Miller’s account of financial ruin is a timely warning from history
The American Clock Old Vic, London SE1 ★★★★
Asizeable thesis could be written on the way the crash of 2007 and 2008 has spilt out across our stages, from David Hare’s The Power of Yes at the National in 2009 up to The Lehman Trilogy there last year. Chiefly, it would have to take in how the Americans have bailed us out in making sense of it all. Perhaps the biggest debt needs to be paid to Arthur Miller, who’s being revived so much at the moment that he almost qualifies for some “playwright of the year” award.
Tripping on the heels of The Price, which registers the long-lasting divisive impact the Depression had on one (very archetypal) pair of brothers, comes a work that’s far less conventionally structured but no less fixated with the cost – in human terms – of the momentous unravelling of American capitalism in 1929. The American Clock (the first part of a mini-miller season at the Old Vic, to be completed by All My Sons) rewinds to the hour of Wall Street’s doom.
At the start, we’re treated to scenes of serenity, complacency, optimism. A businessman who’s worried about where things are going – Clarke Peters’s wistful and wise Arthur Robertson – advises those he encounters it’s time to sell stock – but the shoeshine man laughs off his warnings and his doctor even tries to diagnose his malady: “You’ve always had a fear of approaching disaster.”
Then we’re whisked to a New Year speakeasy where the mood is jittery – giants of industry stare into the abyss while pampered innocents dimly sense the ground shaking beneath them: “I sat down in the dining car, absolutely famished, and realised I had only 40 cents!” chirps the sister of a broker who – as yet unbeknown to her – has jumped from a tall building. An entire system – founded on quasi religious belief – has fallen off the cliff-edge.
First performed in 1980, a flop on Broadway, the piece serves as a warning from history and it draws from Hard Times (1970), an anthology of first-hand accounts of the period, collated by Studs Terkel. But there’s nothing dusty or dutifully clockwatching about it. The book is a montage of memories, and Miller took a leaf out of its non-episodic nature to jump and leap about. He billed the show as a “vaudeville”, likened it to a mural – and that gives him a means of pushing out across the nation, giving voice to a chorus of bewilderment, as the banks fail, the bailiffs call, the crops rot, and the air hangs heavy with resentment and revolutionary fervour. Yet swimming amid the tide of acrimony, there’s stoical humour, resilient American optimism and even young romantic love.
In the London premiere, at the National’s Cottesloe in 1986, there was a jazz band and audience on-stage. And this time round, American director Rachel Chavkin goes for broke, splicing the text with song and dance so that often it’s as if we’re in some ballroom of the damned.
Crackling wireless reports and echoes of the roaring Twenties bleed into frenzied, hysterical tap-dancing. We witness those grotesque dance marathons that pushed young couples to breaking-point in the hope of winning a respite from hunger – and sometimes the cast simply stand stock-still, spinning round on a wooden-floored revolve in dumbstruck disbelief. It’s almost numbing in its relentlessness. But who doesn’t, all the same, feel a pang at seeing a desolate father begging a quarter off his grown-up son? Humiliation is the one constant, the great leveller.
It goes on a touch too long, and I wasn’t convinced by the decision to place the audience either side of the action – the play should come at us like a head-on barrage. But a welcome rediscovery, eerily up to-the-moment and serving as an invaluable reminder of how an economic shock can change a country forever? You bet.
Until March 30. Tickets: 0844 871 2118; tickets.telegraph.co.uk