Review Incident At Vichy

A lesser-known Arthur Miller play where the playwright tackled the fate of the Jews during the Second War receives a fine production, says Francis Beckett. 

Incident at Vichy 
by Arthur Miller  

Miller's Jewish Question
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com 

Arthur Miller may be the greatest English-language radical playwright of the twentieth century. His 1949 play Death of a Salesman is the most accurate and effective indictment of American capitalism I know, and Miller himself was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Yet, on his own admission, he was for years tone deaf to the Second World War persecution of the Jews. In Italy in 1947 he glimpsed a group of Holocaust survivors on their way to Israel but could make nothing of it.  “I was talking to burnt wood, charred iron, bone with eyes” he wrote later.

Yet he was a Jew.  (He told a story about taking his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, to meet his parents, who offered her matzo balls to eat on three consecutive days.  “Isn’t there any other part of the matzo you can eat?” she asked.)

In the 1960s Miller at last began to see the Holocaust clearly, and to relate it to all the things he had fought against all his life.  This short play is one of the results.

It takes place after the fall of France in 1940, when the northern part of the country was under  the direct rule of Nazi Germany. The French government under Marshal Pétain was allowed nominally to rule the rest from the spa town of Vichy. However Pétain’s authority was very limited, and relied on his willingness to do the victors’ bidding in most matters, including implementing Nazi race laws.

So some strangely assorted men are gathered in a police station in Vichy, most of them having been picked up on suspicion of being Jews, and they will have their noses measured, and their penises  inspected to see if they have been circumcised.

Three of them are not Jews. One man has been picked up as a communist, another is a gypsy, and a third an Austrian prince who, we are encouraged to believe, is probably a homosexual.

It’s a very strong and effective play even at that level, the level of telling a gripping story.  These men are not saints. They are fully-drawn human beings, with human weaknesses, and as likely to show solidarity in the face of dreadful danger as you and I.

But it’s the politics of the play, and its contemporary relevance, which most interest director Phil Willmott, who says he was “amazed to discover that the play had always been presented realistically.”  So for the first time, he says, it is now performed without a naturalistic set.

I don’t buy Willmott’s view that Miller didn’t intend us to believe in the play as a representation of what might easily have happened in Vichy France in 1940 or 1941.  But it doesn’t matter.

The set designed by Georgia de Grey is quite naturalistic enough to convince in a fringe venue like the King's Head, which doesn't need all the naturalistic bells and whistles a West End audience demands.

Willmott moves his cast around economically and with calm assurance. That’s to say, he doesn’t insult the audience by supposing constant movement is needed to keep our attention. If, for instance, the dialogue demands the actors sit still for minutes on end, that’s what they do.

Standouts for me in a strong cast were Laurence Boothman as a terrified and neurotic painter; Edward Killingback as the Austrian prince; Brendan O’Rourke as a communist electrician; PK. Taylor as an actor; and Timothy Harker as the Nazi doctor, saying dreadful things in a calm and bureaucratic tone.

But all twelve actors were excellent; there isn’t a weak link. And just pause at that number for a moment. Twelve actors in the Kings Head, which would be crammed to the gunwales if 118 people turned up, and the venue insists they pay every actor, at a special rate agreed with the actors’ trade union Equity.

Paying actors a regular wage is almost unheard-of on the fringe, and the King's Head is much to be congratulated on doing it. Before the performance on press night artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher made a charming and amusing plea for funds and I saw quite a few banknotes being thrown into the buckets his staff held out as we left.

Good as that was to see, it still seems wrong that we now live in a society where you can only pay actors for a fine production like this by rattling a charity box.

Still, you’ll help them by going to see Incident at Vichy; and you’ll see a fine production of a really interesting play, for which a green light is the least I could possibly award.

Review Incident At Vichy

Incident At Vichy
by Arthur Miller

No Exit
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

"Hope", wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers-/That perches in the soul-/And sings the tune without the words -/And never stops - at all - ...".

Is this what was in playwright Arthur Miller's mind when the mute Old Jew (Jeremy Gagan), called to the front of the queue and facing extinction in 1942,  stands up and feathers scatter around the room from the homely pillow cover he has been clutching?

For it struck us that Miller's 1964 play Incident At Vichy is about human hope in the face of almost certain disaster. Set in "unoccupied" France, French police have rounded up eight men and a boy and are handing them to the Nazi regime.

Almost all of them turn out to be Jews on false papers. They clutch at whatever slim chances present themselves. They also deceive and lie to themselves and others all for a sliver of hope that they will survive.

