Roots

Synopsis

'I sit with Ronnie and his friends sometimes and I listen to them talk about things and you know I've never heard half of the words before.' Norfolk, 1959. Beatie Bryant comes home from London to visit her family. She has fallen in love with Ronnie and passionately believes she has escaped her rural roots through the love and education of a good man. While she counts down the two weeks until he visits, she cooks, cleans, bathes and teaches her mother about high culture. As the whole family gathers to await Ronnie’s arrival, Beatie faces her day of reckoning. Roots was and is a revolutionary play which bubbles over with humour, imagination and compassion for its characters. .

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 16 April 2012

We’ve probably all done it in the first flush of love – repeated the pronouncements of that so very special new person ad nauseam to thoroughly uncomprehending and ultimately completely bored family and friends. So Beatie’s mantra of “Ronnie says …” through the first two acts of Arnold Wesker’s Roots strikes a universal chord.

Chord is an appropriate word in this particular context, for there’s a harmonic arch to the play which Andrew Breakwell’s production draws out and which is emphasised by Pat Whymark’s musical direction. Jane Linz Roberts presents us with a thrust-stage set for the two cottages in which the farm-labouring Beales and Bryant families live.

This suggests, through its combination of non-mod con furnishings and bleak landscapes projected behind the cruck framework, both the 1950s reality and the universal timelessness inherent in both the land and its people. Dialect coac...

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