelt backwards
B.: Well, that's what that man said in that situation. You have to h
situation in which a man is going to say that. I won't say it. I've
invented a line for a character without knowing-at least in some w
the character was.
S.: What were your motives in writing a play about Shakespeare's King
Lear?
B..: There are always complex reasons for writing a play, there were
many reasons why I wrote a play about King Lear. One is that in the English
theater King Lear is a sort of archetypal culture-figure who lays down certain
standards for civilized perception-the way civilized people ought to think
and feel-and I thought that should be criticized. He is part of the dead hand
of the past which I thought should be removed. That's one reason. Another
reason is that Lear, although he belongs to the past, he belongs to it in terms
of solutions, but in terms of problems he is in many ways a contemporary
figure: He deals with the difficulties that human beings have in their society.
He articulates important problems very passionately, often very clearly, so
that in that way I'm intrigued by the character.
S.: How did you come across a subject like The Sea?
B.: All my plays deal fundamentally with the same problems, various
aspects of the same problems. If you take a writer like Shakespeare: When
you see Shakespeare's King Lear you are very aware of As You Like It or Twelfth
Night. One doesn't see Lear, one sees these plays together and it's very
important that the whole of a writer's work is seen in connection, that all the
plays are seen related to each other. My own plays deal very often with the
same problems and the same situations in various aspects.
S.: I have the impression that there is also a definite development in your
plays as far as the explicitness is concerned with which you express the basic
idea.
B.: Yes, that's right.
S.: I read somewhere that you had written fourteen or so plays before The
Pope's Wedding. Whatever became of them?
B.: Nothing! Nothing will ever become of them. They were just rubbish.
That's how you learn to write. That's how I learned to write, because I didn't
have any sort of formal education about literary subjects. So, when I started
412
INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD BOND
as a writer I had to teach myself. And that's a good way of learnin

write.
S.: What are the actual stages in the creating of a play? I'm part
interested in your awareness of structural aspects.
B.: The theater is a three-dimensional art. Actually it's not a lit
at all, and it's related more to sculpture than to painting. You h
basic grounding in the theater. It has to become second nature to y
in terms of things acted out on the stage. You must not write i
way, you must not write clever speeches. Words must only be the
gestures. Words must be a form of action. Language on the stag
physical. Anything you say must induce action or repose or w
Nothing can be judged simply by what is said but only by what
what happens.
The way I write a play is that I plan the structure of the pl
carefully. I work out all the scenes. I work out all the characters. I
when somebody is coming on. I know when they're going off. I pla
carefully and in great detail. I know very often roughly what will
this point or at another point and by the time I get this far, I very
one or two of the actual sentences that will be said in various
calculate a play very carefully.
But having done that I think all writing for the theater has
act of improvisation. It has to be related to the actor's technique an
the writer's technique. This is something that I learned at the Roya
the writer's group, where we never discussed or worked on d
questions and problems. We learned how to improvise. Therefore, a
have carefully laid down a structure for the scene, the actual writi
scene has to be an act of improvisation. If in the act of writing it do
in the same way that an improvisation works, then I know the scen
no good. It has to work just in the way that one sets actors a probl
says: "Explain that. Make that real." Writing has to be of that sort.
I carefully plan a play and it may be in my head for years before I
write it down quite quickly. I write, for instance, a scene a day, I v
spend more than a day writing a scene. Afterwards I change the sc
and alter it very carefully.
S.: You mean after it has gone into the theater?

B.: No. After I've written the scene, I go through the play and
and often cut it quite a lot. But still, the important thing about th
always been created when I write it, just in that morning or aftern
can improve it afterwards, but you can't actually make the scene li
if you can't create in that spirit of improvisation, the actor will no
413
re-create it for himself when he acts it. You are imposing a literary
on the scene.
The business of cutting a play is a pseudo-question. People say:
"Are you prepared to cut your plays?" That depends on how much you cut
them before they go to the theater. If you are experienced in the theater, if
your training has been in the theater, then as a reasonably competent
technician you can in fact do most of that stuff beforehand. There is no
mystery that is going to be produced when it finally comes onto the stage. If
you know how the stage behaves, you can anticipate the problems and do
most of your cutting beforehand. But if something doesn't work on the stage,
of course I'm completely ready to cut it in rehearsal. But lots of writers-and
perhaps this is particularly true of the German theater-their scripts aren't,
in fact, written for the stage. They're written I don't quite know what for, and
so, when they come to the stage they have to be cut. Then it is not whether
you are prepared or not: they just don't work unless you do.
S.: You also write poetry. What does that poetry mean to you? Do you
consider yourself mainly a poet who writes plays to make money, or is your
poetry something like a by-product?
B.: I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself going mad.
Because it's my way of making the world rational for me.
I don't make a distinction between poetry and writing for the
theater because, as I said earlier, I don't think that the language of the
theater is a literary, grammatical thing. It's a physical thing. The words have
to be physical on the stage. Shakespeare, of course, is the supreme example of
this, because you actually feel his words when you say a sentence. It's a
curious experience, and one knows that they are written absolutely for the
stage and not to be read.
Poetry is a form of economy. It is obvious that if you talk on the
stage, that has the disadvantage that whenever you talk too much it becomes
boring. Poetry is not something added to speech. It's what is left when the
superfluous is taken away. When I write anything for the stage, the language
has to be metaphorical, physically suggestive and it works on various layers of
inference and meaning and irony. All these things have to come in. I often
deliberately use words that have layers of meanings. All those things are very
important, because people in fact talk like that in real life, all the time. That
is not a special contrivance. It is, like all art, reality.
What I do now is to write separate poems in connection with a play.
I've written several poems for Bingo and six poems for my play The Fool,
which comment on the characters and the situations in the play, because I
think that is useful for an audience. In the past I've written a lot of lyrical
414
poetry which is in a sense purely private, but I can't make t

