INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES,
ENGINEERING & PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES

Arnold Wesker shows concern with the loss of humanitarian values in the modern capitalist society in many of his plays. Through his plays, he makes an attempt to awaken the working class people socially, culturally, politically and morally in order to reform the social system. He does not advocate bloody revolutions but instead asks for a sensible gradual progress. The present paper deals with Wesker’s play I’m Talking About Jerusalem where Dave and Ada have a vision of a personal paradise. Ada and Dave experiment with Morrisian type of socialism, which emphasizes the creative expressions of an artist with its local traditions and ethics of work without any external control. This concept of socialism was evolved by William Morris after his disenchantment with the industrial capitalism, which reduces man to a mere appendage of the machine. Art, according to Morris, should find free expression and should have a stamp of originality and endurance. To translate their vision into reality, Ada and Dave retire to a Norfolk village to build their idyllic world where there would be full realization of one's self in the absence of the capitalist exploitation. But the escape by Dave and Ada from the industrial capitalist society into isolation in the countryside to live by work on an individual level proves futile. It proves to be a romantic not scientific solution against the brutalizing effect on man of capitalist society and they are forced to return to the industrial society of London. Wesker here tries to show that an individual cannot build a Jerusalem without the help of other people in the society. Wesker wants that we should try to reform the society by living inside it. He wants everybody to share the fruits of culture and knowledge achieved by the society. If anybody tries to live on an individual level; he is walking against the current of progress.