Chicken Soup with Barley

Synopsis

A landmark play in the history of post-war British theatre, Chicken Soup with Barley is a political drama based upon Wesker's own experiences of growing up in a Jewish family in the East End of London. Spanning three decades, it documents the effect of post-war social issues on Jewish families such as Wesker's. For the Kahn family the Promised Land is neither the Jerusalem of their forebears, not the basement flat they live in now. Their dreams of a better world is sustained by the vitality of the community around them, and is put to the test in the anti-fascist riots of the 1930s. History begins to take its toll as the mother's ideals and resilience contend with a father's weakness in a deeply moving portrait of the forces that drive us apart, and the ties that bind us together.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 8 June 2011

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 rarel...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 1 July 2011:

Chicken Soup With Barley attempts to be both a political play and a Jewish family drama in a similar style to that later adopted by Mike Leigh. However, I felt that Arnold Wesker fell between two stools and didn't fully succeed in either form. The best scene by far was in the opening act set against the Cable Street riots when the Kahn's extended family had a clear enemy to fight against. Although the hostility but mutual reliance between Sarah and Harry is convincingly conveyed the rest of the play mainly consists of characters popping up to try and give some political context including rather half-hearted references to the realities of Stalin's communist utopia. Although superbly played by Samantha Spiro Sarah was a rather implausible socialist firebrand, apparently uninformed about world events but fighting against authority because that seemed the right thing to do. Wesker now appears to be long outdated, particularly when compared to some of the recent political dramas at the Royal Court....

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