The Knot of the Heart

David Eldridge is an elusive writer. Just when you have him pegged, he does something else. When you think he’s a naturalist, he writes Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness; when you think he’s a domestic miniaturist, he gives you Market Boy; when you think he’s all about the blokes, he gives you this: The Knot of the Heart, the most searingly moving new play of the last decade.

Lucy is a fairly obscure children’s TV presenter who is fired when she is discovered smoking heroin. Her life goes into freefall; she starts injecting, she disappears, she’s beaten up and then raped by a dealer. Her mother can’t say no her favourite daughter; her less-favoured sister, Angela, can’t feel sympathy for her plight. She ends up in a crisis centre, which gets her clean, but she relapses several times, returns to the centre and is finally clean when her sordid life is exposed in a sting by a tabloid journalist. It turns out that Lucy’s sister tipped them off; but also, we discover, their father who died when Lucy was less than a year old died because he was an alcoholic and stopped drinking too quickly at the behest of their mother. Lucy seems to realise that it is her mother’s smothering love that has contributed to her problems and decides to put some distance between them. In the final scene, the sisters are in South Africa, a place that feels like heaven.

In the programme, David Eldridge explains that the play emerged, in part, from a conversation with Lisa Dillon (who had been in his Under a Blue Sky in the West End) who said she wanted a play where she’d ‘get to go on a journey like the boys get to go on’. And what a journey this is, through hell to heaven. Through the fourteen scenes of the play we watch her sink from privilege to purgatory, and then crawl slowly back. And the journey back really is slow. A neater playwright might have placed her at rock bottom just before the interval; the turning point, the narrative reversal. But life’s not like that and Eldridge isn’t like that. It’s not being beaten up and raped by her dealer that is the darkest time; it’s finding that you don’t know why you would want to get better. So we see her lapsing, in denial, struggling repeatedly with her mother who enables her habit, filled with dread in the crisis centre, full of sarcastic anger with a psychologist and then, horribly, when she seems finally clean, a lifeline turns out to be a noose. It’s an extraordinary performance by Lisa Dillon, I should say. If she doesn’t win every award going, justice will not have been done. It’s a complete physical transformation she goes through, from the bouncy, young, nervous girl at the beginning through skeletal junkie and recovering addict in denial, to the woman of the end, bathed in the light of an African sun, fearful of the contentedness she is experiencing, reconciled to the end of a certain life.

The apparent subject of the play is drugs, but it’s really a play about telling the truth. Lucy’s character goes from utter self-unawareness into the trickster evasions of the junkie - the first half of scene two is absolutely captivating: Lucy is discovered by her sister about to steal money from her purse. Angela, a lawyer, pursues Lisa unwaveringly, but with each accusation, Lucy bats it aside with a new evasion, a change of subject, a misdirection, a confusion, a lie. It’s extraordinary stuff. Angela is implacably truthful; Lucy implacably mendacious. But every exchange is, in its own way, truthful. There’s nothing emptily writerly about the exchanges; it’s not a word game; it’s richly felt. It’s here you realise that she has crossed a line, that she can no longer act meaningfully in the world. And, of course, her indulgent mother, also (it is suggested) an addict, but of red wine rather than smack, allows her these evasions, deprecating Angela for so coldly seeking the truth.

Lucy’s real journey is from being a self-deceiving liar to being the most truthful person in the play. There is a heartbreaking motif of mother and daughter saying to each other ‘I love you’, beautifully placed in the scenes so that it seems - this is a current obsession of mine - untheatrically direct, just plain and sincere. But what David then does is terribly clever, because he gets you to understand that even the purest sincerity can be emotionally misguided, deceived. In - for me - the most devastating sequence in a wholly devastating play he has Lucy and her mother telling each other ‘I love you’ in their garden, over and over, the words shaking free of meaning, their importance just a memory. I felt the whole audience hold its breath; this was a brutal exchange.

