Chicken Soup with Barley review, Royal Court

There's an awful lot of tea-making in Arnold Wesker's classic, Chicken Soup with Barley, but then, there isn't much else on offer when you're poor.  For Sarah Kahn, Jewish matriarch and card carrying Communist, sharing is a political as well as a cultural imperative.  When we first meet her in 1936, the Communists and the Black Shirts are in combat on her doorstep.  Her daughter, Ada, is off to the barricades, her future son-in-law is off to the Spanish Civil War, and Sarah is needed at the First Aid point.  Husband Harry, world weary and imprinted with misadventure, stands alone in their sitting room, the teapot still warm, with the red flag.  In his hands it is not iconic, it's a warning.

Wesker's play is studied as a lesson in political disillusion with the Kahn family as a metaphor: the battle between ideology and realism in microcosm.  A modern audience may find it's the dynamic within the family - the secrets, the lies and the dysfunction, with a desperate woman fighting to hold things together - that provides the more potent narrative with politics as a useful punctuation. There are scenes of domestic dysfunction that bring tears to the eye.

You'll always find them in
the kitchen at Communist parties

The play spans twenty years ending in a collective gasp from the audience when Samantha Spiro, as Sarah, pulls the strands together using the language of politics in a bid to redeem her son.  Spiro is a star - her Dolly in the Open Air Theatre's Hello Dolly is unforgettable - and she is the driving force through this production. As Harry, Danny Webb is beyond brilliant: a study in weakness, apathy, uncertainty, fear...  After his extraordinary performance in Blasted at the Lyric, Hammersmith, last year, it's great seeing him centre stage where he belongs.

In conclusion: Dominic Cooke has directed another winner - simple yet complex, convoluted yet true. The lead performances alone would be enough to recommend it, but actually, there is no part of this production that does not hit the mark.

References
Paul Taylor in The Independent
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