I finally realise the identity of one of the writers at whom Garrison Keillor was tipping his hat when he created Lake Wobegon, the place that “decades cannot improve”. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town has a similar cracker-barrel wisdom as Keillor’s and a similar quizzical narrator. An attempt to show “the life of a village against the life of the stars”, it is remarkable in moving from tininess to transcendence, famous for using a stage with no set or props. It is said to have been performed every night somewhere in America since it was first produced in 1938.
Now David Cromer’s production, which has played over America to great success, has been recreated with a plausible mixture of UK accents. Its first act chronicles everyday movements around the town streets – the milkman with his horse, the schoolgirl who wants to shine with her talk on the Louisiana Purchase, the organist who is the talk of the place for being drunk. Its second enacts, to the humming of the town choir, a wedding. The last act is set in a graveyard where a large proportion of the villagers, alive in the first two instalments and now under the earth, commune in wiseacre fashion about the importance of living in the moment.
It’s hard to imagine this better done. It is simple and steady, neither too lyrical nor too effusive. But the play is not much more than a kindly sketch of the American dream, which at moments winks at It’s a Wonderful Life. The characters are approximate, not really individual. Wilder said his aim was to put the audience in the position of looking down a telescope at the action, which gradually recedes as the play progresses. In fact, it is from the beginning seen from a distance, not from within, a collection of homely habits rather than individual feelings.
