Sheffield’s Crucible Lyceum Studio – until 3 March 2018. Reviewed by Dawn Smallwood
5*****
This play is being premiered at Sheffield’s Crucible Lyceum Studio. Many can relate to the 1984/85 Miners Strike and how the devastating impact it had not just on the coal industry but the mining communities. It was after the events at Orgreave which prompted three women, in this play, to do whatever they can do to show solidarity to the miners and their families.
Chicken Soup is about three women who fought and survived amid the struggles in a South Yorkshire mining village. They set up a soup kitchen where they feed families and supply them provisions. The story spans over 32 years from the strike in 1984, the Queen’s Jubilee in 2002, and to the eve of the referendum in 2016 where citizens cast their vote to decide Britain’s future.
The staging has been considered and moves with the times with the smooth transitions between the time eras and this is done by the creative team of Sophia Simensky, Prema Mehta and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite. It is centred on a community centre’s kitchen, a vital hub for running essential services. Friendships blossom and are tested between Josephine (Judy Flynn), Christine (Samantha Power) and Jennifer (Simone Saunders). The play poignantly and emotively, with irony and wit thrown in, projects their characters and livelihoods.
With Katie (Remmie Milner), Jennifer’s daughter, and Helen (Jo Hartley), Christine’s estranged sister in law, being part of the scene, they are reminded with conflicting attitudes that time doesn’t stand still. They witness, however, the parallels back to the strikes with present day austerity measures, food banks and influencing support for the better good.
The play, co-written by Ray Castleton and Kieran Knowles, offers the delicate but crucial direction successfully driven by Bryony Shanahan. It doesn’t prescriptively influence the audience how they should think and feel about the issues raised. The context of the play and the women’s plight encourages the audience to think for themselves about the humanity and bravery that kept the spirit alive during those times.
It is a fantastic performance from the five women cast and is certainly an unmissable production which transfixes the audience from beginning to end. The play is delivered well with complimentary soup available for all at the interval, thrown in as a good measure, and it was such that one wishes for the play not to end when it did.