THE THEATRE
Iwake and Sing." At the Arts Theatre Club.
play by Clifford Odets is a study in frustration—the frustration living in cities and the more general frustration of mind which ed so tragically the twenty-year period between the wars. That not ultimately a great play is in no -way due to a lack of dramatic ique, but rather-to the fact that a solution to frustration is only d at, and then in such terms as to raise certain gloomy fore- gs. The only positive conclusion that Odets provides lies in new hope and enthusiasm of an adolescent who has just dis- rred the Left, together with the Socialist literature appertaining o; but fired though he may be at curtain-fall with the crusading for a better human life, we have seen too much of despair and ess during the play to be convinced that he will be able to resist remorseless grinding of the city's soulless mills. Nevertheless, Awake and Sing is a fine play and a truthful play, in that Odet's later play Golden Boy, which deals with a similar em on more uneasy terms, is not. The squalid respectability the Jewish apartment in the Bronx—admirably conveyed by Rolf rd's decor—reminds us of its counterparts all over the world. dialogue combines the purely banal with the attempt of the 1 soul to express itself through the language of banality, in such v'aY that the never-to-be-fulfilled aspirations of the characters t a heartrending authenticity. And if the characterisation echoes Iitde of Tchekov and of Dickens it is none the worse for that. The play is dominated (whether Odets intended it or not) by the 1 arch Bessie Berger, who has accepted her unhappy world on its
teams and is determined to conform to them. She dominates and directs her family, and when all her plans collapse it is with unbowed head that she retires to bed, defeated perhaps but never subdued. Lilly Kann's performance in this rather difficult part is one of the finest pieces of naturalistic acting we have seen in years. Poor Bessie! With what tearing energy she works at her task of retaining her family scheme, and how unkindly her plans turn out! She forces her daughter to marry a dumb (if devoted) immigrant in order to have a father for her illegitimate child ; but a year later the girl goes off with a petty racketeer to enjoy the uncertain and transi- tory pleasures of travel and of meretricious hotels. Her husband being by now so much of a cipher that she gets no relief from venting on him the rages by which alone she can purge her heart, she turns on her father—an old man who still carries in his heart the twin loves of his Victorian youth—the " new Socialism " and the voice of Caruso. An old man who has failed and has the intelligence to realise it, Jacob pins all his faith in his grandson, and when, in a final ungovernable fury, Bessie smashes his Caruso records, he takes the opportunity of slipping quietly over the roof during his nightly purgatory of taking out the dog—thus securing to his grandson three thousand dollars of insurance money, which Bessie thereupon tries by every means to acquire—not for herself, but for the family.
Too little space is left to do more than mention the admirable performances of Richard Attenborough, John Ruddock, Vivienne Bennett and Martin Miller, and the still more admirable production by Alec Clunes. The play bears every evidence of having been pro- duced on the Russian method of prolonged and meticulous rehearsal —a thing we have not seen in London since the Gielgud-St. Denis production of The Three Silvers some five years since.
BASIL WRIGHT.
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