It’s rather surprising to see the Royal Court charging admission to Chicken Soup with Barley, given that, for the duration of its run, the theatre is, to all intents and purposes, operating as a museum.
In fact, it’s hard to even call Dominic Cooke’s fine production a revival, given the term’s connotations of resuscitation. Rather it is an exquisite piece of taxidermy.
In other words, presented straight, as Cooke does, Chicken Soup with Barley can be nothing but an artefact. That is not to say that it has no relevance whatsoever to a contemporary audience. It does so just as ancient relics of exinct cultures carry universal meaning, but, like them, its significance today is primarily historical. It serves as both a primary and a secondary source: both in itself, as piece of theatre history, and in its content, as representing a past present. The play is now incapable of direct address. Any signs of life, and there are certainly some within, might be thought of as the muscles spasms of a stuffed corpse.
Arnold Wesker’s play, the first (and, it is often claimed, best) in his trilogy of national diagnosis, premiered at the Coventry Belgrade in 1958, transferring to the Court immediately afterwards. It shows an East End, working-class Jewish family, the Kahns, across three decades. In 1936, they are full of hopeful socialist defiance, counter-marching against Moseley’s blackshirts. By the end, in 1956, against the backdrop of Stalinism and the Hungarian revolution, not only has their ideology splintered and deflated, so too has that of the next generation.
A landmark production in theatre’s post-1956 revolution, Chicken Soup with Barley was another example of a stage stormed by an Angry Young Man. Reviving it at the same theatre inevitably comes with a whiff of self-celebration, especially since Cooke merely digs out, dusts off and displays the piece as it might originally have been. It’s almost an archaeological approach to theatre, though, somewhat problematically, it never admits as such.
Instead, Cooke presents it as one might any other piece of new writing, as if its core state of the nation message still stands. Only it doesn’t. Because of Thatcher. Because of Regan. Because of Blair and Brown. We cannot stop the collapse of the Kahns’ various socialist ideologies, because to do so would require us first to resuscitate them.
To be capable of direct address, a play must resonate with its contemporary audience, if not intrinsically, then instrumentally; that is, in its presentation. This still involves treating it as an artefact, only not by handling it with protective gloves, but as raw material to be refashioned. It involves the same irreverence with which the Chapman Brothers painted over a Goya orginal. (In theatre, there can be no charge of reckless cultural vandalism, since there can be no irreparable damage. There is no original to lose. Everything is proposition.)
Peering into Ultz’s meticulously assembled sets is much like visiting the Cabinet War Rooms. The production has a sense of preservation, perhaps even restoration, about it and, because Cooke makes no reference to that process, it’s strangely unsettling. Ghostly. Perhaps we are so accustomed to watching ourselves on the Royal Court stage that we cannot settle into the sort of period drama one expects of BBC2 on a Sunday night, for that is what Wesker’s play has become. Cooke almost needs to pump in the unmistakable stench of formaldehyde that we might know to watch accordingly.
While there are innumerable plays that can wholly survive without such directorial intervention – Shakespeare being the obvious go-to example – Wesker’s is not one of them. It is too firmly lodged in its own historical moment for that. It addresses England in 1958. It calls the dead to arms. Today, it serves firstly as a history lesson or, at a big old stretch, as a lesson from history.
What poignancy remains comes instead from our failure to heed its warning. Today, the most striking line is Sarah Kahn’s premonition of “a world where people don’t think any more,” satisfied as they are with their new television sets. Watching today, all we can do is hang our heads in shame for her struggle has long since been lost. Chicken Soup with Barley is thus made hopeless.
This is what becomes of the state of the nation play when the nation it reflects no longer corresponds. Wesker’s play has crystallised into allegory. It’s politics, so urgent in its own time, is now replaced by softer, pensive philosophy. It no longer matters what the Kahns believe, but how their beliefs wane.
Like his increasingly paralysed father, agonisingly played by Danny Webb, Ronnie (Tom Rosenthal) simply exhausts himself with dreamy romanticism, while Ada (Jenna Augen) flees the bickering unions for the freedom of the countryside. The initially ardent Monty, played by Harry Peacock as if years of shrugging have left his shoulders hunched, fades into self-interest, leaving London to set up as a greengrocer: “There’s nothing more to life than a house, some friends and a family.” A realisation dawns: aren’t we all Montys now?
Only Sarah Kahn holds onto her ideals. As played by Samantha Spiro, Sarah exists in an alternate time, as one imagines a Galapagos tortoise might do. While those around her wither, Spiro merely slows slightly and drops a notch. If she has a summery disposition in 1936 – floral print dress, bright pastels – it takes twenty years for autumn to set in. Her husband, by contrast, is in deep-freeze, two strokes down the line, paralysed and incontinent.
Today, Chicken Soup with Barley is less about the Left, whether utopian like Ronnie’s or pragmatic like Ada’s, than the effects of time. It becomes existential, a meditation on the glacial, inhuman pace of change and the hopelessness of the world as experienced. If Wesker’s play has become an artefact, we ought to make a memorial of it: a reminder that we must continue to fight.
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