between public art and private art. I think that's an artific
even as a private individual one is a member of the commun
the truth about oneself, one is obviously performing an act tha
to society, not just to oneself. If we think of all poetry as bein
romantic, we misinterpret it and don't know how to read i
when I publish very little of my private lyrical poetry, really it
laziness, of not getting around to doing it. It is not because I fe
and therefore it shouldn't be published.
S.: You said that you write plays to stop yourself going
extent do the images of horror in your plays haunt you privat
B.: Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put o
only those things that I know happen in our society. I'm not in
imaginary world. I'm interested in the real world. And in fact,
things that I put on the stage are understatements.
S.: But very often you do transform metaphors into dire

this phenomenon occurs more often in your plays than in
authors.
B.: That's certainly something I employ. But can I add something about
violence? My plays are not particularly violent, actually. There are often
violent things in them, and when they occur, then I depict them as truthfully
and honestly as I think one should. But I'm not interested in violence for the
sake of violence. Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately
violence is never a solution in human affairs. Violence is the problem that has
to be dealt with.
S.: When you wrote your first plays, did you have a knowledge of
Artaud's theater of cruelty? Was there a theoretical influence from the start
or did you come across Artaud's book much later?
B.: It wasn't something that I got from Artaud. I'm interested in violence
not as an aesthetic preoccupation, but simply as a fact of life. I grew up with
violence: I was bombed when I was very young. It's a problem I have to de
with and I think society has to deal with. I know very little about the theater
of cruelty, and I don't think it really relates to my theater at all. If I had to
describe my theater as anything, I'd like to call it the rational theater.
S.: Rational?
B.: The rational theater, yes. I'm interested in a rational society.
S.: But that term might be misleading. It sounds as if you propagate

ideas in a rationalistic way, whereas you put your ideas onto the stage
415
action. And that, I think, is really what the term "theater of cruelty"
that you convey ideas by means of action, sometimes cruel action.
B.: Except that my plays aren't extensively cruel. There are moment
violence. They very often occur quite early in a play and the play then
consideration of what has happened or what the consequences of tha
always try to relate the problem of violence to society and don't see it ju
theatrical technique. I think it's no use just presenting something violen
saying to the audience: "What do you think of that?" If you pres
something violent, you have to say what it is possible to think of it. Th
to be gone into and shown on the stage.
S.: You have often stated that you wanted to change the struct
society. I felt somewhat let down when, in the "Introduction" to Bingo
this last sentence, that a new counter-culture is ready which has
developing for many centuries, and this is democracy. What do you me
"democracy"?
B.: That's a very large question. I don't think that there is any
wrong with human beings in a metaphysical sense, or, indeed, in a biol
sense, in the sense of being condemned to sin, and, therefore, havin
saved outside this world. And I don't think people are biologically violen
the sense that they have to be violent. It is just in certain situations th
be violent. So our problem is not to deal with the weaknesses of
nature, but to create a society in which it is possible for people to func
a way which would be natural for them. And the only sort of society w
that is possible is a society in which people have initiative for their ow
and have to accept the responsibilities for their actions. We can't do th
the sort of power structures we have. We have to have a society which is
democratic, in which people are responsible for the sort of life they live
instead of being told: "You must live like this, you must fit into this cat
you must do this, you must do the other," they will make the decision
affect the way they live. And then they are autonomous individu
autonomous individual has no need to be violent.
S.: Of course this refers very much to a personal level. What concre
changes in the structure of society would you consider necessary?
B.: It is not only on a personal level, because if you say you are
responsible for the way you live your life, that means that you have to make
decisions according to which you live. Therefore, if you work in a factory you
must be responsible for the running of that factory. If you live in a street you
must be responsible for what goes on in the street. If you live in a town you
must be responsible for the organization of that town.
S.: Still, you appeal to me as a private human being. What about
416
political institutions?
B.: Our present political institutions aren't representati
members of society. They are representative of sectional int
order to protect those institutions, society has two powers. One
the other is the manufacture of myths; myths or false world vi
example is that "Jews are evil" or that "all men are sinful."
world view you can build all sorts of political institutions. So bo
force and those myths, are necessary to maintain an irrational so
you had a rational society in which people were responsible
lives, you wouldn't have any need for force or any need to
bother to tell lies about human nature or whatever, if it doe
devious end? Now, obviously, we don't live in a society like
moment. We don't live in a rational society. We live in an irrat
How do you achieve a rational society? Is that what you are
S.: Well, Arnold Wesker wants to teach people through

