Wesker Whisper
Sir: I don't suppose there is an effective way to answer a journalistic effort that surpasses in gratuitous malice even what we have come to expect from Fleet Street's lilliputians. Will Waspe's Wesker Whisper (September 18) is probably best ignored. And yet there is a poisonous quality about this particular Whisper which leaves a taste so bad that one wants to spit out rather than to swallow this time. I must therefore at least correct the errors of fact.
. . He found one or two newspapers to feed his ego by quoting . . . his pompous statement " Wesker's press statement was in fact reported by eleven major newspapers in this country alone. "Wesker is plainly in no doubt of his importance as an author of major contemporary plays . . . ." I don't know how anyone can avoid coming to this conclusion When his plays have been published in thirteen languages and performed in thirty-six countries; when three books have been written devoted entirely to his work; when his plays are set reading not only in schools and universities in this country but abroad.
" Could it be that he is feeling the pinch of non-production?" Since 1958 when his first play appeared there have been eight others. Nine plays as well as other prose works, making eleven volumes in all, is a reasonable output in thirteen years for someone under forty. And next year will see the production of his new play. If this is not enough to prevent him feeling " the pinch of non-production " there are just now three of his plays in Sweden, one in Norway, East Germany, Spain, France, Portugal and West Germany. Others are scheduled for production in radio, TV, and theatre in Poland, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia.
"The Friends achieved no more than a few days' run at The Roundhouse (where else?) . . . The Friends ran for seven weeks in The Roundhouse and has been performed in Norway, Japan, Canada and West Germany, for a start.
And finally, should anyone feel that as Wesker's publisher I would be biased, let me say that for that reason I have here confined myself solely to facts.
Tom Maschler Chairman, Jonathan Cape Limited, Bedford Square, London WC1
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