AWAKE AND SING! To 20 October.
London.
AWAKE AND SING!
by Clifford Odets.
Almeida Theatre To 20 October 2007.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Audio-described 6 Oct 3pm (+Touch Tour 1.30pm).
BSL Signed 3 Oct.
Captioned 9 Oct.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7359 4404.
www.almeida.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 September.
A clarion-call to the power of drama to depict lives and society, in a perfect production.
Clifford Odets’ 1935 play wears its heart on its sleeve, a heart so massive the sleeve struggles to support it. But it does, thanks to the careful structuring of this story which sees a poor Jewish family emotionally fissure from an opening where they’re together at a meal and the tensions seem everyday and comic.
Family matriarch Bessie’s determination to keep up bourgeois respectability impacts on the lives and loves of young Ralph and Hennie. Loveless marriage and frustrated love are the jetsam of family respectability, and Odets ends on a mixed note, with both a bid for freedom and, in Michael Attenborough’s exemplary Almeida production, Ralph standing alone, puzzled, in the home that’s seen tremendous bustle.
Around him America is deepening into the Depression, with mention of evictions in surrounding streets. Odets’ hopeful title (he began the play three years earlier as the more downbeat I Got the Blues) might well be uncertain in practice if clarion-bright in aspiration.
Awake was premiered by the Group Theatre, a thirties American attempt at a theatrical ensemble which foundered – despite this play’s insistence that human life can’t be printed on a dollar-bill – when Hollywood’s fistfuls of dollars came cherry-picking its talent, Odets included.
Thankfully, this revival keeps to the Group spirit. Stockard Channing’s Bessie doesn’t become centre of attention, reducing the play to another awful/awesome mother-figure piece. If anything, this strengthens Bessie’s force; she’s fighting from the core of her existence, with the best of motives. Such conviction-fuelled energy doesn’t need to swagger or shout.
Around, there’s weakness. John Rogan gives Jacob bright-eyed verbal zeal, but he’s compromised in his actions when not retreating to his collection of Caruso 78s. And Paul Jesson’s Myron is transparently ineffectual, getting by on his cheery manner.
Odets is honest enough to make his chief capitalist sympathetic; Nigel Lindsay’s outstanding Moe, watchful, protesting, impassioned, makes this outsider a core member of the family drama.
As in his recent revival of Big White Fog, Theodore Ward’s 1930s Black American drama, Attenborough proves that drama that might be naïve by modern criteria can still speak loud and clear.
Ralph Berger: Ben Turner.
Myron Berger: Paul Jesson.
Hennie Berger: Jodie Whittaker.
Jacob: John Rogan.
Bessie Berger: Stockaard Channing.
Schlosser: Kieron Jecchinis.
Moe Axelrod: Nigel Lindsay.
Uncle Morty: Trevor Cooper.
Sam Feinschreiber: John Lloyd Fillingham.
Director: Michael Attenborough.
Designer: Tim Shortall.
Lighting: Paul Pyant.
Sound: John Leonard.
Dialect coaches: Penny Dyer, Jan Haydn Rowles.
Fight director: Terry King.
Assistant director: Meriel Baistow-Clare.
Sponsors: Coutts, American Airlines.
2007-09-09 12:37:54