Peter Gill on Arnold Wesker: ‘John Dexter brought these new plays to life’

http://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/apr/29/peter-gill-arnold-wesker-obituary-letter

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John Dexter’s extraordinary productions of Arnold Wesker’s five early plays, including those best known, articulated, and in some cases developed, still unformed aspects of Wesker’s work, to a degree that no other director of new plays has managed before or since. Lindsay Anderson’s productions of David Storey’s plays perhaps come nearest.

I had a tiny part in the Sunday night “try-out” of The Kitchen (1959), and could witness Dexter’s dynamism at first hand. I remember him firing up the two weeks’ rehearsal, in the parish hall off Sloane Square, where all early Royal Court productions were created, from his point of command – standing on a chair with a referee’s whistle hanging round his neck. He wasn’t a great one for table work. While it would be wrong to infer from this any lack of sensibility, he was certainly a product of the repertory movement rather than of university, and in this he was unlike most of the other directors of the time. At the Court, George Devine and Lindsay Anderson, for example, had served in the army as officers; Dexter had been an NCO, which was certainly evident in aspects of his directorial method.

He had a particular gift for managing time. It was said that Anderson, who tutored Wesker at the London Film School and was instrumental in his introduction to the Court, did not direct his early work because, while Anderson said he could rehearse Chicken Soup with Barley at the Belgrade in Coventry in three weeks, Dexter said he could do it in two.

But what I remember most vividly of Dexter’s productions of Wesker’s plays are not the celebrated set pieces, such as the stealing of the coal in Chips With Everything or the service section in The Kitchen, but the first scene of Roots (1959), which takes place in an isolated farm labourer’s cottage in rural Norfolk in the 1950s, at that time of day when afternoon becomes evening, when the baby has been put to bed but is not asleep and the husband is not yet in and the lamp is still to be lit. It was an image hauntingly realised by the designer Jocelyn Herbert and Dexter, and brought to vivid life by Joan Plowright as the idealistic Beattie and Patsy Byrne as her unquestioning sister. It remains to me one of the most marvellously achieved pieces of poetic realism I have ever seen.