Chicken Soup with Barley

Chicken Soup with Barley - closing down theatres since '59

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Cover by Denise York - Could do better

Chicken Soup with Barley is a 1956 play by Arnold Wesker. The world it depicts is an ordinary one. This essay discusses how Wesker gives the ordinary, mundane, everyday things a sense of importance in the play.

The play is about idyllic Jews living in London, but their ideals do not lie in Jerusalem or in riches and wealth. These are Jewish Communists, which is a stereotype favourable among nazis, fascists and far right wingers. It focuses on the main characters Sarah; who is an adamant Socialist, is strong, family-minded, honest though bossy; Harry; who is Sarah’s husband, is weak, a liar, not at all manly and lacks conviction, Sarah’s antithesis if you will; Ada; is extremely passionate about what she believes in, Marxism, like the others, is also romantic both personally and politically; and finally Ronnie; youthful idealistic and just as romantic as Ada.

The play is split into three acts, each with 2 scenes, presumably there was some kind of interval in the middle of all this for theatre-goers to go for a slash, storm off to the box office and demand a refund and your afternoon back, walk out of the theatre to avoid the embarrassment of falling asleep in part 2 or buy drinks and drastically overpriced tiny tubs of extremely frosty ice cream that comes with what can only be described as a miniature plastic shovel included, and let’s not forget bags of fruit pastels that some attendant person will probably yell at you for eating during the second half because you spent the entire break queuing up for them.

Act 1 scene 1 takes place in Oct nineteen thirty six, Act 1 scene 2 takes place later on that very same evening, Act 2 scene 1 takes place in

There are many instances of ordinariness in Chicken Soup with Barley, first of all, when Sarah, Harry et cetera are drinking tea or eating sandwiches. They converse about important issues such as the Spanish civil war and the anti-fascist rally but we don’t actually see them. Wesker cleverly leaves it up to the viewer of the play’s imagination as to what happens. Wesker uses the tea, and Sarah as the tea maker, as a way of making peace when ever two character’s engage in an argument, usually over the subject of Harry’s cowardliness.

Another way in which Arnold Wesker creates a certain sense of ordinariness in Chicken Soup with Barley is...

To be continued...

Everything you never expressed an interest in knowing about Chicken Soup with Barley, but have been forced to find out.

-Arnold Wesker originally called the play Oy, it's the Kahn's, he says; or The Glorification and De-Glorification of the Long Road to Socialism 1936 AD. But his publisher demanded he change it to Chicken Soup with Barley to sell it to naive readers who might think it was a cook book. The publisher was inspired by the success of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, which was predominately bought by those who thought it was the instructions manual to a self assemble table.

-Denise York received more hate mail and letter bombs than usual as she grossly offended Weskerites and pouncey book-cover-design appreicators with her dreadful greeny-yellowy mess. She was swiftly disowned by her family and was captured attempting to leave the country and executed on her Majesty's insistance in 1976. All copies of the offending article were located and destroyed. However many books are still in circulation. To this day the law states that any York sympathiser caught with the book are to be casterated, crushed by an anvil, molested by an old guy or all of them or just the first two depending on your lawyer.

-When the play was first performed, Wesker insisted that only homosexual actors and actress were used as he assumed that straight performers' children would cash in on the success of the play. He was dead wrong; opening night was a no-show for the audience who were put off by a Daily Mail 'Kill the poofs!' smear campaign.

-Arnold Wesker was asked to direct a special version of Chicken Soup with Barley for the 1972 Munich Olympics opening ceremony, to show there was no hard feelings between the Germans and the Jews. However, the plan backfired as the play's pessimistic ending was received as anti-seimetic and Wesker was beaten up afterwards by eleven Israeli athletes. Whilst recovering from his wounds in a bar that eveing, Wesker joked to group of shady Palestinians: "I really, really wish somebody would kill them damn Jews!"

External Links

• Chicken Soup with Barley Recipe for Chicken Soup with Barley
• www.arnoldwesker.com The Arnold Wesker homepage
• www.britishtheatreguide.info A review of Chicken Soup with Barley