This is the kind of play they don't write any more: the emotion-packed family drama with strong political resonance. But, thrilling as it is to see Arnold Wesker's 1958 play back on a British stage, I could wish it were somewhere more intimate than Nottingham's cavernous, drum-shaped theatre.
Wesker's great strength is that he allows the politics to emerge through the interstices of domestic life. He shows the Kahn family, dominated by the matriarchal communist Sarah, exuberantly celebrating the defeat of Mosley's fascists in Cable Street in 1936. Ten years later, during the Attlee government, the family is already splintering, with daughter Ada abandoning the urban jungle for rural Norfolk. But the drama comes to a head in 1956, when Ronnie Kahn, distraught by the Soviet invasion of Hungary, returns from Paris to confront his stubbornly idealistic, loyally socialist mother.
Watching the play, I was constantly reminded of O'Casey: like the great Irishman, Wesker is fascinated by the way momentous events expose personal frailties. And in many ways the play's pivotal figure is less Sarah than her husband, Harry: a bookish weakling who constantly evades action and ends up an incontinent invalid. Beautifully played by Simon Schatzberger, he hovers over the play like a stooped, slumped observer. He is also the source of the play's tragedy, in that Ronnie, having lost his mother's political faith, fears he has inherited his father's genetic weakness.
It is a work that hits you in the gut as few modern plays do; and the family's disintegration is perfectly mirrored by the failure of the socialist dream. But Giles Croft's production, owing to the dictates of the space, permits a good deal of demonstrative acting. While Shona Morris, for instance, convinces us that Sarah is a doughty fighter, she is too much the vehement breast-beater and not quite enough the shrugging domestic coper.
Even if overemphasis is a fault, Nitzan Sharron is very good as the authorial figure of Ronnie. And Rachel Edwards doubles effectively as both the disillusioned Ada and a greengrocer's wife who just wants a quiet life with no politics. But that is not possible in a world where Sarah noisily asserts that "politics is living". And the virtue of Wesker's remarkable play is that it reminds us of a time in British life when that was an accepted truth.
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