Review: Theatre

Chicken Soup and Barley, Royal Court dir Dominic Cooke, design by Ultz

Outstanding. Chicken Soup and Barley must have struck more than just a political chord when it was first produced in 1958: this is drama at its best, a chronicle of the times, yet biblical in its scope. So viewing it now, some sixty years later, its pathos and personal aspirations seem more poignant. The play spans the thirties, the forties and ends in disillusionment in the 1950s, as the socialist ideal refracted against Mosely’s Blackshirts, the second World War and the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, fades and disintegrates. It shows the universal through the domestic world of the Kahn family, held together by its matriarch, Sarah. The physical disintegration of Harry, her feckless husband, is ultimately mirrored in the weakened, position of Ronnie, their son; he even sits in his father’s chair at the end. Wonderful performances particularly from Samantha Spiro as Sarah and Danny Webb as Harry; and the sets by Ultz are ingenious in their use of space, suggestions of ‘other places’ and in their period detail.