Awake and Sing

Synopsis

Clifford Odets' neglected Chekhovian masterpiece is as robust, emotional and gritty as the Great Depression itself. Crowded together in a cramped Bronx brownstone tenement and laid low by the Depression, this moving drama of a dysfunctional Jewish family pulses with intense vitality and hard-hitting realism, as they struggle for survival in the midst of poverty and hypocrisy, and grasp for dreams in a blunt, mean, angry world.

Our Review:

7 September 2007

The last time Stockard Channing appeared in a full season on the London stage, she was a wealthy Manhattan liberal married to an art dealer on Fifth Avenue in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. She returns as the lower middle-class, mean-minded Bessie Berger in Clifford Odets’ wonderful 1935 comedy of despair and resolution in the Bronx.

In between, of course, Channing has become a household face as the President’s wife in TV’s The West Wing, but it is major treat in Michael Attenborough’s beautifully cast and joyously well acted ensemble production of Awake and Sing! to appreciate once more her sly, natural delivery of knock-out lines and her feline, graceful stage presence and command.

The Almeida is awash with lines of clothes to convey the height and claustrophobia of the Berger tenement apartment, designed by Tim Shortall, where Bessie is scheming to keep her son, Ralph (Ben Turner) from seeing an “unsuitable” gi...

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Latest User Review

rds - 19 October 2007:

How can they get it so wrong? Michael Attenborough, whom I have great respect for, must carry the can. Stockard Channing, as Bessie Berger, is totally miscast as is Paul Jesson playing her husband Myron. They acted without any true depth of feeling. This production has no heart or depth of understanding of character and by understanding I guess I really mean truth. Possibly for a British audience it is too NY Jewish anyway - maybe not? But it certainly missed the mark by a mile. A real dissappointment when I know the Almeida can get it so right. 2 otta 10 - must try harder!...

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