The artist Lebeau (Lawrence Boothman), for example, tries to persuade himself and others that he has some agency, that it was not him, but a parent clinging to material goods who stopped him from escaping in 1939 on a US visa.

But even this seemingly simple situation has complex layers. He admits to feeling guilt, but it may be misplaced.

What is unsaid is that the elderly had far less chance of obtaining a visa and being allowed into other countries than the younger generation. Their children often had to make the anguished decision whether to stay behind with them or leave the country. He may be lying to preserve his own sanity in the face of certain death.

For it seems to us Incident At Vichy is very much a psychological play, the very human trait of human beings believing their beliefs and actions mean something and can directly lead to survival - and that their survival is not a random blip but says something about them. Transforming them from human beings buffetted by fortune that they cannot control into symbols.

Miller himself described the origins of the story behind Incident At Vichy in the vaguest of terms but named the person who relayed it to him. It's a story about "a friend of a friend" who is the recipient of an extraordinary selfless act by a fellow human being.

An incident  every Jew, every human being, must hope would happen to them if he or she was in such a position. A story everyone would want to hear even if it were a one-off or an urban legend (Losey's later movie Monsieur Klein is another kind of riff on the theme).

Although it was first staged at the Lincoln Center, this play feels very much as if it were written for  radio or a TV play (Twelve Angry Men may be a different subject with a different outcome but it's also a play similarly centring on persuasion and realisation).

Phil Willmott directs a production of great clarity with outstanding performances from Edward Killingback as dilettante gentile Austrian nobleman Von Berg and PK Taylor as an actor who tries to convince himself that confidence in his own performance both as actor and human being will win through.

We did wonder whether a production with an even more diverse cast would open up the universal themes and knotty problems contained in this play more.

The script at times feels slightly clunky as the issues are laid out - this is very much an issue-led play. Nevertheless the issues lead to no simple conclusions where devastating realities set against the nature of human relationships and politics form a web catching every class and type.

While Leduc, the psychiatrist (Gethin Alderman) seems the clearest sighted, he also has his own blind spots. At one point he blames his wife for his situation and at another time views others, not himself, as being as conditioned as Pavlov's dog.

Incident At Vichy is a play set in the year the USA entered the Second World War but also examines issues of power and responsibility which remain live in our times. Both Von Berg's belief in old pre-war feudal structures where he could proffer personal protection and Leduc's belief in education and self-awareness prove illusory. 

It's an amber/green light for a timely production with a discussion of issues always with us including industrial success achieved by using free labour and slavery rather than on its own business merits.

Review The Crucible

The Crucible
by Arthur Miller

No Turning Back
 http://www.queens-theatre.co.uk/

It's surely not too much to call Arthur Miller's The Crucible a collective scream of agony paralleling 17th century witchtrials in Salem with the stranglehold of Cold War 1950s' expediency, tightening its grip on individual lives and families.

 "Excellency, there are orphans wandering from house to house ...", says Reverend Hale (Coronation Street's Charlie Condou) as he entreats the presiding judge Danforth (Jonathan Tafler) to understand the repercussions of the court's politically- and property motivated condemnations imprisoning and executing parents.

When the play was written, many had been swept along by the ideals of communism and thrown their lot in with the cause of the Soviets, who eventually became allies with the US, during the Second World War.

The first performance of the play in 1953 pre-empted the execution in the electric chair of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for Soviet espionage.  They left two small boys with relatives scared off beyond distraction until they were finally adopted outside the family.

The Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch, at the end of the District Line, has now mounted a touring co-production of The Crucible with Selladoor Productions and Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg,

Directed by Douglas Rintoul, this is a production with an intriguing design concept by Anouk Schiltz giving a powerful resonance to a play the relevance of which since it was written  never ceases to diminish when lies have irreversible consequences.

The owners of farmsteads in Salem in the state of Massachussetts find themselves at the centre of accusations of witchcraft and a pact with the devil when a group of young girls led by a calculating Abigail (Lucy Keirl) seek to extricate themselves from fault. As does, for different reasons, the local minister Reverend Parris (Cornelius Clarke). 

The self-sufficient Proctors have had their ups and downs. Yet John (Eoin Slattery) and Elizabeth (Call The Midwife's Victoria Yeates) show a united front in dismissing the allegations.

Especially as they know well two of the girls involved, their past maidservant Abigail and their present wench, Mary (Augustina Seymour). Especially as John appears long ago to have formed his own cartel with fellow farmers Francis Nurse (Paul Beech) and litigious Giles Corey (David Delve).

Instead, the Proctors discover they have unwittingly overreached themselves. Mary has been promoted to court official and she begins a  devastating assertion and instrusion of the court and political administration's authority into the Proctor family's lives and those around them.   

