Arnold Wesker Books In Order

Novels

Honey (2005)

Collections

The Wesker Trilogy (1960)
Three Plays (1968)
Love Letters on Blue Paper (1974)
The Plays of Arnold Wesker, Vol. 1 (1976)
The Journalists / The Wedding Feast / The Merchant (1980)
One Woman Plays (1989)
Lady Othello and Other Plays (1990)
New Plays (1990)
Shylock and Other Plays (1990)
Arnold Wesker Plays: v. 1 (2001)
Arnold Wesker Plays: v. 2 (2001)
Wesker’s Love Plays (2007)
Wesker’s Monologues (2009)
Wesker’s Social Plays (2009)
Political Plays (2010)

Plays

Roots (1959)
I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960)
Chicken Soup with Barley (1961)
The Kitchen (1961)
Chips with Everything (1962)
The Four Seasons (1966)
Their Very Own and Golden City (1966)
Fears of Fragmentation (1970)
The Friends (1970)
Six Sundays in January (1971)
The Old Ones (1973)
Say Goodbye, You May Never See Them Again (1974)
The Journalists (1975)
Said the Old Man to the Young Man (1978)
Fatlips (1978)
Caritas (1981)
The Merchant (1983)
Distinctions (1985)
Break, My Heart (1997)
The King’s Daughters (1998)
Longitude (2006)
Groupie (2011)
Joy and Tyranny (2011)
Wesker’s Comedies (2012)
Wesker’s Domestic Plays (2012)
Wesker’s Historical Plays (2012)

Non fiction

Words as Definitions of Experience (1976)
Journey into Journalism (1977)
As Much As I Dare (1994)
The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel (1997)
On Theatre (2010)
Ambivalences (2011)

Novels Book Covers

Honey
(2005)

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Arnold Wesker Books Overview

One Woman Plays

This collection includes four plays with very strong parts for women.

The action of the trilogy takes place between the middle thirties and the late fifties and has as its background three wars the Spanish Civil, the Second World, and the Cold. Its purpose is to show the ways in which these huge disturbances impinge on a Jewish working class household, altering their habits of work and thought, and thus determining the course of their lives…

Arnold Wesker Plays: v. 2

This second volume of Wesker’s Collected Plays contains his One Woman Plays: ‘Wesker is that rarity, a playwright who writes good, gritty parts for women’ Time OutYardsdale and Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon?: ‘From his earliest plays, Wesker has always delineated women with understanding and sympathy. Both these qualities are present here each character convinces one equally of the depth of her suffering and of the resilience of her spirit’ Sunday Telegraph; The Mistress: ‘Women as victims traditional Wesker themes wrapped up marvellously here and re presented a fascinating evening in the theatre’ Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4; Letter to a Daughter: ‘Wesker breaks new ground a moving depiction of a doubt ridden single mother a finely crafted piece of theatre’ Jewish Chronicle; Annie Wobbler: ‘All three different characters are shown with an intensity of personal involvement which is where Wesker flourishes best’ Sunday Telegraph; Four Portraits of Mothers with Yardsdale won the 10,000 Georges Bresson prize.’Arnold Wesker the unique outsider in the British theatre’ Observer

Wesker’s Love Plays

Spanning three decades of impassioned and inspiring work, the three plays in this volume show in cross section Arnold Wesker’s development as one of the key figures of late twentieth century drama. Each play grapples with the timeless problems accompanying two people in love. The most intimate and personal of relationships are placed under uncompromising scrutiny. Bold, elemental and structurally satisfying, The Four Seasons 1964 depicts the ebb and flow of a couple’s relationship, its power games and it politics, over the course of its year long life. In Love Letters on Blue Paper1977 we witness the late blooming love of a woman for her dying husband in a drama of memory and companionship. Playful, witty and continualy surprising, Lady Othello 1987 gets right to the heart of an urgent, all consuming, passionate affair.

Wesker’s Monologues

Selected by Wesker himself, the finest monologues from his entire oeuvre of work.

Chips with Everything

A reissue of a number of Wesker’s middle period plays including ‘Chips with Everything‘, a play about life and class attitudes in the RAF during National Service.

The Merchant

This is the original version of Arnold Wesker’s imaginative reworking of William Shakespeare s The Merchant of Venice. A part of the Methuen Student Edition series, this edition has notes and commentary by Glenda Leeming.

The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel

Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice the epitome of money grabbing avarice and cruelty is, Arnold Wesker believes, ‘a libel on the Jews’ and a reflection of Elizabethan racism. Wesker, one of Britain’s most revered playwrights, decided to create a counter portrait to the Bard’s offensive character by writing his own play, Shylock, in which the Jew is compassionate, intelligent, and deeply moral. John Dexter, the world renowned director, arranged to have it open on Broadway in 1977 with Zero Mostel in the lead. The play promised to be a great box office draw, with high advance bookings, thanks to Mostel. But after the first preview in Philadelphia, Mostel fell ill and died within days. The play opened on Broadway with Mostel’s understudy, but its momentum had been fatally damaged and it spiraled into disaster. In this extraordinary book, Wesker records how the people involved including many of New York’s cultural elite interacted in the making, and unmaking, of an extraordinary theatrical event.