My favourite play: Elliot Levey

It was as if it was written for her: the part of the archetypal matriarch who was entirely human. She has a final, pleading aria, screaming in anger and weeping in pain with the mantra: “If you don’t care, you’ll die.” Remembering it, I have goose pimples. In anyone else’s hands, it could be a nightmare but Sam gave Sarah a singing subtext with all the notes and grace notes. Magical.

Analysis – David Benedict

Set in 1936, 1946 and 1956, from the East End’s Cable Street anti-fascist demonstrations to the collapse of communism, Arnold Wesker’s argumentative 1958 Royal Court play Chicken Soup with Barley is an intense drama of a Jewish family intertwining the personal and the avowedly political, an eye-opening mix at the time. It was to Dominic Cooke and his cast’s credit that the symbiosis again charged up Royal Court audiences in 2011.

The more fractured and embattled the socialism grows, the fiercer and more eloquent Wesker makes the arguments. There’s not a sentimental second since the ideal at stake is nothing less than hope. Hawk-eyed Samantha Spiro kept Sarah’s determination running through the play like a steel rope. Cooke’s masterly production ensured that the centrality of politics to the bread and butter — or chicken soup — of daily life held audiences rapt.

Elliot Levey is in Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from February 8 -March 29; and Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, from April 26-August 2. rsc.org.uk, haroldpintertheatre.co.uk