Making Peace or Piecemeal? Arnold Wesker's Screenplay and Wolfgang Storch's TV Adaptation of Arthur Koestler's Thieves in the Night

Abstract

From 1983 to 1985 the British Jewish playwright Arnold Wesker worked on a film script for a German-Israeli TV adaptation of Arthur Koestler's propagandistic novel Thieves in the Night (1946), which chronicles a decisive phase in the triangular conflict among Arabs, Jews, and the British during the British Mandate for Palestine. Ultimately, Wesker's script was rejected, but in 1986 the dramatist published an excerpt in the Jewish Chronicle. Drawing on Wesker's original drafts and his correspondence relating to the project, this article contextualizes the publication of the so-called "Peace Making Ceremony" with the playwright's approach to his adaptation of the novel as a whole. It is argued that Wesker's main objectives were to preserve the integrity of the novel and to produce a "script of substance" that was to offer a historical argument rather than the "cowboys and Indian version" expected of him.