induce them to become socialists and create a socialist society. Do you
consider yourself able to influence people through plays and tell them in
which way society has to be organized?
B.: Certainly a democratic, rational society must be socialist. There are
only two ways of reaching such a rational society. One is by rational means;
that means writing plays, that means teaching, that means discussion, that
means persuading, that means caring. The other way of reaching a rational
society is by irrational means, that is the use of political violence in order to
achieve a rational, freer society. Now, that is obviously a very ancient
problem and people have been trying to solve that problem for a very, very
long time. It seems to me that what you can say new is this: In the past,
people have always adopted a moralizing attitude to violence, for obvious
reasons: violence is, in an obvious sense, wrong. We don't, on the whole, want
to hurt other people if we are rational. We don't want to make other people
suffer purely for the sake of making them suffer. That is a perversion.
Another argument against the use of violence is that it is inefficient.
It is inefficient by its very nature and there is no discussion about that. What
happens is: if people cannot achieve the result they want, the freedom they
need in order to function properly, if they can't do that in a natural way, and
that means for human beings, a rational way, then they will, not because they
choose to do it, but because that is the biological truth of the human
situation, then they will become violent. And you might say: "You shouldn't
be violent." Fair enough, I will say that. But then you might just as well say
to a madman: "You shouldn't be mad." What is the use of saying that? He is
mad because he is subjected to certain pressures. Poeple are violent because
417
they are subjected to certain pressures. Now, if you do everything

rationally to remove those pressures, then you are in a position to be
moralistic about violence and to say: "Violence is wrong." But if you don't do
that, then you have no right to morally condemn violence in those
circumstances. And also, it will be totally ineffective. Christ can condemn
violence, Gandhi can condemn violence, Tolstoi can condemn violence. It
will be totally ineffective. You take a great moralistic pose, and you've really
done nothing, except save your own soul. You haven't done anything really to
lessen the suffering or the injustice in the world.
It seems to me to be the job of rational people, of writers, of
dramatists to plead for a just society, in their plays to rationally argue for a
just society, to state clearly the conditions under which we live and try to
make everybody understand that they must bear the consequences of the sort
of life they lead. To show that our society is irrational and therefore
dangerous-and that it maintains itself by denigrating and corrupting
human beings-that is what Bingo is about. If you are an unjust person it
doesn't matter how cultured you are, how civilized you are, how capable you
are of producing wonderful sayings, wonderful characters, wonderful jokes,
you will still destroy yourself. And so a writer, nowadays, has to, as it were,
put the cards on the table for the public and say: "These are the
consequences of your life; they are inescapable. If you want to escape
violence you don't say 'violence is wrong,' you alter the conditions that create
violence.
"If you don't do that, then you are like somebody who says: 'Well,
the children in our village are dying of diphtheria, but we will not do
anything about the drains'."
S.: I see Schopenhauer on your table and I was reminded of some

parallels between your plays and existentialistic philosophy. Are you
interested in philosophy as such?
B.: I haven't actually read Schopenhauer. I had a letter from the
Schopenhauer Institute in Germany, in Frankfurt, and they asked me if I was
aware of certain parallels between Schopenhauer and myself. I wasn't,
because I hadn't read Schopenhauer. And the little I've been told about him
makes it clear to me that we couldn't have much in common.
If you deal with irrational subjects as I often do, people imagine
that you are an irrationalist or that you are writing for the theater of the
absurd. Nothing could be less true in my case. I deal with problems of
irrationality, because they are the problems that break society. I'm not
interested in a theater of the absurd at all, which I think is culturally
disastrous.
418
S.: Because it only shows one half of the picture and you wa
both sides?
B.: Because it says, if I understand it properly, life is absurd. This is not

true. Our society is absurd, and that is very different. If life is absurd, you
know, if we are some sort of freaks cowering in some corner of the universe
and we are all going to destroy ourselves, because we have to, and we're all
mad, anyway, why bother to write plays? I can't see why an author goes
through the ordeal of writing a play, and why the audience bothers to go
along to the theater to be told how awful it all is. The only justification for
going to the theater is that it is a public institution in which your problems
are made clear to you, are stressed to you, are made real for you, and, at the
same time, that you are given hope and confidence in order to change the
situation in which you find yourself.
S.: What kind of structure do you consider most effective in a modern

play?
B.: That raises a lot of important questions, because the structure of the
play actually lays down your view of the world. The thing about the structure
of a play is that what is vital to human beings is their relationship to society
and the sort of society in which they live. That's the real problem of our
species at the moment, because if we don't solve that, we'll just blow ourselves
to bits. If that is so, then it seems to me that the sort of structure which is good
for dealing with our problems is the structure of the epic theater and it's
interesting that all writers who have been aware of the importance of the
social relationship problem have, in fact, written in that way. It's not an
invention of Brecht. I mean Shakespeare used pure epic structure. It's a
consequence of seeing modern problems properly, I think.
Another thing (which Howard Brenton pointed out recently) is that
you would probably get a lot of outdoor scenes rather than scenes indoors
which would be in small private rooms where the emotions would tend to
reflect purely personal preoccupations. One would expect social scenes to
have to be shown. That obviously affects a lot of what happens on the stage.
Nobody has to make rude remarks about the well-made play any
more because it's long since dead. But the well-made play had the aim of
reassuring the members of the audience about society. They went along,
usually after a good dinner. They saw a problem. The problem was made
more complex until a climax was reached-and then they were shown how
the problem could be solved. And they all went home saying, "Yes, with that
payoff we can go back and live in our society." And that seems to me to be
what the theater should not do. It should not reassure people about the
conditions of society. It can reassure them about their strength to alter
419
society, but it must never make them go back into society and say, "Ye
all right." The problems have to be handed over to the audience. In
naive way, when I wanted to symbolize that for myself, I made the e
The Sea finishing in mid-sentence, because I simply didn't want to say
is the end of my play."
I haven't called my last two plays "plays" at all, I called th
"scenes" of something, in the sense that it would be wrong to say
problem is such and such now because of something that happene
past. Our problem is created all the time, constantly re-created. A
because we don't interfere with the re-creations of our problems that
solve our problems. If I would go back into the past, and, like Ibse
say "Who is responsible?", then go back into the past still further
"No, it is not that"-then go back a bit further-"No, it's not that"
on-that won't provide any solution. Justice is not achieved simply by
who is guilty. If that were so, it would be much easier to solve our pr
That play where you investigate the past in order to pin guilt on to
somebody, that also is not a play that would interest me.
S.: Would you agree that the ghost in Lear is not all good?
B.: I think the ghost becomes a destructive thing in the play. He starts off
as a very innocent person, but what he wants to do is to live in a small
community, in his own little private world, in which he ignores certain
problems, and you can't ignore those probelms. If you try to ignore those
problems-they are problems of Lear himself, the questions he keeps
asking-then I think you start inventing a myth about the age of the golden
past. And if you try and live in the past, then that becomes a very destructive
thing. And the ghost does live in the past, and he does belong to a stage of
society that I think one can't go back to. I don't believe in returning to the
past.
S.: What is your image of yourself as author?

