Thornton Wilder’s 1938 hymn to small-town American life is endlessly adaptable. Its last London revival saw the Almeida transformed into a village hall. Ellen McDougall’s production is necessarily on a different scale. The stage is full of banked seating mirroring the auditorium, the open-air setting heightens the references to the sun and the stars, and Wilder’s narrator, the Stage Manager, is no pipe-smoking oldster but a young woman, in the shape of Laura Rogers.
Yet the play still works, not least because McDougall respects Wilder’s insistence on “a continual dryness of tone”. That’s important because Wilder’s evocation of New Hampshire life in the early 1900s can easily lapse into sentimental folksiness (it seems unlikely that, even in this deeply respectable Protestant community, the only unhappy character would be a drunken choirmaster). There is even a touch of vanity in Wilder’s suggestion that 1,000 years from now his play, if suitably preserved, will reveal “a few simple facts” about American life.
But Wilder’s text is tougher than it first seems. From the start, it stresses our mortality and is filled with memories of the civil war. At the same time it reminds us of our failure to appreciate life and argues – in a point that is ever more poignant today – that “we don’t have time to look at one another”.
McDougall underlines the play’s contemporary relevance through the diversity of her 19-strong cast. Rogers is a frank and charming narrator and visibly relishes her chance to play other characters such as a virtuoso of the soda fountain. Francesca Henry also lends Emily Webb, who we see growing up from her school days, a shining intelligence and premarital panic as she suddenly says, of her impending groom: “I hate him.” There is strong support from Tom Edden as her anxious newspaper editor father, Thusitha Jayasundera as her loving mother and from Karl Collins and Pandora Colin as the parents of her future husband.
“Literature,” Wilder said, “is the orchestration of platitudes,” and although his play is not without its homely truisms, McDougall’s production reminds us of their enduring emotional force.
At Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London, until 8 June.
