Clifford Odets's tale of Depression-era hardship feels dated and creaky
Awake and Sing! Almeida Theatre, London N1
I suppose Islington is as good a place for it as any, but Michael Attenborough at the Almeida seems determined to reawaken an urban social conscience among theatregoers by continuing to revive worthy but overlooked American dramas of political struggle. Six months ago it was the plight of black Chicagoans in the interwar years, and now, with Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing!, he returns to Depression-era America, this time through the lives of poor, white New Yorkers.
"Nothing moves me so much as human aspirations blocked," wrote Odets, whose 1935 play presents us with the Bergers, an archetypal Jewish-American family eking out a living in the dismal suburban vistas of the Bronx. Serving out dinner, Bessie Berger (Stockard Channing), sets a mood of bitter resignation as she slops the daily bread on to the family members' plates. Her grown-up children can't afford to leave home; her old, wheelchair-bound father lives with them; and her husband, Myron, is a fool. To make matters worse, she has to survive on donations from her conspicuously rich and successful brother Morty (Trevor Cooper), who lives just around the corner. "Life is like that," she spits. "What's it for?"
As the matriarch, Channing is masterly, her puffy, twisted face barely covering up not only a lost beauty but also a simmering fury at her lot. Meanwhile her clothes, cheap twinsets and fur-trimmed coats, reveal her continuing hope that being smart and proper will one day pay the dividends it should. Her house is tidy, there's always food on the table, her children have been properly brought up. She has fulfilled her side of the bargain, yet the American dream has betrayed her. The window of their living room looks out not on to a glorious view of the future, but down to an airshaft. "You raise them, and what's in it for all your trouble?" asks Bessie, sounding to the modern ear rather like a grimmer version of Beattie, Maureen Lipman's creation for BT. Every so often she takes a break from the tragedy of reality, mobilising benign yet hapless Myron to take her to the flicks.
As if we needed the point hammered home, Attenborough has assembled a company, each of whom offers a different facet of the same story. There is Moe Axelrod, a war veteran with a wooden leg (Nigel Lindsay) who now has a Purple Heart and a state income of $90 a month for his pains. He has the hots for Bessie's fiery daughter, Hennie (Jodie Whittaker), who ends up wedding a man she despises to cover up an illegitimate pregnancy. Add to the mix the youthful disappointment of her brother Ralph (Ben Turner) and the bewildered anxieties of Grandfather Jacob (the marvellously watchable John Rogan), and the cramped set on the Almeida stage seems almost to explode with despair.
"It's all a racket," says Moe and, indeed, it is. You can either dream of marrying a millionaire, as Hennie does, or retreat into the back room and listen to Caruso. Or get cross. The villain of the piece is life itself. That, and the myth that Uncle Sam will always be there for you. This is what is pulling the Bergers apart, but for all Attenborough's subtle directing, it is also what makes this play a bit creaky, as the cradle-to-grave beneficence of Uncle Sam is hardly a concept that gains general recognition these days. We can sympathise with the Berger family, but only from a lofty distance. That is the difference between this play and those of Arthur Miller, which were clearly influenced by Odets's dramatisation of blue-collar American life. Whereas the Miller canon (or, at least, his greatest works within it) examines the tragic gulf between aspiration and truth in us all, Awake and Sing! examines the gulf between human aspiration and the social reality of a particular time. And given that we now all know there is no such thing as society, this play seems as dated as the gleeful, comfortable, all-American family depicted on the front of the programme.
For further info and booking details visit: www.almeida.co.uk
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