B.: The writer must not be a cult figure or a genius or any nonsense like
that. He's just a member of the working staff of the theater. And when I'm
working at the Royal Court, I'm just a member of the theater like, for
instance, the man who does the lights. And the man who does the lights will
come and say "Well, I don't think that's right." When I was in the
Burgtheater in Wien there was no idea of a technician coming up to me and
seriously saying without being self-conscious about it: "This should be
otherwise." That's why I was so unhappy there, you know, there was just no
human contact in the whole theater organization. Perhaps you can't have it
in that great big building.
All the writer has to do is not invent something in here, he has to
420
look out there. All the writer does is look and see and record what he sees.
There is no mystique about it. There is only simply a factual expertise o
learning your job.
S.: Of course you select.

B.: Yes, but then you obviously regard what is important, what reall
matters, what actually, if you look at a street is the relevant thing in th
street; what tells you the thing about that street. That is what writing
about. And when it's understood in that way, the writer can be accepted
just a working member of the theater which is all he is. That's all he can do.
The members of the theater can only say "What is the truth about the lives
we are living, and how do we show this clearly?" And if you show tha
clearly, there are enough people around who want to come and see it. Y
don't have to attract an audience. If you can make peoples' lives clear to them
on the stage, in spite of all the obfuscation and obscurantism and so on that
heaped on individuals in our society, if you can cut through all the myt
that we are brought up to believe, educated to believe, paid to believe, if you
can cut through all these things and put on the stage at least some of t
truth about society, then people, I'm sure, want to come and see that.
S.: How are you satisfied with the criticism of your plays?
B.: I haven't read all the critics. If I were just to talk about the critics in
English newspapers: they are very bad. Nobody takes them seriously an
nobody in fact expects them to write about the play.
My plays still tend to get related to other things like the theater of
the absurd or the theater of cruelty and I don't think they really connect wit
either of those. Also, I think that at the moment many critics don't
understand what a play is about. E.g.: you could say that Bingo is a
pessimistic play because it ends with a suicide. That is a possible approach to
the play. You could say that even Lear is pessimistic. But for me this is not
true, because I see them as the working-out of the rationality of society. You
cannot cheat in life; you have to bear the consequences of the life you lead.
Society has to bear the consequences of what it is. If you want to avoid those
consequences, the only way you can do it is not by applying a remedy on top
but by altering the nature of the problem below. So it seems to me that Bingo
is a demonstration of the working-out of certain truths about society which
are rational and coherent and from which the audience can learn. If an
optimistic play is simply a play where people come on at the end an
"Hurrah," that is a false optimism because anybody living nowadays will
"What is the justification for that 'Hurrah'?" All you can do to wr
optimistic play is to show that human activity has meaning and in that s
is rational. I would like a play of mine to be judged by the truth that ha
421
demonstrated in it. I always write a play in order to demonstrate som

about our lives.
My plays can be misunderstood in the same way that Brecht's
Mutter Courage is often misunderstood, where it is quite possible for an
audience so inclined to go along and say: "What a wonderful woman and
what a terrific example of heroism and 'endurance'." Mutter Courage is the
most frightening play I know. There is this monstrous woman who kills her
family, who is just like a Medea. To say that this destructive woman is heroic
seems to me a total misunderstanding.
And to say that Bingo is pessimistic is also a total misunderstanding
of that play, because it says that Shakespeare may be the greatest dramatist
of all times, but he is subject to the same laws as you and I or the man who
drives your bus.
S.: Quite apart from the character of Shakespeare himself I see the
optimistic tendency of Lear and Bingo in the young people who learn
something in the end, who go out in order to start a new life. In The Sea you
have the same kind of ending. I am amazed you haven't referred to that.
B.: This, as a matter of fact, is what I have been referring to. We said the
same thing. But some people don't see it because they have a vested interest
in something else. A person's pessimism is simply the measure of what he
stands to lose if he learns the truth and if the world is made more just.
Arnold Wesker was born in the East End of London, May 24, 1932. His
family is Jewish, of Russian and Hungarian descent. From 1950 to 1952
Wesker served with the R.A.F. He then worked as a pastry cook in Norwich,
London, and Paris. In 1956 he attended the London School of Film
Technique. From 1961 to 1971 Wesker was the founder-director of the
T.U.C.-subsidized cultural institution Centre 42.
The author is a passionate, idealistic adversary of ignorance and
indifference, a committed social critic who advocates a socialism animated by
the warmth of human feeling. He is the most prominent representative of the
naturalistic "kitchen-sink" drama, but also experiments with loose episodic
structures, different time levels, symbols, pantomime, and introspective
psychological studies. Most of his works make use of autobiographical
elements.
The Wesker Trilogy (Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots, I'm Talking about
Jerusalem) (1960) traces the political, social, and human situation of the
English working class from the Depression to 1955, the disillusioning erosion
of their lofty socialist and humanistic ideals in terms of the East End Jewish
Kahn family. The Kitchen (1960) presents the hectic rush in the kitchen of a
422
Photo by Mark Gerson
Photo by Mark Gerson
INTERVIEW WITH ARNOLD WESKER
large restaurant as an image of the meaningless, enervating

