Chopped Liver and Unions is the second collaboration between writer JJ Leppink and performer Lottie Walker at Blue Fire Theatre Company, following Marie Lloyd Stole My Life. This time around, the focus is on trade unionist and Communist Sara Wesker (1901-1971). If she is remembered at all it is because of her family connection to Arnold Wesker, and her representation in his celebrated play Chicken Soup With Barley.
Walker’s monologue is punctuated by songs suggested by the ‘singing strikes’ organised by Wesker to gain better working conditions and pay for women factory workers. An early line is telling: “a woman is a machinist or seamstress; when a man picks up a needle, he is a tailor”.
There is an impressive amount of detail in Leppink’s play, which moves through time and how women’s rights grew thanks to the efforts of women like Sara Wesker. Despite Chopped Liver and Unions being set in the 20s and 30s, it feels contemporary with regard to workers continuing to agitate for better deals, and to women who still push for their rights in a world that remains skewed towards men.
Walker’s performance is excellent throughout, a kind of weary steel you can trace from the idealistic young woman to her jaded middle-age. Romance touched her life in the person of fellow trade-unionist Michael Mindel, but that was cruelly taken away when he married someone more suitable (and presumably, less difficult).
The play takes us from the Rego Clothiers strike in 1928, to the formation of the United Clothing Workers’ Trade Union (UCWTU), through to the Battle of Cable Street against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt Fascists in 1936. Sara Wesker often muses on how she will be remembered and how history will place her against her male counterparts.
It’s a play that highlights the melting pot of immigrants that made up the East End, with a large proportion of Jewish families whose womenfolk worked in the garment trade. The strong support network around the circle of life (“as old Mr Hoffman was taken out, a baby was born three doors down”).
It took a ‘bloody difficult woman’ like Wesker to push back against the idea that women were inferior, quiet, and compliant, taking inspiration from the matchgirls at Bryant and May in 1888, who spoke out against the dangerous use of white phosphorus that caused disfigurement and even death.
Chopped Liver and Unions, with its hanging banners and video screen displaying archive photographs, is a well-researched hour that makes you want to know more about the people discussed, and to reflect on the parallels where immigration is demonised, and difference is attacked.
You can find out more about Sara Wesker here and Hackney’s garment trade here. You can also read my interview with Lottie Walker about Chopped Liver and Unions from the Brighton Fringe in 2023.
Four stars for this one.
Chopped Liver and Unions, directed by Laura Killen, has its last show at Theatre at the Tabard on 24 Mar, then plays at Wingfield Barns in Suffolk on 18 Apr, and at The Corn Hall in Norfolk at 2 Jul 2026.
Photo credit: Carol Rosegg