Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out

(Yes, I’m playing catch-up. The production closed two weeks ago. Deal with it.)

Meet the Baum family: Moe and Rose, comfortably-off Manhattanites who lose almost everything in the 1929 stock market crash, and their son Lee. Now meet them again. And again. Arthur Miller‘s 1980 play The American Clock, subtitled ‘A Vaudeville’, was a fast flop in its original Broadway production. That subtitle holds the key to making sense of this sprawling, messy journey through the Great Depression: the Baum family might be at the centre of the play, but they are not its sole focus, and what you’re seeing here is more of a revue-like collection of sketches, some of which feature singing and dancing, than a straightforward linear narrative. That effect is magnified rather than diminished by director Rachel Chavkin‘s decision to cast not one but three sets of actors as the Baum family, so that we see a white Jewish family, an Asian family, and an African-American family experiencing the same bumpy ride through their post-Crash reduced circumstances.

It works – or at least, it worked for me – but the effect of this choice is to further fragment a narrative that is already fragmented. The play moves back and forth between the Baum family and scenes set elsewhere, from Manhattan boardrooms to a dive bar in Mississippi to a farm in the dustbowl; there’s a four-piece band at the side of the stage, dance sequences, a selection of period standards from the Great American Songbook, and even a dazzling solo tap dance from Ewan Wardrop as the CEO of General Electric. Chavkin does an admirable job of keeping the action moving fluidly from scene to song to dance and back again, and there’s no faulting any of the individual performances, but you have to work to keep up.  Amber Aga, Clare Burt, and Golda Rosheuvel all give lovely performances as Rose Baum, and Golda Rosheuvel’s unblinking, unsentimental rendition of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out is the most memorable thing in the entire production, but there’s a lot to keep track of here even without the triple-casting, and having the play’s three central characters played by three interchangeable actors doesn’t give the audience an easier ride. This production polarised its audiences, and there are people who wholeheartedly loathed it; anybody who walked into the Old Vic expecting a searing drama along the lines of Death of a Salesman or A View from the Bridge would have been courting disappointment, because that’s not what this play offers.

And while there’s plenty to enjoy in this production, it’s also obvious why the play received the reception it did in its original Broadway production, and why it’s rarely revived. The most vivid scenes – a dustbowl farming family attempting to keep their farm from being repossessed, a conversation between a (black) Mississippi barman and a (white) itinerant journalist, a banker, right before the 1929 crash, telling his doctor to get out of the stock market because the current boom is unsustainable – are only tangentially related to the family at the centre of the piece. It just about all holds together, and it’s a more satisfying piece of theatre than Chavkin’s production of Hadestown at the National earlier this year – that’s not a high bar, Hadestown was musically thrilling and theatrically inert, and the two leads had the stage presence of stale sliced bread – but I doubt anybody walked away from the Old Vic thinking they’d seen a rediscovered masterpiece.

That said, though, this was a rare opportunity to see a fascinating but very flawed minor Miller play get a top-class production on a big stage. There was excellent work from every single member of the large ensemble cast, with standout turns from Sule Rimi and Francesca Mills, and Chloe Lamford’s set – the trading floor of a stock exchange – was an inspired choice. There was no single moment of the production that was not enjoyable; whether everything added up to a coherent whole, though, is another question. And in terms of evoking what living through the depression might have felt like, there was more power in three minutes of Golda Rosheuvel channeling Bessie Smith and two minutes of Clare Burt singing Gershwin’s S’Wonderful than in any of Miller’s scenes, and it’s a rather odd sensation to find yourself watching a production of an Arthur Miller play in which the two things that stick out most clearly in your memory afterwards were not written by Arthur Miller. I’m glad I saw it, it was worth the trip, I can cross The American Clock off my list – and it’s those two songs that made it worth the journey to London. Sorry, Arthur.