THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

(1968), and The Island of the Mighty (1972), but it seems like a crude piece of agitprop in comparison to the rigorous
scepticism of his earlier work.
Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything, performed at the Royal Court in 1962, is also concerned with National
Service, though in this instance with a fictional expansion on Wesker’s own experience in the RAF. The play contains
remarkable moments of concerted physical action by the group of recruits (notably a raid on a coke store), but it
ultimately suggests that, despite official pretensions to the contrary, conscription was no leveller and no social
panacea. Wesker (b. 1932) had earlier shown himself capable of creating a virtuoso visual theatre in his
representation of alternating periods of action and inaction in a restaurant in The Kitchen (1959). Both kitchen and
camp serve as metaphors for an unfair and hierarchical society in which the disadvantaged are forced to fall back on
their chief resource, their proletarian vitality and their innate capacity for feeling. In his most substantial work, the socalled
‘Trilogy’ (Chicken Soup with Barley of 1958, Roots of 1959, and I’m Talking about Jerusalem of 1960),
Wesker manages to relate his intense respect for working-class community to a social, historical, and political
perspective stretching from the anti-Fascist protests of the Jewish East End in 1936 to the failure of a project to
establish a new Jerusalem and a new idealist-socialist lifestyle in the Norfolk of the late 1950s. In all three plays,
Wesker conveys an acute sense of place by capturing distinctive ways of speaking (both London Jewish and rural East
Anglian) and representing the distinctive rhythms of urban and rural domesticity. In 1958 he announced that he
would like to write plays not simply ‘for the class of people who acknowledge plays to be a legitimate form of
expression’, but also for ‘the bus driver, the housewife, the miner and the Teddy Boy [the type of adolescent who in
the 1950s affected a fashion for vaguely Edwardian clothes]’. With this
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aim in mind, and with the high-minded hope of forging links between the arts, socialist action, and society at large,
Wesker founded Centre 42 in 1960-1. The substantial Trade Union involvement that Wesker required was not
forthcoming, but the project failed largely because popular taste proved to be more resistant to his ideals than he had
expected. Centre 42 aimed at creating the conditions in which old-fashioned sweetness and light could filter down. It
was checked by an upsurge of a new ‘alternative’ and genuinely popular culture and it foundered. With it, sank the
urgency of Wesker’s dramatic enterprise.
By far the most original, flexible, and challenging of the new dramatists of the late 1950s, Harold Pinter (b. 1930),
was, like Wesker, the son of an East End Jewish tailor. Unlike him, however, he was an actor by training and
profession. All Pinter’s plays suggest a sure sense of the dramatic effect of pacing, pausing, and timing. Despite his
determined protest against National Service as an 18-year-old, and despite his two brushes with the law as a
conscientious objector, his early plays generally eschew direct political engagement and comment. They open up
instead a world of seeming inconsequentiality, tangential communication, dislocated relationships, and undefined
threats. Many of the dramatic non sequiturs of Pinter’s first four plays — The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday
Party (all written in 1957), and The Caretaker (written in 1959 and performed in the following year) — indicate how
positive was his response to the impact of Waiting for Godot; their distinctive air of menace, however, suggests the
influence of Kafka and the patterning of their dialogue a debt to the poetry and early drama of Eliot. In all four plays
Pinter also reveals himself to be a master of a colloquial, vapidly repetitive, London English, one adept at varying the
idioms of his characters’ speech to striking and sometimes disturbing effect. In the most polyphonic of the early plays,
The Birthday Party, he intrudes seemingly incongruous clichés about cricket and Sunday School teachers into
Goldberg’s volubly Jewish dialogue and he softens McCann’s edgy bitterness with Irish sentimentality. Both
characters threaten, and finally break, the inarticulate Stanley with a monstrous, staccato barrage of unanswerable
questions and half associated ideas: ‘You need a long convalescence.’ | ‘A change of air.’ | ‘Somewhere over the
rainbow.’ | ‘Where angels fear to tread.’ | ‘Exactly.’ | ‘You’re in a rut.’ | ‘You look anaemic.’ | ‘Rheumatic.’ |
‘Myopic.’ | ‘Epileptic.’ | ‘You’re on the verge.’ | ‘You’re a dead duck.’ | ‘But we can save you.’ | ‘From a worse state.’
The Homecoming, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964, marks something of a turningpoint
in his career. Though the play opens familiarly enough in an undistinguished room in a north London house
and with a one-sided conversation, an indifferent exchange of insults, and an ostensibly comic reference to an
advertisement for flannel vests, it steadily veers away from comedy. Everything in the play is unspecific. The rhythms
of Max’s speech (‘One of the loves of my life, Epsom?’) suggest that the family may be Jewish, but nothing definite is
made of the fact. More significantly, there appears to be a family tradition of unfaithful women, for parallels are
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loosely established between the dead but adulterous mother and her living daughter-in-law, Ruth, whom the male
members of the family treat as if she were a whore. There are also often inexplicit frictions between generations and
between the uneducated stop-at-homes and the homecoming son, Teddy, a professor at an American university. The