In this, David Eldridge, a great interpreter of Ibsen (The Wild Duck, John Gabriel Borkman, The Lady From the Sea) is in the tradition of Scandinavian naturalism. I blogged earlier in the week about how weak the inheritance of naturalism is in our theatre but the great thing is the way theatre always surprises you, because here’s is Naturalism, renewed, vigorous, wholly theatrical, intense and extraordinary. This burning, uncompromising quest for the truth is there in the first four of Ibsen’s great prose plays, before The Wild Duck throws that all up in the air. I can’t think of a play that more perfectly unites that urge to portray the contemporary world (the media, drugs, the middle class, the treatment of addiction) with an unfettered ethical demand for truthfulness. Angela, in the early scenes, is a remorseless truth-teller though this is turned against her (her ‘I saw you’ in scene 2 becomes Lucy’s ‘I saw you’ in scene 12, when Lucy confronts her sister about her own addictive, narcotic self-harming). Marina runs the Crisis Centre and she speaks nothing but the truth; she is guileless and, in a way, artless and so carries a shining sense of integrity, a solid place in the shifting ice flows of this play’s heart.

The journey towards truthfulness is mapped throughout by the complex co-dependent relationships in the play: Lucy and her dealers, Lucy and her sister, Lucy and her mother. ‘Will you be honest?’ Lucy begs her mother, unheeded, in scene 8. Part of her Narcotics Anonymous programme requires her to find ‘honesty and moral vigour’. Later she tells her mother ‘I feel my whole life has been one whole fantastic lie’. The acquisition of truthfulness is hard-won; everywhere, lying is the currency; ‘we have to be honest with each other’ says a journalist pretending to be a TV producer. Honesty is, time and again, revealed to be fraudulent, meretricious, shallow in this play, making Lucy’s own harsh acceptance of her own brutal truths admirable and bracing.

And it’s Naturalism, too, in the best sense, because the form of the play - and of the production - is so powerful, so confrontational, so utterly a part of the experience. The fourteen scenes, undivided into acts, are about a picaresque journey, a directionless wandering through contemporary life. Directionless because where are the guides? The guides are as damaged as the rest. Wandering because randomness is part of our age, though, against that, is a terrible sense of grim continuity, the men who fuck her over, the women who tangle her in irrelevant feeling. The production emphasises this with an elegant revolve, not grinding remorselessly on but oscillating back and forth, disclosing new scenes. But also, it’s bisected by transparent screens; it struck me that these are the various chambers of the heart, knotted and tight through the play, but, as understanding floods through Lucy’s body’s, these screen doors open up, until, in the final scene, it was all openness. An exhilarating organisation of space as feeling, power, movement and meaning.

It’s an extraordinary play. It’s a beautiful play. It’s the most chokingly moving play I’ve seen in God knows how long. It’s brutal and brilliant and I feel shattered at having seen it. It challenges my writing to be emotionally richer, truer, more profound. I love this play.

Cuts

Yesterday, the Arts Council announced its National Portfolio. These are the arts organisations who are to be given long term (three-year) funding. It’s been a bloody and horrible day. Of the previous 791 regularly-funded organisations, 206 have been axed altogether. Around 100 have had their funding cut. Around 220 have had their funding frozen or increased below inflation, which means a real-terms cut over the next three years. Roughly 260 are being given boosts in their grants and 104 companies have been brought into three-year funding for the first time. Some terrific, important companies have been cut altogether - Third Angel, Reckless Sleepers, Shared Experience, for example - but some terrific, important companies are being funded for the first time - Clod Ensemble, Slung Low, Eclipse, Gecko, dreamthinkspeak, Coney and the Manchester International Festival, for example.

Actually, I think the Arts Council has done a near-miraculous job, a much better job than the Coalition deserves. They could have enacted a programme of swingeing vandalism - axe the Royal Opera House’s annual £28.3m for example - and let the Coalition take the hurt. They’ve been, in fact, forward-looking and creative.

Almost more than the cuts, I have been angered and depressed by the stupidity and vulgarity and sheer triumphalism shown by the anonymous comment-boxers who have been jeering as tens of thousands of creative people lose their jobs.

Fact: the arts make more money for Treasury than they take. It’s not a choice between hospital beds and the arts. The arts pay for those hospital beds.

Cutting the arts will mean adding to the deficit. People will lose their jobs, and their taxes won’t flow to the Treasury and they’ll need to be paid income support. And the added value produced by the arts will start to dry up.

