Wesker was part of a new generation of Anglo-Jewish writers and playwrights, also finding their voice. This was unprecedented in British culture. It included playwrights like Kops, Pinter and Steven Berkoff, novelists like Bernice Rubens, Brian Glanville, Frederic Raphael and Alec Baron, and poets like Dannie Abse, Jon Silkin and Ruth Fainlight. Wesker’s first play, The Kitchen, was written in the same year as The Birthday Party. Roots appeared in the same year as Kops’s The Hamlet of Stepney Green and a year before The Caretaker.

Wesker’s huge impact in the late Fifties and early Sixties was not simply a personal achievement. He was part of a generational shift in the culture.

So what happened from the early Sixties, both to Wesker and to this new wave? The New Left continued through the Sixties and Seventies and a new generation of left-wing playwrights emerged, including Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, David Edgar and David Hare. However, Wesker’s politics seemed outdated and in many respects he was never really a political playwright compared with this younger generation. His best work was intensely autobiographical. Like the characters in The Kitchen, he had worked in a kitchen as a young man. The Wesker trilogy was really the story of Wesker and his family: he was Ronnie Kahn, battling with his passionately Communist mother, drawn into a farming family in Norfolk (based on his wife’s family) and observing his older sister’s idealism as she and her husband moved to the country to find a new life. Chips with Everything was based on his experience of National Service. In his early work, his experience resonated with the times. His later work didn’t. He had nothing to say about the Sixties counter-culture or Thatcherism.

One of Wesker’s great subjects was class, not because he was on the Left but because that was the world he grew up in. His characters included kitchen workers, farm labourers, working-class Jews from the East End. These were people he knew. It is no coincidence that so many of the great writers of the 1950s — Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky and Saul Bellow in America, Wesker and Pinter in Britain — all gave voice to the poor: Miller’s salesmen and dockers, Pinter’s tramps and lonely lodgers, Chayefsky’s Marty, the lonely butcher. Within a few years these working-class characters were no longer fashionable, except in TV dramas. Instead, the great characters of late-20th-century British theatre were academic philosophers (Jumpers), upper-class men of letters (No Man’s Land), Bennett’s spies educated at public school and Cambridge (Single Spies) and Hare’s murmuring judges. Wesker’s labourers and East Enders were out of fashion as surely as Sillitoe’s cross-country runner and factory workers or Keith Waterhouse’s northern Billy Liar, or in art, Eva Frankfurther’s immigrant waitresses, Lowry’s northern factory workers or Joan Eardley’s working-class children from the tenements of Glasgow. That moment in Fifties theatre, cinema and art had gone.