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 Paper(1977) 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.

ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L was knighted in 2006 for ’services to drama’. He has written over forty-three plays, two opera libretti, various mechanical adaptations; four volumes of short stories, a children’s book, and a novel; two volumes of essays, an autobiography, a diary, and a book on journalism; and recently his first volume of poetry. His plays have been produced in cities from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo, from Paris to Moscow, from Montreal to Zurich, and The Kitchen - his most performed play has been performed yearly somewhere or other around the world for the last fifty years, and is due for revival by The National Theatre in 2011.