Finger wagging is a strange school-mistressy activity that crops up with seedy regularity; these days the finger is pointing to ‘the sixties’ into which I’m unhappily frozen. Good for the pointers, though; so much can be lazily lumped together and save both research and thought.

It is a somewhat disorientating sensation being target practice for having one’s early work born in a decade (Caryl Phillips ‘The Kingdom of the blind’ Guardian 17 July, and ‘Liberal law & order days over says Blair’ Guardian 19 July). Before them were many others, among them Mark Ravenhill, perhaps the daftest (17 October 1999 New York Times, 'Looking Back Warily at a Heterosexual Classic'.) It’s disorientating because – as should be self-evident to those engaged in wagging – no one is ever aware they’re living in the decade that has frozen their image. In the seventies we were busy coping with exactly what we were coping with in the 60s and then again in the 80s, 90s and on into the current 10s, namely struggling to write, market what we write, and survive the reviews that seem more irritated we’re still alive than concerned to understand what we’ve written. Finger wagging depresses because it wastes time and confuses everybody’s public.

Enter, as the century was about to turn, Mark Ravenhill, author of a good, old-fashioned play with the inspired marketing title ‘Shopping and Fucking’ – who wrote in The New York Times that my generation of heterosexual playwrights, Osborne et al, were rebelling against a previous generation of gays – Rattigan and Coward - rather than against anything social! The accusation was absurd. Can it be imagined that either Osborne or I woke up one morning and said ‘theatre is rife with queers, I’m going to write a play in protest to drive them away’?

Enter five years later Caryl Phillips. ‘Why are there so few black characters in British fiction?’ he asks.

   "Braine, Amis, Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Keith Waterhouse cannot have been unaware of the huge public debate around black immigration. And they cannot have been unaware of the social changes that came with it. They obviously knew about the Notting Hill riots, and they were aware of the daily presence of these new people on the streets, on the buses, and working in hospitals and factories all over the country."

Enter Blair as reported in The Guardian 19 July:

   "While insisting that the sixties removed ugly prejudices and expanded individual freedoms, Mr Blair is expected to concede that the new lifestyles did not sufficiently foster responsibility to others, family discipline or role models – and focused the law and order system too much on offenders rights."

The Guardian phoned me for my comments. Being surrounded by family including three grandchildren and one great grandchild I’m not sure my response made too much sense; all I can remember is saying was tell Messrs Blair and Blunkett to read my plays before they level accusations. Though in passing it must be observed that to have ‘removed ugly prejudices and expanded individual freedoms’ was, I’d have thought, a pretty major contribution for a decade of artists to have made to society.

In addition to Ravenhill finger wagging in defence of gay writers (who didn’t really need defending) and Phillips ticking us off for not writing about blacks, and Blair blaming us for a breakdown in law and order, I’ve encountered variations of the finger-wagging - from provincial writers complaining about metropolitan arrogance to women questioning my ability to write about women (I’ve published a collection of plays for one woman).

Of them all Caryl Phillips invites serious response. He’s right, in the sixties the black community didn’t impinge upon me in any personal way until my eldest son, then aged 15, came home from Highgate Wood Comprehensive one day and asked if his black girl-friend could stay with us for a couple of weeks because she had been kicked out by her parents and needed time to get her act together. We agreed, of course. She stayed two years. My son was passionately in love with her until she left him and broke his heart. He later partnered another black girl who gave us our first beloved granddaughter, a partnership that didn’t last but he fulfilled his responsibilities (and still does as his young daughter has made him a young grandfather), and we, too, hung on to her. He finally married a third black woman and added another grandchild to our family. None of this touched me as material I wanted to write about though all our relationships were shot through with drama. Someone might have got hurt.

But it did inspire my son. He wrote a number of plays about his experiences; one was for four black actresses and himself, a play that he also produced and directed for The Jackson’s Lane Community Centre in Highgate. He later offered his work to mainstream TV who dismissed him saying “Look, you’re a white, middle-class Jewish boy, [half, actually] don’t you think you ought to be writing what you know about?” So he found a black writer to front his work, and the plays were performed attracting at least one national review commenting on the quality of the ‘young black’ writer’s dialogue!

As for myself I later wrote two plays with black characters neither of which have been picked up; and a third, a community play for 150 characters whose central theme was ‘the stranger in our midst’, about Asians expelled from Uganda by the idiot Amin. This play was commissioned (and thus had to be performed) to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the building of Basildon, one of the new towns that, under a labour council, shamefully refused to take in any of the Asian exiles.

But this obligation to present our credentials misses the point, which is that society at any one time presents at both the private and the public level a myriad of issues, themes, and events clamouring for the artist’s attention. Enter Ravenhill again, this time on my side in the Guardian (‘A touch of evil’ March 22, 2003, one of a series of essays on political theatre):
Nor do European playwrights feel that compulsion to explore "times like these". As I discovered talking to playwrights in Poland, to write about the social or the political is seen by many in Eastern Europe as a rather petty thing. Playwrights are celebrated for their ability to observe, report, explore beyond the social; to dramatise the spiritual, the philosophical, the metaphysical.

If I haven’t written about the influx of black immigrants into British society (nor about the Holocaust, much closer to my heart and concern, forgive me) I have written about the disintegration of political ideology, the dream in conflict with reality, confronting death, domestic violence, the problems of love never lasting, the vicissitudes of old age, and religious fanaticism. So I missed out on blacks. Shoot me!

There’s something self-righteous about ‘finger-wagging’. I apologise for not knowing the work of Caryl Phillips (and I’d be very surprised if he’d read all my plays and stories), but what finger could be wagged at him? Viet Nam? CND? Three Arab wars against Israel? The cold war? Student riots? Thatcher making council dwellers into home owners? Britain losing its industrial base? The pulling down and building up of walls? Technology changing the face of world societies? Corrupt black African leaders? Which of these has his writing addressed? One, some, all, none?

I doubt if ‘all’. He’d really be cooking, then. And if ‘some’, why not the others? And if only ‘one’ what about the rest? And if ‘none’ I certainly would not be wagging a finger. A writer’s gotta write what a writer’s gotta write. Mea culpa!

©Arnold Wesker 2004