Theater: Sheep That Don’t Say Baa

Chips With Everything, by Arnold Wesker. George Orwell’s image of the future was that of a boot unendingly stamping on a human face. Socialist-minded Playwright Wesker’s image of the present, in Britain at least, is that of sheep endlessly being sheared and slaughtered by the Establishment without raising a baa of protest. Wesker calls his play “a kick up backside, with love” aimed at the British working class, and one of his characters scornfully berates the unimaginative, undemanding docility of that class: “You breed babies and you eat chips* with everything.”

Wesker’s chip is on his shoulder, and in heavier hands his play might have been doctrinaire agitprop-wash. It escapes that dreary fate, thanks to the playwright’s good humor, dramatic interplay and irony, together with Director John Dexter’s drillmasterly pacing. It is, in its own lingo, a scorching fine evening of theater.

The action takes place at a peacetime R.A.F. base, where a squad of conscripts are going through basic training. They find out immediately that they are sinners in the hands of an angry god, a corporal (Alan Dobie) who is full of deafening sound and bogus fury. (Dobie is pricelessly suited to the part.) But there is a class-conscious trouble maker in this nice inoffensive bunch.

Airman Thompson (Gary Bond), whose nickname is “Pip,” has chosen to be conscripted seemingly out of hatred for his father, a general symbolizing all that the Establishment stands for. The officers regard Pip as a traitor to his class and plan to lure or dragoon him back above the salt. His squad mates love to hear stories of Pip’s filthy-rich upbringing in a stately 18th century manor, couldn’t care less when he tries to ignite their class feeling with tales of the French Revolution, and remain stubbornly suspicious of him as a snob who is slumming.

Pip does spark one sizzling scene of class animus at a drunken, brawling Christmas party. The wing commander (Dallas Cavell), a jowly autocrat who regards the conscripts as disgusting animals and wants to see them make a loutish display of themselves, calls for some rock-‘n’-roll music. Pip stops the music and coaxes one of the conscripts to sing The Cutty Wren, an old folk song of peasant revolt. It begins with the stilly calm of a Christmas carol, but as the stanzas become more aggressive, the conscripts improvise a louder and louder beat of spoon on glass, stick on stick, fist on palm. The powerful rhythmic din is the voice of the working class making itself heard, and the officers almost blanch at its menace.

The scene abruptly ends with a thunderclap of silence.

Frightened or not, the officers make Pip doubt the sincerity of his motives, and he pivots on his Achilles’ heel right into the officers’ ranks. Played out to the anthem of God Save the Queen, the final scene is an ironic blend of parade-ground smartness and mocking bitterness. Pip has been broken, and the conscripts are to be shipped out as clerk fodder. Though Wesker probably intended something more hopeful, his play says in sum that you can’t change the bloody upper classes—or the bloody lower classes either.

* Fried potatoes.