Theatre
After Monroe
Christopher Edwards
While you could hardly say that Arthur Miller is an unsung hero in his American homeland, his work continues to receive more, and more thoughtful and strongly cast productions, over here. David Thacker at the Young Vic is responsible for creating a new generation of apprecia- tive audiences for Miller's lesser-known work. The National Theatre has been a constant admirer of the well-known clas- sics: The Crucible recently opened to critic- al and popular acclaim. Now we have a fine revival of Miller's uneven work After the Fall — the so-called Marilyn Monroe play.
The playwright will thank no one for perpetuating the association with his second wife, but it is part of theatrical folk-lore. It is also there, deep in the heart of the work. The play opened in 1964 soon after the nation's idol had died. It was seen as an attack on her. It had to fail, and fail it did, amid considerable recrimination. How could Miller not have predicted its effect? The main female character, Maggie, is a sexy, innocent small-town girl who finds fame as a singer only to destroy herself by pills and liquor. Miller even allowed the actress in the original production to wear a blond wig.
But the play is about denial, and, as Miller recognised, his blindness about the obvious identification with Monroe was his own form of denial. The central character and narrator, Quentin, is a lawyer. We see his shambolic life in a series of flashbacks as he broods obsessively about his failings. Two women, Maggie and Louise, help him to make his final assessment of himself. This production outflanks our prurient interests by casting the lithe black actress Josette Simon in the role of Maggie. Ingenuous and childlike at the start, this actress manages to make Maggie's spiral- ling career look like a regression into infantilism. Touchingly vulnerable without once seeming mawkish, this powerful per- formance is one of the evening's great successes.
The other success is Shelley Thompson's portrait of Louise, Quentin's irritating and put-upon first wife. But there is more to the play than the mere detritus of Quen- tin's private life. And it is Miller's grand, not to say grandiloquent concerns that create the obstacles. For, if After the Fall is to some extent a work of exorcism about Miller's relationship with Monroe, it also deals with Miller's ideas about the loss of innocence following the Holocaust, as well as the McCarthy episode in the Fifties. Quentin's guilt is inflated to include reflec- tions on these and other historically loaded subjects, but his agonising lacks, to coin a phrase, concrete specificity. Miller is prized as a dramatist willing and able to track those poignant moments of connec- tion between the private and the public in American life. If those connections are sometimes sentimentalised, he is so good a craftsman that his conflicts of character usually arrest you. This is not the case with Quentin. Despite the best efforts of James Laurenson, Quentin comes across as a self-inflated bore. As he is our narrator and constant companion his historical in- vocations are impossible to avoid. You spend quite a lot of time wishing he would let someone else do the talking.
When we do avoid him the production grips us. Miller sensed he was making life difficult for his director by relying upon stream-of-consciousness evocations of character, abrupt disappearances and transformations of time and place. In fact, the director Michael Blakemore and his designer Hayden Griffin turn this montage effect to great advantage. Not only do the frequent flashbacks to family, friends and lovers get us away from Quentin's con- versations with himself, they also provide us with the production's truest moments of human drama.
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