perfectionist division of labor. Chips with Everything (1962
sophisticated conformist pressure of the establishment in the micr
R.A.F. barracks. Their Very Own and Golden City (1966) is the
frustrations in the lifelong endeavors of a visionary, idealistic ar
Four Seasons (1966), a poetical love story totally removed from a
background, seemed to signal a new departure.
In The Friends (1970), The Old Ones (1972), and The Wedding F
Wesker does, however, return to characters similar to the one
plays; he intensifies the discussions of ideological positions, but at
time elevates them to the more general level of existential human
such as the loss of ideals and the confrontation with lonelines
death.
The interview took place in Wesker's large Victorian house in London,
in an attic-study crammed with books, manuscripts, photographs of stage
scenes and of actors. The author is a brisk person who repeatedly interrupted
the conversation by jumping up to dig for letters, notes, and articles. The
letter which he mentions as the starting-point of The Friends is still glued to
the first page of his manuscript.
Wesker's comment on reading the typescript of the interview: "Me read
this? One sounds like a mumbling idiot. But if you think anyone is interest-
ed-with my blessing."
Stoll: You've just come back from the GDR. What were your impres-
sions?
Wesker: You can have a good time anywhere, depending upon the peo-
ple you meet. When you are a writer you are very privileged. You meet an
intellectual and artistic cream, who are usually lively, witty, and sympa-
thetic. So it's very difficult for a writer not to have a good time.
But the real pleasure was to see these two productions, The Kitchen in
Magdeburg and The Wedding Feast in Karl-Marx-Stadt. The Wedding Feast is
based on a Dostoevsky story. It had its world premiere in Stockholm, after
which I rewrote some passages and it was this new version that was done in
Karl-Marx-Stadt.
I was a little worried because both these plays could so easily have been
turned into strident, anti-capitalist, boring productions. But they were not.
They were very sensitively and imaginatively directed. Very honest and true
to the spirit and the word. So much so, that in fact the two plays becam
discussion points in their society. The obvious example is The Kitchen, which
discusses work. Work is a big problem for them in a socialist society.
I was very relieved and gratified to see that the two plays were done so
well and that they were able to be used in their society, that they were not
simply productions which patted themselves on the back and pointed a finge
423
at the West, smugly.

It was a thrill to see The Wedding Feast work. I had seen it work
Stockholm and with the new alterations, I saw it really work. There
plans for a production in England. I don't know why they can't see
can work, but they can't, yet. And it was infuriating for me, very frust
to see this play work beautifully and not to have a production here
So in all the trip was, for me, very warming and successful.
S.: Did you have the impression that the reception of the play
different from Sweden?
W.: Yes. There exists a kind of finger-wagging-I call it the "boule-
vardisme de la gauche"-in the West. They have their own set of cliches.
They play to the gallery just as bourgeois theater does. They depend upon a
set of recognizable preconceptions and are, therefore, very shallow. The
audience takes the finger-wagging and, I suspect, feels that it ought to take it.
It's cathartic and they feel, "Yes, we deserve it, because we are decadent
bourgeois and it's right to attack us and criticize us." And they sit back and
that's it. They have paid their penance, having gone to the theater.
In the East the plays seemed to vibrate with more significance.
They really meant something. The audience really did turn them in on their
own situation. And I felt that partly in the audience, just sitting among them,
in Magdeburg. In Karl-Marx-Stadt they came down to the green-room. I
was supposed to meet about twelve or twenty and in fact when the doors were
opened, about seventy, nearly a hundred, people came in, all very eager to
talk about the play. It was obviously a shock to them to see a benign capitalist
portrayed instead of a nasty, cruel one, to see unromantic working-class
people, and a friendly relationship between the manager and the workers in
the factory. They couldn't quite understand how this could happen. It does
happen. I don't think it means anything. It doesn't mean that capitalist
society is benevolent and should be retained. But it is a fact that it can
happen. And this seemed to rock their images a bit. But these are very
superficial observations and I'm certainly not able to substantiate them.
S..: I was a little puzzled by the dedication of The Four Seasons, of all plays,
to the Cuban people. Was that merely accidental or was it a kind of excuse
for this play being different, a way of getting your socialism in through the
back door?
W.: Two reasons: One, they had kindly let me stay on in Cuba as their
guest in order to finish writing the play. Then, it seemed right to dedicate a
play about love to a new revolutionary society.
The play is not so unusual. If you think of a play like Chicken Soup
and the cry of Sarah Kahn, saying, you can't have brotherhood without love:
424
there are links. I don't feel that The Four Seasons is that much out of line with
the other plays. It's another aspect of me and my views of human
relationships in society.
S.: How do your plays come into existence? What made you start writing
a play like, say, The Friends?
W.: I can vividly remember the moment when I started The Friends.
There is a difference, however, between what actually made me start the first
page and what started me thinking about the play. I might have been
thinking about it six months beforehand, waiting for the right moment to
start.
S.: Does it happen to you that you have a whole play in your mind
before you write anything down or do you start with individual incidents
W.: I wait till a shape takes place. While I do so, scenes can come to me,
bits of dialogue can come to me and I write it down.
The moment when I started The Friends was when I received a letter
from a friend of mine who was a journalist and at the time was staying in
Munich. She was going through a transition in her own life and career. She
wrote a letter which contained the first lines of The Friends. There seemed
something so human or true about adding up what one liked towards the end
of one's life. It was a moment at which someone had pushed things aside and
said: "In the end, I really would like this and this." It was very real and just
seemed the right way to start the play.
S.: There are those well-formulated aphorisms in all of your plays that
sum up ideas. Do they grow with a character, or do you have a notebook
where you take down sentences that come to your mind, in order to fit them
into a play later on?
W.: In fact I do have a kind of notebook. Those things go on sheets of
paper. What particular one do you refer to?
S.: Let's take: "Words are bridges."