But if it makes a profit, then why does it need funding? The arts as a whole make a profit but individually the picture is varied. What funding does is allow the risk to be spread. It also means that the individual artists are freed to pursue artistic goals rather than narrowly economic ones. Over the last fifty years, it’s clear that experiment has been commercially successful across the world. Think of the international success of companies like Complicite; think of the global success of plays by Bond, Ravenhill, Kane, Stephens. Think of The Rocky Horror Show which started upstairs at the Royal Court. None of that work would have been created if the artists were having only to think of returning profits to an individual investor. From Jean Seberg to Carrie to Voyeurz, work made with a direct eye on making money has flopped embarassingly. The longest running comedy in West End history? No Sex Please We’re British. Flopped on Broadway, never performed elsewhere. Sarah Kane’s Blasted? Performed across the world, celebrated as an example of British cultural vitality.

Also, there is a pervasive and completely false belief that somehow the subsidised arts are ringfenced and separate from the rest of the arts. How many actors, directors, designers or writers spend their entire working lives in the commercial sector? A handful, I’d imagine. The subsidised sector supports the commercial sector; there’s a two-way traffic between them. Les Miserables started at the RSC. Danny Boyle started at the RSC and Royal Court. Cameron Mackintosh has been a recipient of Arts Council funding, for God’s sake. You can’t lift the subsidised arts out of the national picture without damaging the whole creative industry.

And let’s also remember that the arts are hugely accountable to their audiences. I understand that, on average, state subsidy accounts for less than half of the subsidised theatre’s income. The rest is box office and private sponsorship. But also - and we don’t trumpet this enough - it’s by artists themselves. We all do work for free or for negligible fees that I doubt is widespread in private industry. Most theatre artists, I would guess, spend the first 2-3 years working for no payment at all. If they build up a reputation, a following, and a distinct creative voice, then they might start connecting with more established companies, buildings and so on, and eventually they might start being considered eligible for funding. The theatre industry is mainly subsidised by theatremakers themselves. The fringe would not survive without this private subsidy.

None of these arguments seems to be well-known. It’s disturbing to see stupid myths ignorantly parroted by people who should know better (step forward Quentin Letts).

But what is most shocking is the tone. Look at these extracts:

This on the BBC’s coverage:
•  Didn't the arts council pay thousands of tax payers money for sheep to be painted in a field and then for the artist to take photos? It's about time the government stopped wasting our money on people who can't be bothered to get a real job and who only entertain the minority.
•  Because art is only a perception with no intrinsic value of itself, it should never have attracted tax payer's money in the first place
•  Good. Until they don't need to cut any more police or hospital staff they should carry on cutting Arts funding. I would rather a Copper patrolling the streets than some Art piece anyday.
•  Just fund it from people who are interested in it - charge entry, sell subsriptions, sell tickets, whatever. I can't bear to think of people struggling with their everyday lives through no fault of their own meanwhile artists and dancers are getting cash for entertaining a few people. If you want more cash, do more paintings or more dancing or something. Simples!
•  Well done the Government ! Why should my taxes be spent on various hairbrained events and other people's personal enjoyment?
•  "The Arts" should be funded privately by those who hold and interest in such things. I literally don't know anyone who is interested in the arts, most would prefer the cash to be spent on something more useful. We have a couple of arty roundabouts in our town which are huge wastes of money, and quite ugly. Their only value is for giving driving direction like "turn right at the ugly roundabout."
•  Most Art is just visual masturbation
•  About time they stopped wasting money on ths rubbsh!!
•  One word- luvvies!

This on the Guardian’s coverage:
•  I rather set fire to the money than give a penny to the arts.
•  The more I hear from the art world, the more cuts I want.
•  Theatre/Opera or Cancer drugs?
    A no brainer for most working class people.
   There, of course is nothing to stop you paying for art out of your own pockets and not those of the tax payer.
• I wish the government would just abolish the ACE and cut public subsidy of all arts.
Any artist or craftsman worthy of that title will find a market for their art or craft.
As for the myriad arts 'administrators' and 'facilitators': perhaps its time they did an honest day's work for their pay.
•  The BBC being a point in case. Despite the commercially funded HBO producing Television the multibillion taxpayer funder BBC can only dream about.
If 'art' can’t stand on its own feet financially it deserves to die, because that means that not enough people care about it.
The days of Labour funding “Black-Lesbian-Vegan” Theatre groups are over!
•  I find it utterly bizarre that these pages are being festooned with articles and supporters who genuinely believe that certain forms of entertainment which can't pay their own way ought to be financed out of the public purse.
•  Sorry Mr Edgar, but as I've said in the last four or five threads on this topic, if you can't put bums on seats, don't give up the day job.
I'm not in the business of subsidising your lifestyle choices out of my taxes. Those days are gone.
If we're talking about this or pre-school funding, or public libraries, or the NHS, the arts is going to lose out every time. Get used to it.
•  As a toiler in that particular field myself for many years, I can tell CiF readers that as a generality people working in the arts are amongst the most arrogant,, pretentious and self-serving tossers you will ever meet. The arts in Britain are run by a cosy job-swapping clique.

