Wesker’s heyday was brief but, crucially, so was the cultural moment of the late 1950s and early ’60s. The New Left emerged in the late 1950s: the debates about Hungary and Soviet Communism after 1956 when so many left the Communist Party; the formation of CND and the first march to Aldermaston in 1958; books like Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963); new journals like The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, both founded in 1957, which merged to form The New Left Review in 1960. This explosion was well summarised by Perry Anderson in his essay “The Left in the Fifties” in 1965: “The New Left was created in 1956, by the twin crises of Suez and Hungary. It grew rapidly from 1957 onwards, with the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament itself. Its peak was reached in the electric climate of 1960, when the attempt to delete Clause Four was defeated, and unilateralism was victorious at the Scarborough Conference. Thereafter, its strength declined . . .”

Wesker later wrote that his breakthrough play, Chicken Soup with Barley, “was about the decline of idealism, about disillusionment”. Ronnie Kahn represented a young generation sceptical about his parents’ Communism. Like Wesker himself, Ronnie had grown up in a Communist home. “I had quarrelled with my mother over politics,” Wesker wrote later in his autobiography, “raging at her continuing adherence to Communism. We quarrelled constantly.” Produced less than two years after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Chicken Soup with Barley spoke to a generation disillusioned with Communism. The years between the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and 1956, when the play ends, “suggested an arc,” wrote Wesker, “beneath which the disintegration of a family could be poetically charted against the background of disintegrating ideology.” They told the story of the decline of an ideology which looked back to the heroic days of the Spanish Civil War and Cable Street but which seemed discredited after the uprisings in East Europe in the mid-1950s.

At the same time Wesker played a key role in a revolution in British theatre, what the critic Harold Hobson called “The Great Uprising”. In a recent tribute to Wesker, his fellow East Ender and playwright Bernard Kops wrote: “Before, theatre had been a very upper middle-class adventure. There was suddenly this emergence of new playwrights from the working class.” Recalling those days, Kops told me: “It was all so nice and middle class. The usherette would bring you some tea at the interval. A tray with tea, with all the works and china cups and cake. It was a cakey sort of time.” Wesker, Kops and Pinter grew up in East London; John Osborne’s father was a commercial artist and advertising copywriter, his mother a Cockney barmaid; Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey) was the daughter of a bus inspector from Salford.