Feature: - Interview - Playwright Arnold Wesker on his play Chicken Soup at the Royal Court
Published: 02 June 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN
ARNOLD Wesker gives a rare chuckle and declares: “I’m too old to be happy.”
It is a poignant moment for the knighted playwright who has lived almost in purdah in recent years, ignored by British theatres and critics yet acclaimed round the world.
His 42 plays have been translated into 17 languages and even the late Terence Rattigan, who castigated the post-war Angry Young Men school of playwrights, considered Wesker on a par with Ibsen. Now, at 79, two of his classic plays, Chicken Soup with Barley and The Kitchen, are being revived, the latter at the National Theatre, no less.
It coincides with his leaving his isolated home in Hay-on-Wye in Wales for a new one in Hove, Sussex. He is also reunited with his wife, Dusty, after many years apart. This revived relationship has undoubtedly breathed new life into him as he contemplates the opening performance tonight (Thursday) of Chicken Soup with Barley at London’s Royal Court – the iconic theatre that was the scene of the play’s 1958 debut.
“Things are hotting up now, there’s a sense of excitement in the air,” he tells me, having earlier denigrated this momentous occasion as hardly something special.
He is off on slightly shaky legs, with Dusty as his guide, to see a final rehearsal run-through of Chicken Soup in Toynbee Hall. That is close to the East End streets of Spitalfields, where he grew up, the son of cook Leah and tailor’s machinist Joseph Wesker, themselves the offspring of desperately poor Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.
“It’s a very autobiographical play about my parents,” Wesker explains. “Reading it through is very painful. I don’t remember sitting down and writing it, in the council flat in Hackney where we lived, but I do remember when it was finished and how I wanted to read some of it to my mother.
“She was talking to a friend in another room. I had to stop the conversation in order to start reading. My mother said: ‘I’m not saying it’s not good, but who’s going to be interested in all that?’ – which was a good Jewish mother’s reaction.”
Indeed, the powerful play begins with the Mosley fascists on the march in the East End and the reaction of Sarah Khan, a staunch Communist fighting against the tide of events, her wastrel husband and trying to keep the family together some 20 years later, when Russia crushes the Hungarian revolution.
Back in the 1950s, the Royal Court, very much London’s home of the avant-garde, was celebrating “Fifty Years of Repertory Theatre”, offering to put on four provincial productions.
Director Lindsay Anderson had recommended Chicken Soup with Barley but the Royal Court’s George Devine and Tony Richardson were uncertain. They suggested it go for a week’s try-out at the Belgrade Theatre, in Coventry.
The play, a considerable success, returned to London, marking the start of Wesker’s triumphant trilogy of plays at the Royal Court.
The unexpected revival of Chicken Soup with Barley – director Dominic Cooke contacted Wesker out of the blue – was followed by Nicholas Hytner at the National insisting on reviving The Kitchen. It too is autobiographical in that one of Wesker’s many odd jobs, while trying to trying to become an actor, was as a kitchen porter in the Bell Hotel, in Norwich (where he met Dusty).
The 1960s were very much Wesker’s heyday, he and Dusty living then in Bishops Road, Highgate. It was then that Wesker resurrected the Roundhouse as a theatre as part of the trade union-inspired Centre 42 project.
But Wesker’s rise to the top was jolted, , then virtually halted, after rows about his play, The Journalists – based on the experience he had working at the Sunday Times – and controversy over Shylock, his version of The Merchant of Venice.
He went into virtual exile in Wales after a split with Dusty over his philandering ways – accused too of being arrogant and difficult to work with, which undoubtedly affected both his demeanour and his national status.
Yet Wesker is more philosophical in his view of how he was discarded.
“I never felt like [I was exiled],” he insists. “Things have been happening to me all the time. My plays have been produced round the world. I’ve written a biography, books of short stories, poetry and a children’s book. I moved on and now it is the British theatres who are catching up with me.”
And he has something new to offer, a play written last year called Joy and Tyranny, which very much reflects today’s fight – and flight – for freedom by oppressed people.
“It’s about the way tyrants feel intimidated by joy, how it is the poets, the painters and the intellectuals who are the first to be sent to jail,” he says. “I don’t know what will happen to the Arab spring. The fact that it has happened at all is really significant. Now Bin Laden has been killed, Mladic has been captured and Gaddafi is on the run. That really puts out the signal to warn tyrants that you can’t ever get away with slaughter.”
• Chicken Soup with Barley opens at the Royal Court Theatre tonight (Thursday) and runs until July 9. 020 7565 5000,
www.royalcourttheatre.com