Miller himself could be shrewd at self-promotion and not a little disingenous. However what makes The Crucible a great play is that, while thinly veiled, it is searingly honest about the fallibility, as well as the strength of individuals cornered by a politicized and partisan legal set up.

This push-me-pull-you is crystallized in this production's precise design which speaks to the audience without using words. The over-confidence of John and Elizabeth Procter  at the start of the play  quickly finds itself besieged from all sides and erupts in rows between husband and wife as the pressure increases.

The costuming ranging from muted browns, black and white of the 17th century and the pastels of the 1950s all serve to give a double time aspect to domestic circumstances cracking under the weight of communal accusations and legal harassment.

The tall trees and interior dark brown wood panelling of the first act give way to the skeletal theatrical flaps in the second. These, alongside lighting by Chris Davy and an ingenious TV-style rumbling soundscape by Adrienne Quartly, cleverly and viscerally conjure up an entertainment industry caught up in processes over which it has no jurisdiction or influence.

The expansive performance of Tafler as the ruthlessly wily Judge Danforth, with his over-zealous sidekick Judge Hathorne (Patrick McKenzie), crosses the years and gives added heft to the layered effect.

So there is plenty of meat in this stylish production of The Crucible. At the start of the tour, it is already a gripping production, albeit some of the pacing needs to bed in. However Rintoul's and the ensemble's attention to detail extends to some beautifully-observed smaller roles: Diana Yekinni's pleading yet indignant servant Tituba; David Kirkbridge's wary clerk of the court, Carl Patrick's bespectacled grey-suited predatory neighbouring farmer Thomas Putnam.

It's a production that can have no bigger compliment than the spontaneous collective gasp from the audience, who clearly had never seen the play before, as John Proctor visibly seals his fate. Who can argue with that? It's a green light from TLT and her motorised cohort in devilish reviewing. 

Review No Villain

No Villain
by Arthur Miller

Look Back In Anger
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/no-villain/trafalgar-studios/

The year 1936 was an unhappy time for many Jewish immigrant families in America. Yet at the same the children of immigrants, albeit often cash-strapped, were receiving the kind of education their parents and grandparents could only dream of growing up in European and Russian towns and villages.

Children like Arthur Miller who took up playwriting and penned No Villain only as a means to receive an Avery Hopwood award to finance his journalism major college fees.

He was given the award, swapped to playwritng and the rest of course is history.  But in a feat of literary excavation, nearly 80 years later, director Sean Turner has unearthed this remarkably mature and complex previously unstaged piece by the 20 year Miller  in the University of Michigan archive.

Following an initial sell-out run at the Old Red Lion, No Villain has now transferred to the Trafalgar Studios. Abe Simon (David Bromley) has risen out of piece work garment making in New York to become the owner of his own furriers' workshop.

Yet to expand, like many others in the manufacturers' trust of which he is a part, he has taken out bank loans,  working with the tightest possible margins.

The line between prosperity and defaulting is worryingly fine and when rag trade shipping clerks who transport the coats to retailers go on strike, the situation is desperate.

So much so, Abe is even willing to taken advantage of workplace workhorse Frank (Michael Lyle) who ends up bloodstained after attempting to smuggle boxes of coats through the picket lines.

At home, Abe lives with wife Esther (Nesba Crenshaw), his daughter Maxine (Helen Coles), son Ben (George Turvey) and his elderly father-in-law (Kenneth Jay), the bridge between the old world and new world of business.

In the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer the protagonist in dispute with his father cuts himself off. There is no such rift in No Villain between Abe and his synagogue-going father-in-law.

But when elder son Ben, who has dedicated himself to the firm, eventually breaks away from an arranged marriage and the traditional father-in-law, son-in-law financial set up, he tears the fabric of his family apart and more

This is a sly, certainly not face-value play. With the benefit of hindsight, some may be  quick to assume it is a juvenile work blocking an examination of it as a stand-alone play with its own mix of ingenuity and irony.

Brother Arnold (Alex Forsythe) returns home for college, head stuffed full of theories and tries to shoehorn  his mother's legitimate fears into the latest psychiatric theory.

The shipping clerks on strike could just as well be commandeered to destroy the small-time businessmen on loans (something charted in Jerome Weidmann's almost contemporary 1937 novel I Can Get It For You Wholesale).

By 1936 US moneylenders were calling in their loans from Europe and Russia. Successful immigrant businessmen (they were mostly men!), like Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, could no longer send back money to fund their home towns and regions, including the pension funds.