When someone says something untrue, he or she must either be ignorant or a liar. I’m not sure which is true here; mostly, I think these people’s attitudes have been twisted by hatred, misanthropy, and an incredible worship of money. They resent paying 13p a week for the arts. They believe, like some vile religious principle, that all value neatly and cleanly translates into economic value. In fact, some of them believe that there are no values other than economic values. They frequently dismiss artistic value as subjective as if that makes a big fucking difference. Having an orgasm is a subjective experience; doesn’t make it a meaningless one. They mock modern art that they know nothing about (the lump of wood?); they foster ludicrous paranoid fantasies about left-wing theatre (“Black-Lesbian-Vegan”), that probably were never true and certainly aren’t now; they trumpet their ignorant contempt like its a sign of honour (“I literally don't know anyone who is interested in the arts” being my jaw-dropping favourite). 

Interestingly, they condemn themselves through their witless, pompous, awkward attempts at wit and humour. The gleeful dismissal of things they don’t understand, the dreadful, stupid arguments, the brandishing of prejudice; what does all this add up to? A degrading of mind and spirit, a disgusting philistinism at all levels. Let’s remember that these people - these nutters who bother to comment on these articles, who seek out opportunities to spread hate and derision - they are a minority. They are the few who don’t care about art. But this minority are in the ascendent and they are the reason we must hold our nerve and fight back. We need art more than ever because this is the march of the artless.

Remembrance Day

What is naturalism now? Naturalism in the nineteenth century was a radical, shocking, formally innovative kind of theatre that brought a scientific perspective to bear on humanity. It introduced innovations in design, acting, writing, directing, attitudes to the audience and to the world. Naturalism now is a kind of lazy default position, without a vision of the world and often suggests a complete disregard of theatrical form; we’re supposed to immerse ourselves entirely in the fictional world and the stuff people are saying and doing. Saying and doing. Naturalism is also a very broad category that suggests no consistent view of the world - there’s nothing like the scientism that is there in all Naturalist writers in the 1880s and 90s. Sometimes it’s not even about doing and only about saying: characters standing or sitting on stage having a debate about things with no real drama happening (e.g. The Vertical Hour). In fact, what seems to distinguish contemporary naturalism is its lack of attention to form, its belief in theatrical form as neutral or transparent, something you look through to get to content.

Remembrance Day is a play by Aleksey Scherbak, a Latvian playwright. This is about the legacy of Latvian fascism. Each year the surviving members of the Latvian Legion (a division of the Waffen-SS), hold a march and are met with increasingly fierce opposition. Anya is a young woman who has become passionate about protesting against fascism and wants to attend the march. Reluctantly, her father Sasha agrees and even paints the banner for her. When he says he will chaperone her she is horrifies and says she’s not going at all. In fact she does and is spotted by her father, who gives an interview to the TV news suggesting that the divisions be put behind us and that we might look at them just as old men. This is broadcast accompanied with editorial comments that paint him as a Nazi-sympathiser. Their door is vandalised and Sveta, Sasha’s wife, loses her job; their son, Lyosha, gets into a fight. The next door neighbour Valdis is a veteran of the Legion and when his friend Paulis has a heart attack, Anya (a would-be medical student) refuses to help. He survives but only because of the intervention of Uncle Misha, a veteran of the Soviet forces. Misha is terrorised out of the flat by the visit of a young Nazi activist. Anya falls out with the family and runs away with Boris, a left-wing activist. They have sex and Boris reveals himself to be a self-regarding bastard, uninterested in the direct action that Anya craves. After he leaves, Anya finds Misha’s old rifle and prepares for war.

