Here in America at the Orange Tree Theatre – review

A play about the relationship between the playwright Arthur Miller and the director Elias Kazan is an appealing prospect. The two men made some of the most enduring art to emerge from America in the first half of the 20th century, from Death of a Salesman and The Crucible from the pen of Miller to Kazan’s direction of films such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront.

Both men were the sons of immigrants, whose fathers went bankrupt in the turmoil of the Great Depression. Both turned to communism as an answer to the failures of capitalism, though Miller never joined the party. They fell out when Kazan decided to name names to Senator Joseph McCartney and his House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), obsessed with rooting out communism from American society – and Miller refused to do so.

Kazan’s reputation never entirely recovered from his decision; Miller’s has been through some vicissitudes since, mainly because of his treatment of his second wife, one Marilyn Monroe, though his themes of guilt, betrayal and the flaws in the American dream still resonate.

All of this is present and correct in David Edgar’s Here in America, set mainly in 1952 when Kazan gave his testimony. Yet for all its intrinsic interest, not to mention the subtle parallels with today when what it is to be American is once more under the microscope, it stubbornly fails to spring to dramatic life. It feels like a history lesson without too much purpose behind it.

Edgar is such a good writer that some scenes still spark. When Kazan – here known by the nickname Gadg (an agonised Shaun Evans) is learning how to play Scrabble with his rabidly anti-Communist wife Molly (known as Day and played with febrile intensity by Faye Castelow) and Miller (Michael Aloni) strolls in to add a double word score, there’s a sense of lives lived that is often missing elsewhere.

But the arrival of Marilyn, under the alias of Miss Bauer (a breathy Jasmine Blackborrow), to spout Actors’ Studio theories and semi-narrate the action is a complication too far and the tone in general veers broadly from naturalistic to stylised without ever generating a head of argumentative steam.

James Dacre’s direction is elegant enough, but the actors seem to be concentrating on accents more than character, and the arguments between them are often circular. There’s not enough jeopardy to make us truly care. The unfortunate echoes of James Graham’s much more vital Best of Enemies (about the debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley) are a reminder of just how engrossing dramatised history can be – and how little light this particular recreation is casting.

It all feels like a missed opportunity, a curiosity rather than a drama. It’s nice to have Edgar back on British stages where he has contributed so much – but it’s to be hoped that The New Real, another new Edgar play which opens at the RSC in October, has rather more heft than this one.