Chicken Soup with Barley

Arnold Wesker’s tremendous working-class trilogy, of which Chicken Soup With Barley (1958) is the first, and perhaps the best, is like vintage Clifford Odets with British regional variations. These are plays about family, and finding your voice, and gauging your feelings; and being alive.

Wesker wrote what he knew in these plays, and what he felt, and for anyone like me who comes from anything like the same East End background, they are simply iconic, historic, ground-breaking, heart-breaking; still, after all these years. Accept no substitutes.

Dominic Cooke’s frantically fast-paced Chicken Soup production cuts corners and isn’t quite right; the character outlines are not always filled in enough by the actors. Samantha Spiro’s fiery but too rigidly focussed central performance is spoilt by a bad wig.

But to see this play on the stage where it made Wesker’s name --and with a ceiling (you rarely see ceilings in sets these days) in Ultz’s hyper-realist design of the Whitechapel attic flat, then the Hackney council accommodation -- over fifty years ago, is intensely moving; the original Harry Kahn, Frank Finlay, was in the audience, too. As people’s lives are trimmed with pragmatism and domestic duty, the hearth is stoked by Spiro’s blazing Sarah Kahn, a lifelong Communist Party member who refuses to face the disillusions of her own budding writer son, Ronnie, whom debutant Tom Rosenthal plays with great comic energy and accumulating hurt. Meanwhile, Harry (Danny Webb), Sarah’s husband, goes from sly indolence to gibbering immobility after a couple of strokes and endless (he says; we agree) nagging. Their big row is quite uncomfortably spectacular. Ronnie’s sister, Ada (Jenny Augen) takes socialism to the fens in Cambridge, while Aunt Cissie (a really wonderful, zesty performance by Alexis Zegerman) keeps up the good work with the trades unions, and registers the changing climate. In a theatre that Dominic Cooke has controversially, and imaginatively, turned into a haven for middle-class, sometimes very good, double-edged plays, the ironic use of “The Internazionale” on the soundtrack and the Russian revolutionary imagery on the poster, is brilliantly undone by Sarah’s last great speech in defence of socialism. No-one’s spoken in our theatre like this for years!

Dave’s Tories pretend they care as much about everything as everyone else does these days. But they don’t. And socialism took a few hard knocks under Tony Blair. Jesus was a socialist. As Sarah tells her wilting son, the surrogate Wesker figure who will be transformed by experience, and memory: if you don’t care, you will die. Harry didn’t care enough. What happens? He dies.

- by Michael Coveney