The Wesker Trilogy

The Wesker Trilogy is key to the development of British drama after 1958.

The three plays – Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960) – were written as stand-alone plays between 1958 and 1960 but because of their thematic and narrative continuity they were soon grouped together in a printed trilogy. Loosely autobiographical, the three plays trace the coming to maturity of Ronnie – a fictionalised version of Arnold Wesker himself – a young Jewish lad, raised in the East End of London.

Chicken Soup with Barley, gritty in naturalistic detail, is set against a fabled Socialist victory over Oswald Mosley’s Fascists. Roots offers, in Beattie Bryant, one of the most challenging and glorious theatrical representations of a complex woman ever written by a male dramatist. In I’m Talking About Jerusalem, Ronnie copes with crushing disappointment as he realises that lofty dreams, even when paired with committed graft, do not always result in satisfying, deserved outcomes.

This book is a timely reminder of the impact of the young Wesker’s work on the theatrical scene of mid twentieth-century Britain. It is an impact which endures to the present day.

About the author:

Kevin De Ornellas has lectured on drama at Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Bangor, Wales. Since 2006 he has lectured on drama at Ulster University, Coleraine. He is the principal pre-show speaker at the Riverside Theatre, Coleraine – and he also serves on the Management Committee of that theatre. He has published widely on drama and dramatists including a Times Literary Supplement review of Arnold Wesker’s one novel, Honey (2005) and the Dictionary of Literary Biography essay about Wesker's short fiction (DLB Volume 319,205). He is the author of The Horse in Early Modern Culture (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014) and the co-editor ofThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020).

66  pages

ISBN: 978-1-910996-41-6