He then returned to live with his parents who had moved to a council flat in Hackney, East London, where he attended Northwold Road School.

Rather than opening in the West End, its premiere was seen at the Coventry Theatre, a locale which typified Wesker's political views as an 'angry young man'.

Wesker's play Roots (1959) was a kitchen sink drama about a girl, Beatie Bryant, who returns after three years of stay in London to her farming family home in Norfolk and struggles to voice herself.

Another of the Royal Court contingent, Lindsay Anderson, made a short documentary film (March to Aldermaston) about the event.

[11] After his stay in prison in 1961, Wesker made a full-time commitment to become the leader of an initiative that had arisen from Resolution 42 of the 1960 Trades Union Congress, concerning the importance of arts in the community.

The Centre 42 group of artists, writers, actors and musicians, founded at the Bristol Trades Union Festival of 1962, had taken their name from Resolution 42 passed at the 1960 TUC Congress.

Centre 42 was initially a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other main working class towns of Britain, moving to the Roundhouse in 1964.

The project to establish a permanent arts centre struggled through subsequent years, because its funding was limited; Wesker fictionalised it in his play Their Very Own and Golden City (1966).

The RSC's literary manager Ronald Bryden thought it would be "the play of the decade" and it was scheduled to be directed by David Jones.

In this retelling, Shylock and Antonio are fast friends bound by a common love of books, culture and a disdain for the crass antisemitism of the Christian community's laws.

When it does, the play argues, Shylock must carry through on the letter of the law or jeopardise the scant legal security of the entire Jewish community.

This production had a challenging history in previews on the road, culminating (after the first night out of town in Philadelphia on 8 September 1977) with the death of the exuberant Broadway star Zero Mostel, who was initially cast as Shylock.

The book reveals much about the playwright's relationship to director John Dexter (who had been the earliest, near-familial interpreter of Wesker's works), to criticism, to casting, and to the ephemeral process of collaboration through which the text of any play must pass.

Other oddities are that the timeframe includes the Rushdie affair and John Major's fall as recent events and yet the action is concerned with the dotcom boom.

[20] Wesker's papers, covering his entire career, were acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000.

The collection's contents include over three hundred boxes of manuscript drafts, correspondence, production ephemera, personal records, and other materials.

[1] In December 2021 a plaque in Wesker's memory was installed at his former primary school, Northwold Road, Hackney, London, by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.