The interest of this play lies almost entirely in its content. The form of the play is lumpily uninteresting. The staging is a little more inventive, with scenes overlaid on one another which produces occasional moments of additional resonance. But by and large if you don’t want to think about the legacy of Latvian fascism (and the ways it might parallel your own cultural experience and ideas) you won’t be interested in this play. It’s off-the-peg naturalism, not trying to give you a complex artistic experience. If there’s complexity its in the complexity of our emotional allegiances to the characters in the play, though these seemed to me less complex than the play seemed to think.

Mainly the path that is supposed to take Anya from youthful idealism to mature violent activism is ridiculous. The problem is that she’s so naive all the way through (‘In books people sacrifice their lives for ideas’, ‘I keep thinking I want to sit in Freedom Square and set fire to myself’) that the moment of clarifying disillusionment with Boris doesn’t work. First, Boris is such a cliche it’s hard to get involved in the situation; second, she goes from naive dreaming to naive activism. What’s she actually going to do with that 60-year-old gun?

The play is lumpily written, with some extremely inelegant plotting. The neatness of the legionnaires living next door, one having a heart attack, and Anya being a medical student feels lumpy. It seemed to me bizarre that Sasha’s mild remarks could be editorialised by the television news so harshly. (I know the point is about how humanitarian sentiments don’t survive in a fiercely divided culture but still it seemed a step too far.) I’m not clear why exactly Uncle Misha does a runner. He leaves his keys for Anya, not for any obvious reason except that it gives her somewhere to have sex with Boris in the final scene.

The translation doesn’t help to engage you. There’s something theatrically dead when people are speaking a bad translation. The air doesn’t move; it just seems arid, like we’re watching people gingerly talking about situations rather than acting them. The language is florid and clumsy: why does the young activist use the phrase ‘Your fusspot Christian ideas ... they’re a dead end’. Who under the age of 50 says fusspot? And the rhythms are all wrong. Look at this ‘I never got to finish school. The War got in the way. Stiff competition, getting into medical school. You think you’ll make it?’ Going from ‘in the way’ to ‘stiff competition’ is horrible, like there’s a sentence missing. The actor will be like a train trying to jump a gap in the tracks.

So, while I feel I know more about the history of Latvia and the legacy of fascism and of the Soviet occupation, I didn’t get much out of this as a play. It seems to me a good example of the fag end of contemporary naturalism.

The Holy Rosenbergs

It’s been a learny, huggy week at the National. Rocket to the Moon ended with a middle-aged dentist learning not to take things for granted (okay, it’s a better play than that sounds). The Holy Rosenbergs ends with a North London Jewish father hugging his daughter and promising to make things right.

David and Lesley Rosenberg are caterers. But tomorrow they are burying their son, Danny, who died during service for the Israel Defence Forces. This is the crucible for community tensions; some people plan to picket the funeral, not because they are angry at Danny’s actions, but because they are angry at his sister, Ruth, who has joined a legal team, writing a substantial report on war crimes in the recent conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians. The local rabbi comes to urge her to stay home and sit shiva; the family friend, Saul, says he can’t ask David and Lesley to do the catering at his daughter’s wedding - a contract that would be a lifeline - because it will threaten his position as chairman of his synagogue. When the leader of Ruth’s legal team, Stephen Crossley, appears unexpectedly at the family home, a heated debate ultimately produces some understanding on all sides. But he has brought with him documents which show that Danny was suffering from hallucinations and horror and wanted to come home. It becomes apparent that David, in the final phone call to his son (that he’s been unable to recall), he showed no sympathy, perhaps leading him to his death. Things fall apart and then things come together. The younger son, Jonny, whom David insults, shows understanding and sympathy for his father; Ruth agrees to step down from the report team. David will make things right.

This is a very old-fashioned kind of play in some ways. It’s a debate play, a well-made play, a middle-class domestic melodrama. It mainly unfolds in real time (there’s one ellipsis that means the family have dinner while we have the interval) and entirely in one room. Information is brought into the house by visitors who come and go without care. It has buried family secrets forced out into the open; some characters representing clearly plotted positions in a debate. It’s reminiscent of All My Sons, as some reviews have noted.

