ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT DRAMA
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sion; it is instead the documentary film. For the documentary merely
presents, while the artist presents in order to resolve; which brings us
back to that question of thinking.
Arnold Wesker's
Roots,
for example, is unquestionably the best
play now on in London. Wesker has extraordinary insight into unlikely
people, an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue, and a nice sense of
irony at his own expense. Moreover, he has also flung an idea or two
into the ring. But he has, as yet, no sense at all of what it feeb like to
live ideas so that they are implicit in every action. He may talk about
intellectuals, but his own intelligence works through the shrewdness of
his ear. The result is that his work, like Osborne's, leaves you most
strongly with a great impression of artistic muddle. At the end of
Roots
all
the implications of family loyalty and hatred, all the criticism of the
seemingly blameless young intellectual cad, are left in the air. The
heroine's revelation is simply a gift of the gab, which apparently makes
all the trickery and corruption worthwhile. No doubt Wesker is per–
fectly sincere about what he says; but sincerity only counts in a work
of art when it is transformed into
artistic
conscience, forcing ,the ma–
terial to whatever its latent but inevitable conclusion may be. Funda–
mentally, all satisfying drama is Aristotelian.
Perhaps all four of these dramatists have yet to produce objective
works of art; so far they have been concerned with portraits of the
artists as young men.
If
their work is inconclusive, that may be because
not enough has happened to them. The danger is that their talent to
do the partial thing is such that it has created of itself a convention and
a fashion. Before the age of thirty they are becoming models for other
writers. In, for instance, a recent Royal Court production called
Sugar
in the Morning,
the author Donald Howarth was so obviously delighted
with his ability to put real people on the stage and make them talk
as he has heard them, that he apparently never bothered to think up
a plot until, at the last moment, he found himself stuck for an ending.
There is plenty of writing talent in England, just as there are
talented producers like Joan Littlewood and William Gaskill to do it
justice, and at least one brilliant new stage designer-Sean Kenny, a
pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright, who got his start at the Royal Court
and has now been given a much bigger chance at the new Mermaid
Theater. But the question is whether the talent will develop according
to its own toughest artistic instincts, or whether the anti-intellectual eso–
tericism of the theater will turn it into just another transient and self–
stultifying fashion.
A.
Alvarez
