THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By David Edgar
Orange Tree Theatre, 1 Clarence Street, Richmond, TW9 2SA, until October 19, 2024
In April 1952 playwright Arthur Miller drove up to Connecticut for lunch with his old friend and frequent collaborator the director Elia Kazan and his wife Mary. It was not an easy encounter as Kazan revealed to him that he had been subpoenaed, again, by the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and he had decided to name names.
Kazan eventually named half a dozen of those who worked with him in the famous Group Theatre in the 1930s and were card carrying members of the Communist Party. He didn't name Miller because while the latter had attended events he was not a member of the party. In many ways it was the defining event in both their lives. Miller later got a suspended jail term for refusing to name names when he testified.
In this world premiere, the distinguished British playwright David Edgar (Pentecost, Playing with Fire) uses this meeting as a springboard to explore the knotty issue of how far we are responsible for our own actions to others as well as for our own self-respect. Kazan's action saved his career but marked him out, for many, as a traitor from then on. This still wasn't forgotten nearly 50 years later, when in 1999, he was awarded an Honorary Oscar. The Hollywood audience was split in two, with many performatively sitting on their hands rather than giving the honoree a standing ovation.
Kazan's film credits are now legendary (On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden etc.) but he also triumphed on Broadway, staging the premieres of all of Miller and indeed Tennessee William's best plays. This play highlights the similarities of the men's emigrant backgrounds, one Polish-Jewish, one Greek, but both with parents who were winning at the American Dream until they were destroyed by it in the Wall Street Crash.
Edgar's play flashes between the heightened tensions of 1952 and later in 1963, when Miller finally relented and asked Kazan to direct, perhaps his most personal play, After the Fall at Lincoln Center. Kazan's lover Barbara Loden played Miss Bauer, the character based on Marilyn Monroe. Monroe had been involved with both men and was married to Miller for a while.
Edgar's play is an eloquent, insightful exploration of the relationship between these two figures. Shaun Evans (from ITV's Endeavour) is excellent as Kazan and Michael Aloni has an uncanny resemblance to the young, dashing Miller. Faye Castelow brings great vigor to the role of Kazan's wife, who challenges Miller's right to be so sanctimonious. Jasmine Blackborow doubles as a very convincing Miss Bauer/Monroe and as Barbara Loden.
At 80 minutes with no interval this big tale feels truncated, and it doesn't surmount the key challenge with historic pieces, resorting to clunky exposition where characters explain to each other who they are and what's going on. It cries out to be an extended TV miniseries.
Despite this, director James Dacre lends it momentum in the Orange Tree's intimate space aided by Simon Kenny's clever designs. Rather than staging the hearings, the couples are seen rehearsing their words to each other in bed the night before. Monroe's character is mostly a specter troubling the two men and Blackborow deftly captures Marilyn's keen intelligence.
The play does fall into a trap though of being about ideas rather than action and the crucial climax is approached so obliquely that when it arrives it lacks dramatic punch. Miller never seems angry enough at this great betrayal and Edgar perhaps plays too much into the hero worship of Miller, who some now treat as if he's on Mount Rushmore. Interestingly, Evans characterization of Kazan is so warm it makes us consider more his argument that he didn't feel he had to suffer for an ideology in which he no longer believed.
That period where the failed faith of Communism was replaced by a hysterical Americanism is still pertinent today and you don't need to look too far to find demagogues. Edgar's play is a chastening reminder that these troubles are never resolved.