W.: That was certainly not a note. That's very likely to be something
I've said in the course of conversation and probably not even something that
I invented. It can't be original. I must have read it.
I am actually very preoccupied with words because I need them.
And there are lots of words which I don't know. I understand experience
through them. Throughout the plays there is a preoccupation with words,
from Beatie in Roots up to Macey in The Friends.
S.: Don't you think there are areas in human life where communication
through words is not sufficient, is not possible?
425
W.: I do, but there are no rules. All I can say is that communicat
some sort is essential. Dialogue must continue for ever and ever,
when it breaks down, you begin to throw bombs, and when you throw
civilization breaks down.
But having said that, it's madness not to recognize that for all sorts
of reasons communication very often does not happen. You may meet
someone whom you don't like. An animal instinct, all sorts of vibrations are
set up, and no matter what you say to each other, it doesn't really matter
because behind it, you just don't like that person. Or you listen and the same
word obviously means something quite different to him. Semantics is a whole
separate field of study, tied up with psychology and God knows how man
other disciplines, all of which must produce a whole body of evidence as t
why people don't communicate.
But I think too much is made of this notion that people don't
communicate. It's enough to acknowledge that there are many levels on
which they don't. But people give each other so much pain, so much of th
time, that I can only come to the conclusion that they do communicate. They
really do succeed in achieving their end, which is hurting other people o
diminishing them or intimidating them. So, one must conclude that
communication is not as difficult as all that. People do communicate. That'
one of my quarrels with Pinter.
S.: Well, as a matter of fact, he said: "People only communicate too

well."
W.: Did he say that? Perhaps I'm reacting to what people say about
Pinter.
S.: Is it true that some of the characters in The Old Ones are aged versions
of the ones in Chicken Soup?
W.: Only one of them, Sarah.
S.: That's obvious. But aren't, for instance, Rudi and Martin rather
similar to Ronnie?
W.: Ronnie is an archetypal young man in search of the meaning of life,
so any similar character can be related to him. Martin has the energy of
youth, inquiry and curiosity and political consciousness like Ronnie. So there
is a relationship. But Rudi is a quite different personality. He is based on the
much sadder version of a cousin of mine. Rudi, as I've portrayed him, is more
interesting, has more humor. The original is madder, really.
S.: Martin Esslin told me that he had given his book about Pinter to the
author, who said, "This is probably all very true, but I don't want to read it,
it's bad for me." You seem to be quite conscious of what you are doing and
426
also to take in criticism. Do you find that this has an inhibiting ef

W.: What you are saying needs qualification. Like Pinter, I
the books on me, I can glance at them. I haven't read any of the th
on me. I certainly never read any of the many theses that have bee
me. But I glanced at them, and from glancing, I can feel which one
me to make the most sense. But I can't bear to go on reading. N
think it induces a sense of self-consciousness, but simply because I
bored reading about myself. After a while it doesn't mean anythin
this man they are talking about?" It also becomes slightly embarras
feel as though you are intruding on something very private and pe
you really don't want to know.
Self-consciousness in a strange way doesn't operate. I don
operating to the degree where I am writing in order to fulfill a pr
about my work, which has been given me by reading what other p
said about my work. Looking at the plays will prove this: although
a mainstream of preoccupations and themes, they've all hazarde
techniques. If I'm pleased about anything in the way I write, it is t
myself not to be afraid to try new technical forms. And I arrive at
from the material, I don't sit down and say: "Now I am going
something very stylized and highly lyrical," and then write The Fo
The material and the shape of the material come together.
So, to that extent I feel that I'm not self-conscious and I wo
that the works suggest that I'm not self-conscious. But if you say I'm
about what I'm doing, then I agree; but, in a way, after I've don
because people are always asking me questions and I become as in
answering the questions as they in hearing the answers. I try
explanations for why I work the way I do and do what I do. A
think the answers are interesting enough, I make them into no
essays or give lectures about them.
S.: Does it ever happen to you that, after you have written a
come across new aspects in interpretations or discussions, which yo
aware of at all?
W.: I think that academics tend to overdo this. There is a tendency to
dismiss the writer as really not having known what he's done. By and large,
this isn't true. You can look at a play and extract other themes and
preoccupations out of it, but if you break it down into its tiny component
parts, you will find that the majority of the component parts all belong to
only one theme. The author has one thing which he is exploring and almost
everything can be seen to illuminate and illustrate this.
But if he is a really interesting writer, it's inevitable that, in trying
427
to illuminate in different ways this one theme, he will have to touch

