The Defeat of Naturalism in Arnold Wesker's Roots

The Defeat of Naturalism in Arnold Wesker's Roots TOM COSTELLO BY ANY COMMON DEFINITION of the term, Arnold Wesker's Roots is bound to be considered for a place as a representative play of modem English naturalism: the focus in the text on working-class culture, the Norfolk dialect, characters presented as determined by environment and habit, the sense of the play having been written as an expose for a particular moment and point in historic time, and last, but not least, the dullness, monotony and literal tone of so much of the dialogue. As naturalism, Roots provides good evidence to support the definition. The trouble is that such evidence is so obvious and imposing that too many productions of the work succumb to it without question. Consequently the public is presented with an experience which fails to reveal the force of the non-naturalistic, even poetic dimensions of Wesker's drama. The purpose of this paper is to explore briefly some of these nonnaturalistic dimensions and to argue that the romantic and mythopoetic elements in Roots must be permitted to modulate production if the audience is to receive the full impact and quality of meaning which Wesker is attempting to achieve. The whole play may be said to be concerned with a waiting-a coming-an advent. The audience relates to the expected arrival of Ronnie in a posture of excited anticipation and suspense which permits the playwright to focus our attention upon a promise. The dra39 40 TOM COSTELLO matic skill with which this promise is palpably fulfilled while seeming to be denied is one of the great theatrical achievements ofRoots. In creating the idea of the absent-though-present character of Ronnie (absent through never taking physical shape, present by proxy in the form of Beatie's declarations of his rhetorical life-which also brings her to life), Wesker touches that archetypal realm which lies at the very heart of the myth of Advent. During Advent we prepare for a Coming that has already taken place. The human spirit nurtures itself while seeming through faith and celebration to be worshipping another. Beatie's celebration of Ronnie throughout the play is the worship of a disciple. But her celebration is simultaneously the cultivation of her own spirit. To witness on stage the evolution of that spirit is to experience that theatrical rarity of multiple dramatic transmutation. The actress who plays Beatie is and is not herself at two levels. She must "pretend" to be Beatie-and the basic conventions of theatre create no problem for our acceptance of such pretence. But in her "pretence" of Ronnie something quite remarkable takes place. By the end of the play she has actually become a Ronnie. The defeat of the assumptions of classical naturalism are made explicit in this transformation. Man is not necessarily a determined victim of environment or heredity, nor is he a passive sufferer who cannot change his world. Those on stage who surround Beatie may for the most part be presented as such, but Beatie stands in her ultimate transfiguration as a demonstration which both questions that posture and offers a devastating criticism of social and cultural immobility. The very method of staging chosen by Wesker to inject the Ronnie dimension into the play reinforces this questioning of naturalism. Beatie spreads the received word of Ronnie before a group whose scepticism takes the form of astonished shock as she repeatedly elevates herself on a domestic chair to broadcast his message. The use of a chair-the elevation-is itself a theatrical device which has the effect of literally raising the play's context from the low mimetic of naturalism into a realm of socially ideal grand-eloquence. Ronnie's "speeches" are thus projected through the barriers of naturalism and come to constitute some of the most verbally and dramatically interesting aspects of a play which would otherwise linger at the level of gossip and pettiness. The shaping and presentation of this Ronnie dimension come indeed to constitute a play within a play which offers the audience a choice of perspectives. The effect is to create an other-than-presenttense consciousness-a variety of alienation-which tempts...