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Wake up to Odets
AWAKE AND SING
Almeida Theatre
AS a young reporter covering a postal strike a union organiser said something that was pure gold: the Post Office negotiator was, he said, “a man of 40 faces, none too pretty and all deceptive”. Before I could copy it down he admitted he’d borrowed the line from the Hollywood classic, The Sweet Smell of Success. I was grateful for my first encounter with Clifford Odets, one of the finest writers on Broadway or in Hollywood.
Odets revolutionised American theatre, swept Broadway with trailblazing play after play, including Waiting for Lefty, and scripted Hollywood classics like The Sweet Smell of Success (Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis), and A Wonderful Life (James Stewart).
He had a passion for the poetry “inherent on the chaff of the street”. When Americans were starving under the Great Depression and the Soviet Union was a beacon for change, Odets’ heart beat on the left. His themes, the cruelty of big business, the waste of war and redemption of the little guy through the fight for social justice, were music to the ears of millions.
By the time Awake and Sing was produced, Waiting for Lefty had already made Odets an overnight sensation.
But it was on Awake and Sing, his first play at just 26, but which was on the shelf for a few years, that he cut his teeth on blue-collar political theatre.
About life for ordinary people grubbing to get by and burying their dreams, it’s told through the goldfish bowl of a tenement in which three generations of a Jewish family, the Bergers, live cheek-by-jowl.
Director Michael Attenborough’s excellent production makes full use of the theatre space and has a terrific cast led by the Emmy-winning Stockard Channing as the matriarch Bessie Berger.
John Rogan is heartbreaking as Jacob the grandfather – the voice of Odets’ political conscience – and Nigel Lindsay is enthralling as Moe Axelrod, the hard-boiled cynic Odets painted from his own father.
The cast fire the lines brilliantly, but it’s Odets who loads them.
“Here without a dollar, you don’t look the world in the eye,” says Bessie; a broken-hearted Ralph warns the world must change, “so life isn’t printed on dollar bills”; Moe kisses the young Hennie Berger (Jodie Whittaker) with lines straight from the New York streets where Odets was at home: “Say the word and I’ll tango on a dime”; “Don’t give me ice when your heart’s on fire”.
When Odets died in 1963, aged just 57, he’d been swamped by Hollywood, endured the death of his second wife and lone parenthood, and been mercilessly hounded by the McCarthy anti-Communist witch-hunt. But his writing still breathes fire and his ideas are as sharp as ever. Arthur Miller, who lionised Odets, was certain that, “In Marxism was magic, and Odets had the wand”.
Until October 20
020 7359 4404. |
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