Old-fashioned doesn’t mean bad of course (hey, I’m loving the Rattigan revival) and although debate plays aren’t really to my taste, you can change gear and get interested in the debate, if not the drama. In this instance, the play gives a compelling sense of how criticisms of Israel are viewed by some in the Jewish community, as a threat to their own existence, with genocide vividly felt and passed on through folk memory. David tells a story about his father:

I grew up in a block of flats on the sixth floor, but there was a short time when all I wanted was a little dog. I begged my Dad. Begged him. You know what he said to me? He said ... what if we have to leave again? What if they come for us like they did before, like they came for your aunts and uncles and all your cousins, and we have to leave at a moment’s notice? What would we do with the dog? We’d have to leave him behind? No boy, he said, it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be fair on the dog.

It’s a kind of story that I’ve heard often before (and Pinter says that a feeling of that kind lurks in The Birthday Party). It has a stamp of truth and feeling. On the other hand, Crossley and Ruth’s accounts of why it is important to hold Israel to account for human rights violations are well put, convincing and humane. The play, happily, does not fling the charge of anti-semitism around in a muddying way; it is concerned with issues of justice, but also of how you balance that value with the value of community, whether human rights can be protected when you have your back to the wall, or to the sea. In some ways that leaves Ruth’s decision to step down from the Report group interesting, if not wholly satisfying; if you wanted defiance, justice (let right be done), the play isn’t going to give it to you, because this is a complex situation, requiring compromise and understanding. If anything, the play is, unfashionably, suggesting that in a situation as polarised as the Palestinian conflict, compromise is a radical act.

While I’m being positive, I should say that Henry Goodman gives a wonderful performance. From the moment he appears, unable to sit anywhere for long, restlessly drumming his fingers, it’s a long, sustained, continuous performance that is graceful and moving, an affectionate and sympathetic study of a mind under enormous strain, his buoyancy cracking at times, but being the root of his human spirit. And Ryan Craig wrote the part that let him give that performance, so he deserves at least some of the credit for that major role.

If I had a complaint, it’s that it’s not old-fashioned enough. I never felt very moved by the play and that’s because it’s too concerned with debates, and with telling us how people are feeling, rather than letting us feel it in the way they act with each other, and through structure and subtext. Inevitably, I think of Rattigan and the way he will give us imaginative space to understand someone’s pain by placing them silently in a social situation digesting some awful news (Joan in After the Dance, for example). There’s not enough of that here; people get news and react and we’re just given what we’re given. I didn’t engage with the play on the level of character.

There are some clunky bits of plotting. Ruth rushes out to an all-night chemist but announces that she doesn’t have a key because of the new front door. This implausible idea (who gets one key for a new lock? Why can’t she just ring the bell?) is a way of getting Crossley into the house who wanders in without a by-your-leave. And then he stays, really making himself at home, despite knowing that the family are preparing for a funeral the next day. As written and played, Crossley was an old-school upper-middle class professional and it’s bizarre to think he’d not show more sensitivity. Saul also behaves appallingly. He has to break it to the family that he’s not going to accept their bid to cater his daughter’s wedding. He tells them this the day before the funeral. He really could have waited a week. The very idea that Danny’s body has been brought home seems a little convenient; ‘Danny was an Edgware boy at heart’ doesn’t do it for me, since he’s not too Edgware a boy to fly out to Israel and join its army. These things niggle at the play and give it a sense of artificiality; these characters have been brought together to have a debate - they don’t have a debate because they’ve been brought together.

This sense isn’t helped by some clunky dialogue. Sometimes it’s the exposition firing off but at other times it’s just rather ponderous (‘I’m asking you to find a way to avoid a huge amount of heartache that I’m worried your parents are too fragile to handle at the moment’). There are things I enjoyed about the content - and the performances are mostly very strong - but it’s the sort of play that either needed David Hare’s elegance of expression or Terence Rattigan’s elegance of structure. Preferably both.

Rocket to the Moon

Famously, in the Seinfeld writer’s room was a sign ‘No hugging, no learning’, a necessary corrective to American sitcom’s addiction to redemptive endings. It’s not just the sitcom either; American drama in the mid-century period was often famous for its closing lines that sum up the play and offer a clear statement of the improving message that it’s been trying to convey. This is the way we were. Attention must be paid.

Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon is no different. The journey the hero has to go on is curious but it is plainly meant to deliver a moral to the audience when Ben Stark declares ‘I’ll never take things for granted ever again’.

