Chicken Soup with Barley is a 1956 play by British playwright Arnold Wesker.
A major revival, starring Samantha Spiro, was staged at the Royal Court in the summer of 2011.
It spans 20 years of the lives of the Jewish, immigrant Kahn family living in 1936 in London, and traces the downfall of their ideals in a changing world, parallel to the disintegration of the family.
They are communists, and Wesker explores how they struggle to maintain their convictions in the face of the Second World War, Stalinism, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Sarah is an adamant socialist; she is strong, family-minded, honest though bossy; Harry, her husband, is weak, a liar and lacks conviction; Ada is extremely passionate about what she believes in, especially Marxism, and, like the others, is also romantic both personally and politically; and finally, Ronnie is a romantic, youthful idealist.