On Stage

...A less vigorous performance would have helped a little...

...The question of exporting the English class struggle has just been the subject of an international exchange, and it is worth developing a little further...

...The players are equally effective when, again wordlessly, they respond to the singing of the ballad, making their own music with whatever they find at hand...

...Expressionism has its uses, but, in this case, the novelty of turning the outside inside soon wears thin...

...like Centre 42, he encounters an ambiguous reception...

...How does he know that popular ballads are elevating...

...But this same, inevitable preoccupation is hazardous for a dramatist...

...The military drills are splendidly effective, especially because British military procedures are so flamboyant...

...The performance bears out the real emphasis of the play...

...Daddy tried to make me go to Harvard or West Point, but I can't stand French fried potatoes and so I want to mingle with you people and to teach you to recite Walt Whitman and to sing "Pie in the Sky...

...What is most curious is that he, and only he except for Pip, shares Wesker's values, but the commander happens to be on the other side of the fence...

...Nigel Dennis in Encounter wrote a hilarious piece in which he pretended he was reviewing one of those military drills that Sol Hurok sometimes brings to Madison Square Garden...

...Living in England, who does write about anything else...

...The Variety review of Chips shrewdly observed that the American audience responded most warmly to the wrong elements in the play—wrong from Wesker's standpoint...

...His only mistake is to forget that, given the nature of Wesker's recruits, the man on horseback is a historical necessity...

...But one of the London critics did choose to interpret the play this way...

...The Scottish soldier would never dream of reciting Burns on his own initiative...

...Leadership is one of the keys to the play, for, in theory, it is leadership that keeps the upper class on top...

...Has he possibly been sneaking off the post to see Wesker's plays or to hear a poetry reading at Centre 42...

...Not the new English dramatists—and certainly not Arnold Wesker and David Turner, whose plays recently opened on Broadway...

...but just try leaving two people alone on stage with nothing but Wesker's dialogue, and even Dexter is helpless...

...Where did he find out that Elvis is debasing...

...Instead of creating people, he will create members of a social class...

...The best place for a meteorologist is not the eye of the storm, and that is what is wrong with Chips...

...While it has provided John Osborne and Wesker with a subject that excites them— indeed, it provokes them to fury— it runs the risk of becoming a nonexportable local issue, a private joke or a private tragedy...

...Wesker too insistently sees himself as a part of the class war, and so he cannot see the rest of it for the purposes of his play...

...A Variety review is the last place I had thought of looking for shrewdness, but this is quite right...

...Pip also instigates the ballad-singing, in a battle of wills with his commander, who wants his men to dance to the songs of Elvis Presley...

...I suppose some Wing Commander somewhere might be the sort of perverted culture-vulture who thinks culture is too good for the masses, but I am tempted to postulate a more credible portrait: a commander who wants his men to dance to Elvis because he thinks Elvis is fine, or one who thinks that high art is no more than a pain in the neck and therefore gets a few laughs at the sight of his men going highbrow...

...The doorbell rings at the Berger home...

...Now, why do I go on as if I am talking about some hypothetical play that I am warning Osborne, Wesker, Turner and the rest not to write...

...The human relationships that Wesker puts on the stage are awkward at best, embarrassing at worst...

...The big difference is that the positive arguments are, except in Waiting for Lefty, quite muted, nearly implicit in Odets...

...We expect him to snarl, "Curses, foiled again,' when his men reject Elvis for folk art...

...The oddest character in Wesker's play is surely the Wing Commander, a supercharged stack of evil...

...it is a clean-cut young man of obviously AngloSaxon origin...

...Pip, the upper-class rebel, tells the men how to steal coal...

...He extravagantly complimented Sergeant-Major Brittain, director of the drills, for devising the evening's entertainment...

...No, it is quite unthinkable...

...And so, between them both, they lick the platter clean...

...It is all the same in the end because Wesker repeats the weary old theme of all British plays about army life: Only the upper class can lead, and the cockneys should be grateful for the chance to follow...

...We can occasionally—not especially in this play—be grateful for his passion, but he derives no other benefits from his bad location...

