In December 1959, while nominating Joan Plowright's performance as Beatie as one of the best of the year, Plays and Players awarded ‘black marks to the public for failing to support Roots and Serjeant Musgrave's Dance’. Here, already, Wesker's name was linked with that of John Arden, and the two men have shared similar experiences in the British theatre. Both have been dismissed as having failed to live up to the promise of their early work, and both have been involved in wrangles with the theatrical establishment in the form of the Royal Shakespeare Company: Wesker over The Journalists (1975), Arden over The Island of the Mighty (1972). This is where the major similarities end. For, while Wesker could be seen in his early work to be treading a realistic path, Arden was striking out in quite another direction.

One significant influence on Arden was Bertolt Brecht, whose Berliner Ensemble had toured to London in 1956. In 1970 Wesker still seems to have been unfamiliar with Brecht's ideas. In the December 1970 entry in ‘From a writer's notebook’, Wesker, in discussing the validity of an episodic dramatic treatment, refers to Aristotle but, surprisingly, makes no mention of Brecht.