Waiting: Arnold Wesker and The Nottingham Captain

Abstract

Arnold Wesker’s 1962 musical play about Jeremiah Brandreth and the Pentrich Uprising (1817), presented at a series of Centre 42/Trade Union festivals held around the Midlands and the South of England, focuses questions of class, cultural consumption and the education of ‘the people’ in their own history, in the postwar years. The article considers dissemination of ideas about the Luddites in postwar history broadcasting, including schools broadcasting. A long trajectory of ideas about ‘teaching culture’, from William Morris, via the early labour movement, to Arnold Wesker, is traced out. Wesker’s play The Nottingham Captain (Jeremiah Brandreth) is discussed in relation to the radical playwrights and theatre companies who, in the 1960s and 1970s, argued that the best way to reach working-class audiences was to infuse traditional and popular forms with radical content. Ways of ‘writing the working-class’ in film and television are also considered.