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The Theatreguide.London Review
Rocket To The Moon
Lyttelton Theatre Spring-Summer 2011
Clifford Odets
was the theatrical poet of the Great Depression in America.
It was he who discovered that the great national trauma could best be
explained and made real through the small stories of small people.
Rocket To The
Moon (1938), while not the best-known of his works, is a heartbreaking
and exhilarating drama fully realised in this near-perfect National
Theatre production.
Odets’ subject is not so much the economic depression - there is a poor
character in the play, but also a rich one - as the death of hope, the
closing-in of the horizon so that happiness and fulfilment seem as much
a fantasy as space travel.
His central character is a modestly successful dentist, married for ten
years to a woman who is a bit of a nag but no more, and beginning to
sense that this, which isn’t bad but isn’t in any way satisfying, is all
there is ever going to be of his life.
He hires a new assistant, a young, foolish, ignorant girl only
half-conscious of her sexual power and totally without guile or malice,
but filled with life and hope and the totally unrealistic faith that she
has a future.
And so of course he falls in love with her, as does his rich
father-in-law, and as does the audience, because as much as Odets knows
that she’s doomed and that the dentist isn’t even capable of rising to
her level of vitality, he knows that there is something wonderful about
her.
Is the glass half empty or half full? Is this a dirge for the death of
the American Dream, or an assertion that the stupid human spirit will
persist in hoping and dreaming in spite of the evidence?
I have never
before heard the voice of Samuel Beckett so clearly in this play as I do
now, for which I thank director Angus Jackson and his impeccable cast.
Joseph Millson as the dentist brings us fully within the emotional
journey of a man who takes the dreadful risk of hoping only to realise
that he has long since lost the ability to hope, and that it is himself
as much as the world outside that will continue to imprison him.
Nicholas Woodeson shows us the energy and also the vulgarity that made
the rich man a success, that makes him confident that he will always be
a success, and that makes him able to cope with a rare defeat.
The character
is a monster, but an irresistible one, and Woodeson shows us all his
unpolished and unfeigned charm.
But the play lives or dies with the girl, and if we don’t feel her
life-affirming energy and fall in love with it ourselves, then everyone
else onstage will just look foolish.
Jessica Raine lights up the stage. She doesn’t hide the character’s
silliness or even the awareness that she is probably as doomed as the
others. But she makes us feel that right here and right now she is life
and hope and the indomitable human spirit personified - and, as a
result, incredibly sexy.
The actress
makes us fall in love with her so we understand how the men onstage fall
in love with her character.
Keeley Hawes sensitively lets us see that the wife is driven by fear
more than nastiness, and that she hates what she is turning into, and
Peter Sullivan as the impoverished friend is given a beautiful aria of
despair that he delivers with dignified pathos.
The very best of twentieth-century American drama found poetry in solid
realism, tragedy in the little lives of little people. This production
makes it clear that Clifford Odets ranks with the very best.
Gerald Berkowitz
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