The Four Seasons

In an interview with Arnold Wesker taped in July 1977, Robert Skloot confided that he was drawn to The Four Seasons as a director because of the challenges offered by “its austerity and its lyricism” and confessed that he was disconcerted by “the discontinuity” between “the play itself” and its dedication to Cuban revolutionaries.¹ He was in effect, identifying the two features of the play which had alienated many of the early reviewers and which have to a large extent blighted its reputation ever since.² Those who had admired Wesker’s naturalistic dialogue in The Kitchen and the Trilogy were unprepared for the highly stylized prose in which Adam and Beatrice meditated on their past lives and negotiated their relationship with each other. And those who had cast Wesker in the mould of Clifford Odets—as a socialist dramatist whose “people live politics, idealism, and reform in an everyday world”³—were disappointed by the intensely introspective emphasis of a psychological drama which, in the words of one review, “totally excludes the outside world.”⁴ The dedication of the printed text “to the romantic revolution” of Cuba was, perhaps, the dramatists act of compensation for turning away from the issues of economic and cultural exploitation and the theme of political idealism that had been at the center of his vision in the works of the late 1950s.