...Again parenthetically, I should add that Brien is one of the best London drama critics and that, consequently, I took his admiration for Chips with Everything, in which he was joined by nearly all his colleagues, as a personal affront...

...An upper-class recruit throws in his lot with the rest of the men, mainly because he has undergone some sort of mystical experience on discovering that lower-class restaurants serve French fried potatoes with everything...

...For Semi-Detached David Turner has employed a convention that permits all his social climbers to reveal their truest motives at every opportunity...

...Even the stories he tells give Pip another way of lording it over the men...

...Turner's Semi-Detached shows us the middle class striving to rise...

...he, too, needs Pip's orders...

...A few days later, Alan Brien replied in the London Sunday Telegraph that the American audience was grievously misunderstanding the play and that no one in England could make such a mistake...

...In the present production, Alan Dobie is very good...

...The coal-stealing bit is a beautifully done scene of precise and careful movement, happily none of it interrupted by a human voice of any social class...

...Living in England, who could write about anything else...

...In Chips with Everything, Wesker puts the upper class and the working class on display...

...Instead of taking the nonconformist to their hearts, the Broadway playgoers admired the military discipline which kills the spirit of the recruits and against which the hero rebels...

...For these scenes, we are indebted to John Dexter's direction and not Sergeant-Major Brittain's...

...Henry Popkin, Associate Professor of English at NYU, is New York drama critic for the London Times...

...I think the comparison has been overdone...

...Saying this is my way of interpreting what Wesker would surely call his pessimism about the working class...

...Preoccupation with class structure is a highly visible feature of the English scene...

...Thus the charge against Pip is entirely sound...

...The danger in a play is that a dramatist will base too many assumptions upon the specifically British awareness of the class structure, and that he will let class loyalty take the place of characterization...

...he concluded with a passing reference to Wesker as author of the connecting dialogue...

...He wants the men to embrace Elvis because he detests them and likes to see them debase themselves...

...No scene works that is based only on simple, person-to-person human contact...

...The rebel is shown that the real purpose of his rebellion was to make him a leader, and so he becomes a leader the conventional way by going to officer-training school...

...The plays have been written, and they are called Chips with Everything and Semi-Detached...

...Accordingly, the father keeps shouting that if he gives up his hobby (railroad trains), he will lose all his social contacts, and he loudly proclaims his embarrassment at seeing a Sunday scandal sheet in his home...

...For some years now, critics on both sides of the Atlantic have been comparing Wesker to Clifford Odets...

...we get a superfluous chorus-character in Golden Boy and a few extraneous words about the class struggle in Awake and Sing, but Odets' characters, like most ordinary people, live out their lives without directly confronting the great issues...

...The nature of his satire prevented Dennis from addressing himself more directly to the faults of the play, but, if he had been able to take his tongue out of his cheek for a minute, he probably would have said that the drill came over so strong because the characters came over so weak...

...Sarah is a Communist agitator, while Bessie is no more than a Bronx housewife...

...Good evening," he says...

...Or imagine Chips in the Odets canon...

...They are not characters but representatives of their respective classes, all except the rebel, who learns better...

...Chips, as all of you have guessed by now, takes place in a military camp—an RAF training camp...

...Compare the two authors' mother-figures, Wesker's Sarah Kahn and Odets' Bessie Berger...

...in London, Frank Finlay was incomparable...

...his orders, which we do not hear, must be just as exact and effective as those of the drill sergeant...

...In everything except the coal-stealing, he calls to mind Wesker's Centre 42, which was designed to furnish art to the working class...

...As in England, the most remarkable figure is the hard-boiled corporal who puts the men through their paces...

...What comes off best is action that can be made to shine with a sort of mechanical precision...

...Happily, London cabbies address Americans as "guv'nor," as if all of us went to Oxford...

...Rebellious as Wesker is, he is still sufficiently docile to accept this theory...

...A better view is available to those of us whose careers, whose very lives, do not depend on the crucial difference between a toff accent and a cockney accent...

...He holds his fellowsoldiers spellbound with his stories, shows them how to steal coal, and teaches them to appreciate Robert Burns and popular balladry...