Nearly every Jewish immigrant family, many of whom had lost everything during the Wall Street Crash, were receiving letters from  relatives scapegoated in the lands of their birth, begging for a sponsor and a shipping line ticket to allow them to emigrate.

No Villain with its disclaimer of a title in an America and Europe filled wth corporate states and inter-nation loans is an important, astonishingly mature work, albeit with its echoes of Clifford Odets's Waiting For Lefty,  for a 20 year old journalist major.

With the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and, above all, the betrayal of the show trials and purges, often targetting Jews, in Russia, Miller heeded the calls of a desperate people seeking escape while facing  the reality of  life in America.

Of course the Miller family's experience including losses in the Wall Street Crash informs this play, even taking his own mother's surname for the fictional grandfather's surname.

Yet it feels reductive and blinkering to over-identify the play with autobiography. There is a playwright's hand behind the artful concertina of family and world events.

If the call to action at the end feels rushed and hollow after a funeral and foreclosure, that's probably because, with world  events as they were, it was meant to be - political affiliation the best option but, many knew by then, not a solution.

This is not a perfect production, sometimes suffering from over-gesturing and a caricatural feel,  but it is a clear one with an atmospheric hallway and living room  set by Max Dorey transforming cleverly and simply into the factory floor

It also benefits from  an outstanding performance by George Turvey as Ben. An amber/green light for an uneven but crisp production of a play which should now become a staple of theatrical programming.

Review A View From The Bridge

A View From The Bridge

By Arthur Miller

Young Vic SE1 

Family Guy

Yes, we’re back. Do we have to make excuses for our absence? We think not  – after all, you’re reading this blog and hopefully hooked like a fish on bait or a side of meat hung in an abattoir. ;) Nor, unlike some others, will our narration misdirect you. This is a wonderful production of Arthur Miller’s 1950s’ fable, A View From The Bridge, with not a dud coin amongst the performances. 

At the same time, TLT and her well-oiled and speedy-wheeled chariot have to admit, although they would always race to a Miller play, they have always found his writing a little  – well - schematic. Yet in their humble opinion, the rendering of director Ivo van Hove, along with Jan Versweyveld's design and lighting, of A View From The Bridge turns this into a strength.

At the height of an economic crisis, the arrival of a wife's cousins as illegal immigrants from the old country disturbs the tenuous status quo of the Italian-Brooklyn Carbone family: Eddie (Mark Strong), good natured patriarch eventually descending into despairing self-defeating revenge, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), torn between her family and her isolated husband, and Eddie’s young niece Catherine (Phoebe Fox), chafing at the bit to experience life. 

A simple stretched length-wise stage  –  without props, bare-bones black and white with long box benches rising on every side can change within a few words into a dockyard pier, a Brooklyn home, an attorney’s office, a boxing ring or maybe even a court house foyer, a political cell,  an international conference room - or a man trap.

Cousin Marco (Emun Elliott) sets out methodically to earn precious dollars to send back to his own wife and children in Italy but, to the horror of her Uncle Eddie, Catherine is charmed by ambitious Rodolpho (Luke Norris) with his matinee-idol looks. 

Yet there is an explicit indication this play means more than the one man’s tragic (alleged) incestuous, jealous obsession. The two Italians speak perfect American from the start, although TLT and her motorised compatriot willingly took part in the audience's suspension of disbelief, while glimpsing the possibility of parallel stories.

Alongside a masterly use of sound (Tom Gibbons), lighting and choreography, the staging reminded TLT of a previous Young Vic production – the circular heartbeat simplicity of  The Brothers Size. And like Richard Eyre’s recent absorbing Ghosts, this production gathers momentum by eschewing an interval (back to its one-act verse roots) and the two hours fly past. 

The twists and turns of this piece’s tragic trajectory and insistent lawyer-narrator demand attention and open up the possibility of an audience analysing the action and words for itself rather than accepting the say-so about any character from others.

Naturally the pacing is superb with seemingly sympathetic but seedy lawyer Alfieri (Michael Gould) and the increasingly tortured and trapped longshoreman Eddie Carbone juggling the action until all hell breaks out and events spiral out of their control.

A minor quibble alone -  for us, using coloured lighting in the denouement might have made a more visceral impact than a final prolonged clinch in an actual liquid tide, although (we think) we can understand the reasoning for this. 

Anyway this may seem rather churlish as, for us too, the tragic human consequences acted on an anosmic (look it up! :) ) set of otherwise almost digital cleanliness gives the play recognizable currency in our globalized electronic age of video games and drones. A great ensemble effort to which TLT and her rootin’, tootin’ buggy give an unadulterated green light!