things. And he may touch on one of those two or three times. But on
if you can break it down and add up the component parts, the g
emphasis will be in illustrating the main theme. I think, if really cha
could show how this was so in any one of the plays.
There's a very interesting example which shows that I do
across new aspects: the production of The Wedding Feast in Karl-Marx
The play is about a factory owner who believes that you've got to tre
workers as equals and love them because when you love them, the
you and they'll trust you and all will be very beautiful. He tests hims
unexpectedly going to the wedding of one of his employees. Befor
in, he has a big monologue saying how beautiful it'll be; they'll res
they'll be wild at first, but then they'll see how friendly I am and how
and relaxed and it will all be lovely. He goes in and it's terrible. I
and, because they are close to each other, they abuse each other. He ge
drunk and they get very drunk and it ends up in a terrible fiasco.
Two acts of the play are the wedding feast. The first act is a ser
scenes in the factory owner's office, in his home, which lead up to th
wedding feast. In one scene he is in his office and one of his opera
naive painter. With largess, he says: "Come on, show me your p
Marvellous, I'll buy them. How much? Five, ten, fifty? Here's fifty p
He bullies the man into accepting his generosity.
In the Stockholm production the painter was performed by an
in a way that made me think about developing him further, brin
into the wedding scene. It improved it very much. In Karl-Marx-Stadt
saw in it the introduction of a second uninvited guest, but one of the w
They showed how the employer was received coolly but the work
received beautifully. I think they overdid that, not in a politically
way but in a slightly ridiculous way. The employer was left standi
they all sat down to eat, which was just physically impossible. Th
have been a little more subtle about it. Nevertheless, they had seen th
play and it's perfectly true. There are, in fact, now two uninvited gu
the response of the family to the two of them is quite different.
intended that, nor had I realized it. But they picked it out and used it
think, with justification. That's the most extreme example.
S.: You have said that the structure of your plays develops as you
them. Apart from that, would you say that in general you have a pre
for a special form of play, such as the epic theater?
W.: No, I have none. And neither do I think anybody should
S.: Well, Bond said he does have one.
428
W.: Does he? I don't know. The forms of his plays are so diffe
from the other that I can only conclude his forms fit the material. Th
be any rules and there can't be any predilections. There can onl
individual writer's special vision of his material. He's got a specia
looking at his experience and the world in which he lives and th
makes the play or any work stunning, regardless of whether it's a
conventional three-act or twenty-scene play.
S.: Is it an over-interpretation to see in a play like The Friends a rhythm

that creates subdivisions smaller than scenes? I am thinking of the spaces you
left in the printed text.
W.: Yes, those are musical breaks, rhythmic breaks.
S.: Do you regard them as different from a stage direction, like silence?
W.: I don't know. Maybe silence doesn't mean the same thing. Silence
means that you can be in the middle of a whole. A space means that you've
come to the end of a passage, you take a breath and go off to somewhere else.
S.: Why didn't you use spaces in the printed texts of your other plays?
W.: I don't know. I think that all the plays could be broken down in
spaces like that.
S.: Would you say that the basic contents of your plays are explicitly
formulated or that there are quite a few aspects not covered by language? To
put it differently: Do the scenes of pantomime in your plays just heighten
something that is also verbalized, or do they reach towards something beyond
that?
W.: I've always had a delight in the visual. I like to see things physically
done on the stage. Physical action is theatrical, is right for all sorts of reasons,
for the point it is making itself, for its position in a play. The building of the
arch, for instance, in The Kitchen: it's just right that it should happen there.
S.: Let me be more specific: Monica Mannheimer states about the end of
The Friends, that the effect of Simone's words is not convincing, that either
you make too light of the characters' problems in the final scene or that you
exaggerated them before, since by a mere speech about order, they appear to
be solved. Now, I think that Simone's words may not convince the others, but
the important thing is the following ritual pantomime, by which Simone puts
herself into Esther's place, becomes the new focal point for the emotional
needs of the friends. So I see an additional aspect expressed by the
pantomime that does not becomes verbally explicit.
W.: What Monica means is that it's too facile. But it seems to me that
Simone has been struggling through the whole play to say something and she
429
can't quite get it out. Just like Beatie in Roots has been strugglin
something. Then something happens that releases her.
S.: But is just what she says sufficient to convince the others?
W.: Oh, I see. What she says touches them. But it's not only w
says. It's that she says it at all and the passion with which she says it.
someone wants to shake you out of your misery, it almost doesn't matt
they say, in order to ease their distress you lose a bit of your misery.
warmed by the fact that they care so much that you begin to sto
miserable, even if what they say is nonsense. You say: "Bless them
don't know really what they are talking about. But how sweet of
care." So, they are probably as much touched by the fact that she doe
the way she does it, as by what she actually says.
S.: Still, doesn't the emotional appeal of Simone's leading the frien
an action create a relationship that transcends the effect of the word
W.: She takes the sheet off and she begins to have a physical relat
with the body, which gives them courage. In other words, she's not af
face death.
S.: She does start the action of seating Esther in the chair.
W.: Does she? I'd forgotten that. Yes, I suppose she does. Until that
point-I now remember-they don't move, do they? They are shocked.
S.: Yes, and it is the physical action that finally gets them over the shock,
that reunites them.
W.: Oh yes. But if you ask me now, how deliberately I intended that, I
don't remember. All I can remember is that I was concerned about the
problem of facing death. I was in Romania at the time and I met w
friend, a Romanian director, called David Ezrik, who told me how v
concerned he was with ritual in the theater. He didn't know about Br
and it was interesting how at the same time these two directors w
concerned with the same aspect.
He told me about a peasant custom which still existed. They
brought the dead body out on a catafalque. The mourners would be sitting
against a wall and the elders of the village would, then, begin to do a dance.
And the dance would go on and on through the night and it would get more
and more excited. They had a big stick in their hand which they used as a
phallic symbol. They would make sexual gestures in front of the mourners. At
the high point they would get the dead body itself under the armpits and
dance with it. The mourners would somehow be forced into laughing,
because it was funny and they would get worked up and join in the dancing.
This struck me as a very powerful ritual which people had worked
430
out for themselves in order to face death. I found it very moving

