Chips with Everything (1962)

1. Chips with Everything (1962) Arnold Wesker–Brechtian influences

2. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) • John Willett (ed. and tr.) Brecht on Theatre. 5th ed. Reading: Methuen, 1996. • Select Plays: • Baal (1923) • The Threepenny Opera (1928) • Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny(1930) • Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) • The Life of Galileo; The Good Woman of Setzuan(1943) • The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui(1947) • The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948)

3. A non-Aristotelian dramaturgy • 1. Critiquing identification • Opposing mimesis and catharsis • Epic theatre is non-aristotelian • 2. Against the hegelian formula • Hegel’s Aesthetics (lectures given 1818-1829) • Neo-classical formula: mimetic illusion and cathartic identification

4. What is epic theatre? • Towards the epic form • e.gLehrstücke (didactic plays) • He who says Yes / He who says No: • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdJL_vL2Ew • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om66ElJ9ez8 • Epic Theatre derives from Greek. Epos, story. A form of theatre which self consciously narrates. • Epic Theatre= Historicised theatre, theatre about the present, but not set in the present. (Distanciation)

5. DRAMATIC THEATREEPIC THEATRE Plot narrative Implicates the spectator in a stage situation turns the spectator into an observer, but  Wears down his capacity for action arouses his capacity for action provides him with sensations forces him to take decisions experience picture of the world the spectator is involved in something he is made to face something suggestion argument instinctive feelings are preserved are brought to the point of the recognition spectator is in the thick of it, shares spectator stands outside, studies the experience the human being is taken for granted the human being is the object of the inquiry he is unalterable he is alterable and able to alter eyes on the finish eyes on the course one scene makes another each scene for itself growth montage linear development in curves evolutionary determinism jumps man as a fixed point man as a process thought determines being social being determines thought feeling reason Brecht on Theatre. ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’. Dramatic theatre vs. epic theatre.

6. BUT • The table ‘does not show absolute antitheses but mere shifts in accent’ so that ‘we may choose whether to stress the element of emotional suggestion or that of plain rational argument’.

7. The epic spectator • ‘The dramatic theater's spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too-- Just like me--It's only natural-- It'll never change--The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable--That's great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world--I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theater's spectator says: I'd never have thought it -- That's not the way -- That's extraordinary, hardly believable -- It's got to stop -- The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary -- That's great art; nothing obvious in it -- I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.’

8. Alienation? Distanciation? Defamiliarisation? • Verfremdungseffekt= V-Effekt • ‘Verfremdung estranges an incident or character simply by taking from the incident or character what is self-evident, familiar, obvious in order to produce wonder and curiosity’. • Estrangement effect = estrangement/alienation effect: distancing the viewer from the action; encouraging rational thought and analysis; reducing emotional catharsis. • ‘In epic theatre, the dramatic action is structured on the basis of montage rather than straightforward linear flow, and is interrupted by direct address to the audience in songs, choruses and projections.’ • E.g. ‘films that show a montage of events from all over the world’. • ‘The V-Effekt was achieved in the German epic theatre not only by the actor but also by the music (choruses, songs) and the setting (placards, film, etc). It was principally designed to historicize the incidents portrayed.’

9. Arnold Wesker at the Roundhouse, 1966.

10. Arnold Wesker (1932-2016) • ‘“Visions don’t work”? The role of Wesker’s theatre and Centre 42 in 1960s’ British culture.’http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2016.1149769 • Conscripted in the RAF in 1950. (Chips with Everything) • Turned to theatre for 2 reasons: • the Observer play competition, for which he wrote The Kitchen, • John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, in which ‘he just recognized that things could be done in the theatre, and immediately went home and wrote Chicken Soup’.’ (Mini Autobiography, 240)

11. Early career • The Kitchen (1957; perf. 1959) • Chicken Soup with Barley (1958; perf. 1958) • Roots (1959; perf. 1959) • I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960; perf. 1960) • Chips with Everything (1960; perf. 1962) • Their Very Own and Golden City (1961-64; world premiere 1965/UK prod. 1966) • The Four Seasons (1964; world premiere 1964/UK prod. 1965) • The Friends (1970, Roundhouse)

12. 1960 Oxford address: ‘The Modern Playwright or O, Mother, is it worth it?’ • Centre 42 (C42) project (1960-70): to create a popular audience and centre for the arts. • The Roundhouse: C42’s spatial and emblematic home after a series of regional festivals in 1962.

13. C42 and the Roundhouse • ‘art is a commonheritage, not the habit of a few’ (“Vision! Vision! Mr Woodcock” - New Statesman, 30 July 1960). • Socialismisnot ‘merely an economic organisation of society but a way of living based on the assumptionthat life isrich, rewarding and thathumanbeingsdeserveit’ (Fears of Fragmentation, 17). • Doris Lessing, John McGrath, ShelaghDelaney, Clive Barker, Lindsay Anderson, Jennie Lee, etc.

14. Chips with Everything (1962) • ‘You’re not at home’ (14). • ‘stylisednaturalism’ • Harold Dobson:‘the first anti-Establishment play of which the Establishment has cause to be afraid’ (Sunday Times, 29 April 1962). • Purpose of the play is to ‘prove that the body politic needs purging. We are studying a disease; and what matters is not so much the pain it inflicts as the extent to which it is curable’ (Kenneth Tynan, Observer, 6 May 1962).

15. Chips at the NT, 1997

22. Synopsis • 18 scenes • 8 weeks of square-bashing • Structure. ‘The theatre is a place where one wants to see things happening’ (Wesker). • a series of sketches, snapshots of relevant parts of their training • two interactive plots • revolution can only be effected by the ruled and never by the ruling class • The play warns, through Pip’s example, ‘how rebellions were accommodated and defused’ (Wesker)

23. Why Chips? • Declaration, a collection of essays (1957) • Lindsay Anderson's `Get Out And Push’: Let's face it; coming back to Britain is always something of an ordeal. It ought not to be, but it is. And you don't have to be a snob to feel it. It isn't just the food, the sauce bottles on the cafe tables, and the chips with everything. It isn't just saying goodbye to wine, goodbye to sunshine. After all, there are things that matter even more than these; and returning to Britain from the continent, today in 1957, we feel these strongly too - a certain, civilised (as opposed to cultured) quality in everyday life: a certain humour: an atmosphere of tolerance, decency and relaxation. A solidity, even a warmth. We have come home. But the price we pay is high…

24. Images of working class acceptance of any thing that’s dished up – not only fatty food but fatty ideas. • Pip. And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said..."Chips with everything". Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything. • Personally I have a weakness for fried chips as I have for Barbara Streisand, but I also eat Pommes Lyonnaise and listen to Mozart.

25. A working-class dramatist writing on the class conflict? • Not even Chips With Everything is about ‘the class conflict’. A conflict of classes occurs but that’s not the play’s theme. Chips is preoccupied with what many of my plays are preoccupied with: knowledge versus ignorance, caring versus indifference, tolerance versus bigotry. • Ronald Hayman: ‘Because of theirclear-cut division of personnel intoofficers and men and theirrigidhierarchywhichsubdividesbothcategoriesintoranks, the armed services have often been usedbefore as an image of society but Chipsembodies a more serious, powerful and systematicattack on the class system’.

26. Suggested plays for further reading • The Kitchen (1957) • Their Very Own and Golden City (1965) • The Journalists (1972) • In his 1980s Woman plays: Four Portraits – of Mothers; Annie Wobbler; Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon • Badenheim 1939 (1987) • Groupie (2001)