Baking, banquets and Norfolk accents. What a bootiful mix!
Roots (Donmar Warehouse) Verdict: Grows into a gem ★★★★✩
YOU could never call Sir Arnold Wesker’s Roots pacy. Never mind. It makes an important and long overdue argument — and does so with great charm. Pretty 22-year-old Beatie Bryant, her head crammed with all sorts of exciting thoughts by her socialist boyfriend in London, heads home to her family in Norfolk in 1958.
She wants to tell them all about her new intellectual life and love. They, being solid Norfolk types, just want to eat potatoes and swap mundane gossip.
The slowness of the action is necessary to convey — as Sir Arnold sees it — the stultified ways of these provincials. First, we meet Beatie’s sister Jenny (Lisa Ellis), who has just married a country lump (Michael Jibson). Later we meet Beatie’s parents (Linda Bassett and Ian Gelder) and others from the family. Beatie is driven to despair by their East Anglian dullness.
The Donmar cast have gone to s ome l e ngths to acquire bootiful Norfolk accents. At times it is like being in a Bernard Matthews advertisement.
Miss Ellis takes the garlands, at least in perfecting the dialect: her voice is as deliciously honeyed as a plate of Gresham ducklin’.
The play’s tension, if you can call it that, comes from the prospect of the f amily meeting Beatie’s boyfriend. He is expected. A great banquet is prepared.
At times, this play is a bit like an episode of the Great British Bake Off, there is so much cooking. Beatie mixes the ingredients for a cake. Mother peels spuds. Jenny mashes some. A trifle is made, wide as a Daimler’s hubcap. WHEN the play was written, this ‘kitchen sink’ aspect to the drama was much remarked on for the way it confronted middle - class theatre audiences with workingclass realities.
Seen today, there is another consequence. The domestic chores — this was the age before kitchen gadgets — heighten the nostalgia f or an England of regional remoteness and family ties (for good or ill).
Beatie, played by Call The Midwife’s Jessica Raine, is a fragile beauty, her accent having been infected by fashionable London. She shines with love for her boyfriend. A moment when she starts dancing to a record he has introduced her to is a delightful sketch of liberation.
Her mother stares at her as though she has become some foreign object.
I l oved the subtlety; the precision of the acting. Is the lighting too low and the slowness overdone? Some may say so, but for me they only add force.
Here is a work which savours t he cadences of ol d r ural Englishness and catches the explosion of opportunity that came with the mobility, social and geographical, of the postwar era. Playwright Wesker certainly keeps his powder dry until the very end when his powerful, unfashionable argument explodes.
The roots of his title are not some mystical connection of country folk to their land. He is talking about intellectual roots: the roots that we grow when we discover art and ideas — proper art, t hat i s, not t hird- r ate, commercial ‘slop’.
At today’s BBC, Sir Arnold would be decried as a wicked elitist for holding such a bold (and truthful, you could almost say Gove-ian) thesis.
The Donmar is to be congratulated for reviving a play which has plenty to tell us today.