Chicken Soup with Barley

by Arnold Wesker

The kettle boils in 1936 as the fascists are marching. Tea is brewed in 1946, with disillusion in the air at the end of the war. Twenty years on, in 1956, as rumours spread of Hungarian revolution, the cup is empty.

Sarah Khan, an East End Jewish mother, is a feisty political fighter and a staunch communist. Battling against the State and her shirking husband, she desperately tries to keep her family together.

This landmark state-of-the-nation play is a panoramic drama portraying the age-old battle between realism and idealism. Chicken Soup with Barley captures the collapse of an ideology alongside the disintegration of a family.

Chicken Soup with Barley , the first in a trilogy that includes Roots and I'm Talking about Jerusalem was first performed at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in 1958 and transferred to the Royal Court in the same year.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, Theatre, Fiction, Politics, Historical

96 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1984

About the author

Sir Arnold Wesker is a British dramatist known for his contributions to world drama. He is the author of 50 plays, 4 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, a book on journalism, a children's book, extensive journalism, poetry and other assorted writings. His plays have been translated into 17 languages and performed worldwide.

Reviews

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the earliest of the 1950s British “Kitchen Sink” plays. I don’t know if the young playwrights, such as Arnold Wesker and John Osborne, thought of themselves as a movement, but putting a label on them was probably good for marketing. And at the time they were thought of as fresh and new, but that probably tells us more about the state of British theatre than the new playwrights: for decades British theatre was respectable, middle class playwrights writing about the middle classes for a middle class audience – it was not necessarily bad (Terence Rattigan is now very fashionable), but it was narrow. The new realist theatre promised new subjects and new ideas and new experiences, but, outside of the British theatre, realism was hardly new: at the beginning of the century there was Maxim Gorky and Gerhart Hauptmann, and then a little later, in English, there was Sean O’Casey and Clifford Odets and all the American realists – the British were a bit slow. And I have doubts about this sort of realism: it tends to spend a lot of time building the textures of reality and all this energy spent signifying reality tends to swamp everything else; and Realism tends to deny the theatricality of the theatre, which seems self defeating. The great strength of Chicken Soup with Barley is probably also its great limitation: it builds its working class Jewish London community with loving detail, it has a life and freshness that feels as though it is based in a solid reality, but the energy spent doing this leaves little room for anything else. That’s not to say the play is static, there is a major development within it. Its three acts are spaced over a twenty year period – 1936, 1946/47 and 1956 – all focused on the Kahn family and the community around them: the development follows the breakdown of the family and community. The first Act takes place on the day of the “Battle of Cable Street,” when the fascists threatened to march through the Jewish area of the East End, but the local communities saw them off. This is a heroic time when the community are bound together by a common purpose – and at the centre of that political purpose is the Communist Party. In the second Act the Kahns have moved into a Council flat: the post-War Labour government is in power and even the Communists have some elected Members of Parliament, but they have lost their old community and notably Sarah and Harry’s daughter Ada has lost her faith in politics: she is planning to move to the country with her husband, Dave Simmons, as part of a rural community - Dave was in the first Act, a Communist militant about to leave for the Civil War in Spain; although absent from the second Act, we hear he has fought in the Second World War and is now waiting to be demobbed, but his experiences in Spain have created doubts about the Party. In the third Act Sarah and Harry’s son Ronnie is now disillusioned: in the second Act he had ambitions to be a socialist writer, but now he has been earning a living as a cook and is returning home. He is another figure disillusioned with the Communist Party and has little resource other than collapsing into despair. (Monty Blatt, another militant in the first Act, also visits in the third Act, now a tradesman in Manchester having turned his back on politics.) In contrast Sarah has kept her faith in the Party. But I can’t help feeling all this is fairly straightforward: people have become depoliticized following their disillusionment with the Party – Sarah does allow a different view, but the options seem to be Communist or conformist/social despair. Maybe this illustrates a mindset of former Communists, but I don’t feel it is an insight. Alongside this loss of political belief is the loss of community: the old community has gone, someone complains that they don’t even know their neighbours, there are words of criticism about the impact of television: this is cliché pretending to be insight – these are late 1950s anxieties about the new commodity society, that the working class are being ‘spoilt’ by a new wealth. A constant throughout the three Acts is Sarah and Harry’s arguing and bickering: he is constantly put down as weak, his children using Sarah’s rhetoric against him – in the final Act Sarah explains her contempt for her husband, but his crime seems to be that he isn’t enough of a militant. I find all this a little sanctimonious. I found the play nostalgic for a time of moral and political clarity, but I wasn’t sure if the play wasn’t also nostalgic for the poverty that created the clarity and its inability to think of radical politics outside of the Communist Party is, at best, blinkered.

[Joel Wall · Rating 3 out of 5]

"You’ll die, you’ll die – if you don’t care you’ll die."

I love discovering old plays and realising I've written something very similar without having read it.

[Eduardo Norte · Rating 5 out of 5]

La historia de una familia que cambia y evoluciona en un mundo que lo hace también. Los personajes cambian, la familia se desmorona, al mismo tiempo que la idea del comunismo en Europa. Es tan bonita la evolución de los personajes... y tristemente, tan real...
En cuanto tenga oportunidad iré a verla en el escenario. Me ha encantado.

[Noha · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You'll die, you'll die - if you don't care you'll die," Sarah's final plea and Ronnie's uncertain final gesture sums up the ongoing conflict between idealism and realism. It hits you really hard if you have just survived a revolution.

[Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The disintegration of family and beliefs just too depressing.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drama on 3:
Arnold Wesker's landmark play portraying the age-old battle between realism and idealism.

[Mxj · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really know what to think of this play, I'll be honest - one of the only thing I can say is that it's a punch in the gut all along : you see their political ideal crumble, people getting miserable as time goes on and can sense it from the beginning
The last scene in particular is really amazing and disturbing at the same time : you see Sarah really put words on her thoughts and despair

In my books it's almost a 4 stars rating, but I don't know I feel like something was missing ? To be fair this is a play, and I would really be curious as to see it live !

[Gipsy.fgl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought it was a mediocre play until I read the last scene, Ronnie's confrontation with her mother. Although it is not so genuine, it was still good to hear some background info about Harry and Sarah and to see the shifts in ideologies and in family members' approach to the ideas/to each other. Overall, an average play for me

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

"You've got to care, you've got to care or you'll die."

A stunning evocation of post-1945 Britain and how idealism and the practical everyday interact, through the microcosm of one Communist family.

[Betül · Rating 4 out of 5]

i feel just like Ronnie and i am not even 30 yet. Will this feeling torment me till the end?

[Doğa Aydın · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Eleidhunita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es bonito, y cortito, y se lee muy rápido ^^

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important and bittersweet play that captures the decline and disillusionment of the Jewish Left in the East End of London over a 20 year period from 1936-56.