It’s a simple plot. Dr Stark is a dentist who lacks drive and ambition. His marriage has flatlined, his work barely pays the rent. Then he employs Cleo Singer, a ravishing young woman with whom he begins an affair. He was encouraged in this by his father in law, who is estranged from his daughter. In the event, the father in law falls for Cleo too, as does the rapacious theatre producer Mr Wax. In a final confrontation, she rejects them all and Dr Stark vows never to take anything for granted again.

What’s interesting is to have an essentially passive hero; everyone walks over him, he is hectored by his wife, doctors on the same corridor walk in and out of his waiting room without knocking. He’s offered funding by his father in law to set up a new high-class specialist clinic but he turns it down thinking that half a loaf is better than none. The rocket to the moon of the title is an affair; aged 40, maybe this is a make-or-break moment. Will he settle for his loveless marriage and his middling career or will he change everything, take risks, make something new of his life?

It’s got the same problem as Separate Tables. In the latter, the Major’s offence is to furtively grope women in the cinema. I think we’re inclined to be much less forgiving of him now that audiences would have been in 1954. We’d be likely to think that there might be more to it than groping (check his basement! check under the patio!). Here we are invited to think that having an affair is a bold and sympathetic action. The problem with the play - and with the new National Theatre production - is that it has to persuade us that the marriage really is in a bad way. In fact, in Keeley Hawes’s performance - but also in the text - Belle Stark is a gorgeous, sexy, funny, smart woman who is a little bossy but fundamentally more interesting than Cleo. Cleo is basically a bit of a bimbo (though brilliantly played, full of wit and detail, by Jessica Raine). As a result, the play asks us to take seriously a bored man shagging his bubbly young secretary and therefore cheating on his lovely wife as a supreme act of self-realization. I didn’t really buy that.

I’m not sure Odets had fully decided what sort of play to write. It’s a romance (particularly in Act 2). But it’s also a wisecracking comedy (particularly in Act 1). It’s also a realist drama (particularly in Act 3). There are traces of Odets’s earlier more directly political work in the continual talk of money and in the sensational scene where his fellow dentist Dr Phil Cooper returns having sold his blood for money - and also in the near-agitprop names: Stark, Singer, Wax all suggest something about their attitudes and situations. What I’m hugely understating is how funny the play is; it’s full of laughter, generous and cynical, all in character and often pitching the thing into realms of wonderful absurdity (‘Do you know something? I can’t read Shakespeare - the type is too small’). 

The humour itself causes problems. The father in law is a wisecracking character, full of New York Jewish schtick; but then we have to undergo a crunching gear change as he declares his love for Cleo. To be sure, this gives him perhaps the most heartfelt speech in the play: ‘There are seven fundamental words in life, and one of these is love, and I didn’t have it! And another one is love, and I don’t have it! And the third of these is love, and I shall have it!’ But I remained unmoved by his love for Cleo, which seemed like an old man’s infatuation rather than anything more interesting.

There’s not a whole lot of plot either. The entire first act is set up. The second act only gets interesting when Ben exposes Cleo’s lies about herself, when suddenly, at last, you felt the air move, and here was a play about people with desires and aspirations and delusions and false fronts. The affair itself seems somewhat unconsummated and it’s only the third act where things really seem to matter. The short exchange between Joseph Millson’s Ben and Keeley Hawes’s Belle when she realises about the affair (‘It was only a thing of the moment, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Do you hear me - wasn’t it?’) was beautifully played, tender and awkward, Belle’s assurance momentarily crumbling. Odets’s stage direction says that at this moment Belle is ‘wavering, a spout of water’ and we got that. But even then the act dissolves into a series of conversations, with the cynical doctor Frenchy, with the father, then the decision that Cleo has to make.

And it all adds up to Dr Stark’s epiphany: ‘for an hour my life was in the spotlight... I saw myself clearly, realized who and what I was’ and makes that pledge: ‘I’ll never take things for granted again’. This is the problem with hugging and learning, an awful lot of stress has to be placed on the things peoplesay about what they do. But we know from life that when people promise to change their ways, that’s just words and it’s just the start. It’s their actions we want to see if we’ll believe them. And this case seems particularly suspicious. Is he really never going to take things for granted again? The existence of Kentucky? How about gravity? The airy vapidity of the announcement would, in life, communicate more about the speaker’s immaturity, their windy self-regard, than about any real intentions.