Interview: On Playwriting

Interview: On Playwriting Arnold Wesker Arnold Wesker is a British playwright, essayist and short story writer. His many plays include The Kitchen, Chips with Everything, The Old Ones, and The Wedding Feast. His latest play, The Merchant, opened on Broadway in November 1977. This interview was taped by Robert Skloot in July 1977. Robert Skloot I want to begin by asking two kinds of questions. The first has to do with ideology, politics, theatre, and the second deals with some questions about specific plays . .. You've written somewhere about the evils of competition, of how to maximize your energies, your creative energies, by working together rather than against each other, realizing that you don't have to take from somebody to get more for yourself. Arnold Wesker The whole problem of the competitiveness of men is one that I'm very confused about. Reluctantly, I've come to the conclusion that there is something about competitiveness between men that animates the human spark at a level where the apparent alternative 38 doesn't. Now the apparent alternative is cooperation. Why should cooperation dull the human spark? One has in many instances, many situations which it doesn't, of course. In times of crises, people come together and a marvelous human spark happens. From snow storms which isolate communities to wars which draw people together in a sense of cooperation. So, obviously on a certain level the cooperative spirit does create the same spark as I think the competitive spirit often does. But there are areas, or there are degrees of certain kinds of cooperation , certain kinds of competitiveness which have the reverse effect. Again, you see it's not so simple. I feel this particularly now because fairly recently I took the family on a holiday to Eastern Europe; we toured the continent actually and went through Eastern Europe calling on friends in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and we stayed in West Berlin and went across the border a few times to East Berlin. Apart from the shock that my children got to discover that there existed people who weren't free to move anywhere, to move where they wanted, I found myself feeling the death of the human spirit in East Berlin. Crossing over, I felt I suddenly was in touch with the human spirit alive, with all its vulgarity, its cheapness, with all the things I actually don't like and in Western society criticize. Nevertheless, that had an energy about it which made one feel the people were alive and human, and it really worried me, and this is being confirmed by people who live in Eastern Europe who say that the paradox of the socialist society is that it is producing people who are socially selfish and indifferent. The State has taken on all responsibility and people don't care about each other, and they don't care about what happens outside their own- country, outside their own community. There's this terrible social listlessness that has been created. I'm now at a halfway stage where I'm readjusting to all of this ... RS: One of the things I seem to perceive in your work is an implied statement that all people are artists in one way or another. That there is a kind of creative energy which we all possess and needs to be tapped in some way. AW: I mean just simply one shouldn't run away from words and concepts like talent. I'm not a religious man, but I do believe that people have been breathed upon and blessed with a certain way of looking at experience and bringing it together. This has been so manifestly proven true over the centuries I never understand why it should be debated. I would avoid being on the side of the argument of the view that says all men are artists. I don't think I ever said that. For sure what I have said is that more men, more people than it is believed are sensitive enough to respond to the arts. I've always believed that the wish to create should be encouraged in people, and there are more people who are...