The 1962 Club: Chips with Everything / Arnold Wesker

My history with Arnold Wesker is brief: I’ve seen one of his plays, once. That was Chicken Soup with Barley at the Royal Court in 2011. Looking back, what a cast: Samantha Spiro, Danny Webb, Tom Rosenthal, Harry Peacock, Steve Furst … Now I think of it, I’ve also seen the super 1961 film of The Kitchen. Fairly or unfairly, Wesker’s reputation seems to rest on a small number of plays he wrote around in a period of a few years either side of 1960, and Chips with Everything is one of the big hitters.

The play is set over a period of eight weeks, and focuses on a group of nine conscripts doing National Service with the RAF. One, Pip, is a former public schoolboy and presumed to be officer material; the others are working-class. Among these are Chas, whose needling of Pip made me think of Pinter to begin with, the potential for violence simmering not far below the surface, though he softens at the end of the first act when Pip masterminds a raid on the coalhouse (a silent set piece described in minute detail that might be very excitingly staged); and Smiler, with his perpetual retort of ‘It’s natural, I was born like it.’ (Smiler was played in the original production by Ronald Lacey; he’d have been just right.)

The comic episodes are immediately funny. There’s a good scene where the various officers – Wing Commander, Squadron Leader, Pilot Officer, PT Instructor – are introduced, a parade of caricatures. This play contains some of the seeds of my favourite film, Lindsay Anderson’s If…., and nowhere more so than in the Wing Commander’s philosophical blether, which recalls the empty speeches of Peter Jeffrey’s Headmaster:

… We need a fighting force and it is for this reason you are being trained here, according to the best traditions of the R.A.F. We want you to be proud of your part, unashamed of the uniform you wear. But you must not grumble too much if you find that government facilities for you, personally, are not up to standard. We haven’t the money to spare. A Meteor, fully armed, is more important than a library …

A later scene involves charging a dummy with a bayonet and practising the Yell of Hate.

Some of the backchat is right out of variety.

PILOT OFFICER
Don’t tell me what I already know.

ANDREW
Oh, I wouldn’t, sir—you know what you already know. I know that, sir.

The more darkly satiric elements I found harder to get a handle on. There’s a party scene where, urged to sing a pop song by the Wing Commander, Pip instead leads the conscripts in a pointedly political rendition of ‘The Cutty Wren’ (I love it when you get notated music in a play, like in the appendices to Under Milk Wood), which I suspect would be electric in a theatre but didn’t spring off the page as it might have. Similarly Pip’s metamorphosis in the penultimate scene. I enjoy reading plays, but you need to watch them too.

Even if not all of it hits home, it’s clearly a profoundly angry piece of work. Just as the school in If…. and the kitchen in The Kitchen serve as microcosms of society as a whole, so the RAF hut here. The RAF as an institution is portrayed as bulldozer, flattening all in its path, and if Pip ends up as one of the drivers it doesn’t appear to be of his own volition. But how do you face down a bulldozer? By the time Wesker wrote Chips with Everything, conscription in Britain had been abolished. Good riddance. Probably.

Tags: Arnold Wesker, Books, Chips with Everything, National Service, Reading, Royal Air Force, The 1962 Club, Theatre