This revival of Roots, the 1959 play at the middle of Wesker's trilogy (preceded by Chicken Soup With Barley and followed by I’m Talking About Jerusalem) is playing in repertoire with John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger under the season title “Angry and Young”. Together they present us with Beatie Bryant, the angry young woman of this play, and Jimmy Porter, the angry young man of Osborne’s.
Roots is set in rural Norfolk when Beatie returns after three years in London where she has espoused the ideas of her ardently socialist boyfriend Ronnie Khan about class and culture. With a missionary zeal, she seeks to awaken family and friends from their docile acceptance of their situation, but she does so spouting Ronnie’s words parrot fashion.
Director Diyan Zora makes her deliver these outbursts standing on a chair, spotlit, like an hectoring orator at Speakers’ Corner. It is a bold image in a stylised production played out on a raised, red revolve against the theatre’s bare walls.
Actors sit behind the stage when not in the action, ready to come forward in character, to hand up props when needed and to assist in choreographed moving of furniture; though there is no 1950s realistic setting, their performances bring these people to vivid life.
And a tough life it is for incontinent old Stan (Tony Turner), on his last legs, Beatie’s dad (Deka Walmsley), pushed into a lower-paid job because of injury when his money as a pig man had already meant her mum (Sophie Stanton) had to budget scrimpingly, and her sister Jenny (Eliot Salt) and her young husband Jimmy (Michael Abubakar). Wesker may be attacking their acceptance and inertia, but his feelings are for them, and homely Jenny Beales and resourceful Mrs Bryant are portraits of women who hold families together.
Morfydd Clark’s Beatie is disruptive, but she has an innocent naïvety, touchingly pleased with herself at her artistic creation. Her confrontation with her mother is fierce and cutting, but part of the way, she is developing from being Ronnie’s mouthpiece to thinking for herself, which lies at this play’s core. In that, Wesker may have seen hope for the future, but for those who once shared such hopes, it may now seem differently prescient.
The whole play builds up to Ronnie Khan’s arrival. He doesn’t come. Today, seven decades later, what happened to that dream of a truly socialist Britain?