to use an equivalent on the stage as a means of demonstrating how
face and survive the knowledge of death.
But when you talk about it in simple terms like that, i
though the creation of a work comes to you in tight compartm
made notes, all the way along, from the moment you think about
be possible to see that it began with this, which led to this, whic
other. But then it reaches a point where things begin to merge an
become blurred. The Friends is not only a play about people
knowledge of death and overcoming it, but it is also a play
facing their own mistakes, their own sense of failure. It is afso a c
ideas and discovery because of the big revolution speech.
People have great difficulty in living with a number
together, a number of possibilities. A play can be saying more th
I think that the ritual at the end and Simone's speech about o
contradictory. There are all these things in the play.
S.: To move further along this line: Do you consciously try

subtextual levels in what your characters say or do you try to ma
explicit as possible?
W.: I'm not trying the one thing or the other, but, the way i
there is sometimes just total explicitness and sometimes a subtext
In all serious writing there is a subtext. Even in explic
there is a kind of subtext, a subtext of personality. Manfred, goi
that revolution speech, is not explicitly telling a story abou
revolutions, but the subtext could be him welding them together i
friendship. It could be him testing his intellectual powers. But I d
terms of explicitness or subtext. I write to meet other demands.
S.: I have the impression that you stop where Pinter starts
into the question of human identity as such, whereas you ta
granted; you tend to investigate your characters' ideas, social r
actions.
W.: I don't think of the work in those terms. Do you know

Pinter does?
S.: Well, he said that he was not so much interested in social

relationships, politics, etc., as in human beings, when they are alone in a
room, when they are left with nothing but themselves.
W.: I wish Pinter would be interested in other things as well. It does limit
him to be always preoccupied with this-which is a pity because he has much
more in him.
431
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE
I don't know whether it's his fault or the directors'. I was very an
with No Man's Land. I do think that Peter Hall is to blame. If a director has
any function, it is to help a writer to explore every possibility within himself.
And I think Peter Hall has not helped Pinter to dig deeper, to be more
ambitious.
I am at times interested in people when they are in a room left with
nothing but themselves, there are scenes in various plays which show this.
S.: The Four Seasons is an obvious example, of course.

W.: Even more so The Old Ones.
But I don't think you can go on and on writing plays about people
who are left with nothing but themselves. People don't spend their lives being
confronted with nothing else. They have to face lots of other situations.
S.: What direction do you feel you are going to move into?
W.: I feel that the direction I'm going into is madness [laughs].
The Journalists and The Wedding Feast haven't been done here. If The
Merchant won't be performed, I'm going to feel quite desperate.
S.: Does that affect you so much? You are being performed in other
countries.
W.: Of course, I want my plays done everywhere, only just everywhere.

But since I live here I would like to be performed here.
S.: Can you see yourself not writing plays at all?

W.: No, that wouldn't stop me writing plays, it would just mean drying
up.
I don't know the direction. All I can do is to tell you about the next
play I'm toying with. It may be called The Demagogue. It would explore the
relationship between what George Steiner calls language and political
inhumanity. Again: words, you see.
432

Interviews With Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker

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Interviews With Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker

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Interviews with Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker

Author(s): Karl-Heinz Stoll, Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker

as a writer I had to teach myself. And that's a good way of learnin

S.: You mean after it has gone into the theater?

poetry which is in a sense purely private, but I can't make t

S.: But very often you do transform metaphors into dire

S.: But that term might be misleading. It sounds as if you propagate

S.: Still, you appeal to me as a private human being. What about

S.: Well, Arnold Wesker wants to teach people through

they are subjected to certain pressures. Now, if you do everything

S.: I see Schopenhauer on your table and I was reminded of some

B.: Because it says, if I understand it properly, life is absurd. This is not

S.: What kind of structure do you consider most effective in a modern

S.: What is your image of yourself as author?

S.: Of course you select.

demonstrated in it. I always write a play in order to demonstrate som

large restaurant as an image of the meaningless, enervating

at the West, smugly.

S.: Let's take: "Words are bridges."

S.: Well, as a matter of fact, he said: "People only communicate too

also to take in criticism. Do you find that this has an inhibiting ef

to illuminate in different ways this one theme, he will have to touch

S.: Is it an over-interpretation to see in a play like The Friends a rhythm

out for themselves in order to face death. I found it very moving

S.: To move further along this line: Do you consciously try

W.: I don't think of the work in those terms. Do you know

S.: Well, he said that he was not so much interested in social

S.: The Four Seasons is an obvious example, of course.

W.: Of course, I want my plays done everywhere, only just everywhere.

S.: Can you see yourself not writing plays at all?

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