work, eat, and die
by Douglas Messerli
Arnold
Wesker Roots (London: Bloomsbury,
1959, 2001)
Arnold Wesker’s
1958 kitchen-sink drama Roots (the
second part of his early trilogy) has not aged well. Its apostrophe-filled
Norfolk dialect, stuffed with “yit”s, “git”s, and “blust”s, makes me think of
Henry Higgins’ line in My Fair Lady,
“Whenever an Englishman speaks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” And
the characters spend most of their time on stage—when the central figure Beatie
is not spouting the words of her London boyfriend, Ronnie—peeling potatoes, cutting
up runner beans, and frying up liver. In short, the play demonstrates the
family’s lack of “roots” by refusing to dig any deeper than gossiping about the
neighbors (including a pub owner who is accused of “accosting” another man) and
complaining of a “pain in the guts."
When Beatie (the wonderful Joan
Plowright in the original production) returns home to Norfolk for a short
vacation, she is appalled by their refusal to even think. And while waiting for
Ronnie to arrive and meet them, she grows increasing embarrassed for their
stubborn stupidity. Yet, she herself admits she does not quite understand those
in Ronnie’s crowd, and still does not comprehend how to ask questions when she
doesn’t know what is being said. Ronnie describes words as being like “bridges,”
as paths between human beings, and Beatie clearly is intrigued by the idea. But
having grown up in a world where, as her mother puts it, “Words never mean
anything,” Beatie is clearly out of her element in London.
Yet her mind has been opened, and seeing
her sister and her husband, her mother and father, and various neighbors once
more, she finds herself dissatisfied with their lives and, most importantly,
with herself. And in her recreation of Ronnie for her family, even her mother
vaguely recognizes “you do bring a little life with you anyway.”
Unfortunately, it’s a quoted life, a
life she cannot yet herself experience. It’s clear that Ronnie has begun to
influence her, but the words she repeats are something alien to both her and
her family, as she were speaking another language.
During her visit a beloved neighbor
dies and her father loses most of his income as he is demoted on the farm on
which he works to “casual labour.” Equally irritating to Beatie, particularly
since Ronnie is an active socialist, is the fact that her family simply accepts
these facts—men working themselves to death and having most of their income
taken away by the powers that be—without any protest and even serious
commentary.
Yet gradually we discover that the
renowned Ronnie and his friends, in some respects, are not that different from
her own family. At one point she lets out the fact that Ronnie and his friends
have all failed their exams and work at hard labor not so very different from
her own father and brother-in-law. And while her family has gathered to await
her boyfriend’s arrival, a letter is delivered that honestly accesses the
truth:
My dear Beatie. It wouldn’t
really work would it? My
ideas about handing on a new
kind of life are quite
useless and romantic if I’m really honest. If
I were a
healthy human being it might
have been all right but
most of us intellectuals are
pretty sick and neurotic—
as you have often observed—and we
couldn’t build
a world even if we were given
the reins of government—
not yet any rate. I don’t
blame you for being stubborn,
I don’t blame you for
ignoring every suggestion I ever
made—I only blame myself for
encouraging you to
believe we could make a go of
it and now two weeks
of your not being here has
given me the cowardly chance
to think about it and decide
and I—
It takes the shock of their breakup to
suddenly make Beatie see that she has behaved no differently from her family.
That Ronnie has attempted to teach her to type, to add figures into her
painting, or even to read a book, she has, as she puts it “taken no heed.” Admittedly, she “never discussed things”: “I
never knew patience.”
But to her own surprise, she now becomes
angry, turning on her mother, demanding some words of comfort, to which her
mother, in her continued stubbornness, denies her: “I can’t help you my gal, no
that I can’t, and you get used to that once and for all.”
And
with those words Beatie perceives their problem. Despite their ties with the
land, they have never realized that they too, as human beings, needed deep
roots, something to “push up from” in order the change things, to make life
better.
It’s the passivity of their lives that
makes their living so meaningless, and leaves them powerless. But in the very
perception of these facts and her speaking of it to her family, she has, quite
miraculously, come alive, has actually begun to think for herself. Yet, as
Wesker makes clear, there can be no changing for them, and he ends the play by
having her standing alone, perhaps stronger and more perceptive now that even
Ronnie, as the others rush to the table to eat.
We cannot know what will happen to her,
but surely she will no longer be able to bear Norfolk, and certainly she will
now put down roots somewhere, hoping to pass them on to another generation.
In the end, however, Beatie’s
perception—and the author’s revelation—is such a modest one that it seems
almost insignificant, as if Wesker has put all his energies into expressing a
simple cliché: we must learn to communicate with one another, a variation of
the lament “can’t we all get on together?”
The class tensions implied by this play
must have seemed more shocking and dynamic when it was first presented, yet
today the issues seem tame and vague. And the realism that may have enchanted
so many viewers when this play was so well-received in British theaters is
today as pale as a David Belasco production. Realism, it is clear, isn’t
reality, and reality just ain’t what it used to be.
Los Angeles,
August 4, 2016
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