Roots: A Reassessment

ROOTS: A REASSESSMENT My people are not caricatures, they are real (though fiction). And though the picture I have drawn of them is a harsh one, yet still my tone is not of disgust-nor should it be in the presentation of this play. I am at one with these people-it is only that I am annoyed with them and myself. Wesker's note to actors and producers. Roots is the central play of Arnold Wesker's trilogy; although on the stage it has been the most successful of the three, it has met with little favour from the critics. Laurence Kitchin, in his Mid-Century Drama (1960) and in an article in Experimental Drama (1963), has given it the praise I think it deserves, and John Mander in The Writer and Commitment (1961) has analyzed its central theme, communication , with insight. Otherwise the view which prevails is expressed by J. L. Styan in The Dark Comedy (1962): the play presents "a raw, real and therefore [sic] largely unsympathetic family of simple country people" whom we are meant to despise; at the same time critics seem to be agreed that Ronnie is an unattractive and unsympathetic character and that both the Bryant family and Ronnie fail Beatie in the end. The Bryants, though, should not merely be dismissed as a more successful attempt at a typical country family than Shaftesbury Avenue or even Sloane Square usually gives us. Such acceptance leads to the judgment that Roots is a "one-act play blown up to three acts" as John RusseU Taylor says in Anger and After (1962). On the contrary , I believe that a case can be made for the prominence given to the Bryant family, and that Wesker's handling of language, though less exciting than Pinter's, is more resourceful than has been admitted. In Roots, one of the functions of the Bryant family is to point up the limitations of Ronnie. Wesker's attitude toward the Bryants is not one of disgust-as he has said in his "Note to actors and producers ," he is at one with them. They have grave limitations-Mrs. Bryant fails Beatie just as Ronnie does-but Beatie's roots are there. When Beatie has received Ronnie's letter ending their relationship and she admits that she has learnt as little from Ronnie as her mother has learnt from her, Mrs. Bryant cries triumphantly, "The apple don't faIl far from the tree." Beatie is the apple drawing her life from her roots, and when in the last minutes of the play she becomes truly articulate, speaking in her own voice and not Ronnie's, the audience must see that her roots are in her family. Some critics have asserted that Act I has no organic connection (192) 1965 Roots: A REASSESSMENT 193 with what follows. But it is important because it establishes the contrasting attitudes to life of the Norfolk Bryants and Ronnie the pseudo intellectual. Ronnie's views are reported by Beatie, but the Bryants' outlook is expressed more obliquely. The metaphor of the title suggests a romantic view of the natural world; there is even perhaps a Biblical suggestion of the paradisal Golden Age in Wesker's use of root, tree, and apple. There is enough, at any rate, in his treatment of nature to imply a sympathetic, even nostalgic, view. This is not to deny the crudity and ugliness of Norfolk life in the play; it is to suggest a far greater complexity of outlook than critics have previously allowed. The Bryants are part of the cycle of growth, fruition, and death, living in harmony with the natural world. Their unseI£conscious acceptance of birth and death can even be seen in their conversation, although it is, of course, very limited-Mrs. Bryant in particular gossiping and repeating herself. Wesker does not, in the main, give them trivialities to discuss. With an ease which to the inhibited world of mass communication seems almost savage, they mention death, incurable disease, maiming, defecation, mental illness, and male soliciting. Their comments on these things are not profound; they cannot be-but what is significant is their attitude towards them. Because they...