Spurned by the New York critics in 1935, Clifford Odets’ forgotten play gets a rare and excellent performance by final-year students at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It emerges as a remarkable US state-of-the-union play. Odets himself said: “It is too jammed, too crowded”, but it gives a vivid portrait of the shattered dreams and hopes of the Depression years.
Odets focuses on the lost paradise of one particular middle-class family. Leo Gordon is an impractical idealist who is betrayed by his business partner and watches his family fall apart: one son, a former Olympic champion, gets fatally involved with a small-time crook, another son suffers from sleeping sickness, while the daughter of the house is a talented pianist with no chance to perform. But Odets fills the stage with other characters who represent different aspects of the dissolving American dream: shop-floor workers begging for a living wage, a furnace man raging against a world drifting towards war, a Democratic politician indifferent to daily hardship.
Even if the play is packed with too much detail, Odets paints on a big canvas, and ends on a note of hope with Leo’s declaration that “the world is beautiful”. Wyn Jones’s arena-stage production clarifies the complex action and is cleverly designed by Libby Watson to give us glimpses of off-stage life. While it is invidious to pick out individuals from a 20-strong cast, I was much impressed by Finlay Paul and Charlotte Blandford as the senior Gordons, and by Nicholas Armfield, Mhairi Gayer and Joe Bolland among the younger generation. Isn’t this precisely the kind of lost classic the National Theatre should be reviving?
• At Silk Street theatre, London, until 28 March. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
