STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
" Awake and Sing." By Clifford Odets. The Stage Society: At the Vaudeville Theatre FOR some years Mr. Clifford Odets has been accepted in New York as the most promising new dramatist since the arrival of Eugene O'Neill. In 1935 three of his plays were simul- taneously and successfully running on Broadway, and at the present moment his latest work, Golden Boy, is sharing the honours of that gilded thoroughfare with The Shoemaker's Holiday. It is clearly time that London woke up to Mr. Odets' existence.
Waiting for Lefty, a vivid and effective piece of dramatic propaganda, has already been performed in small Left Wing theatres in London, but Awake and Sing is the first of his full-length plays we have had an opportunity of seeing. The Stage Society was only able to give one Sunday evening performance, nor does there seem much likelihood of a public production in the near future. But we are going to hear more of Mr. Odets, and Awake and Sing is an extremely interesting introduction to his work.
It presents a crude and forceful picture of life in a Jewish family apartment in the Bronx. There is no plot in the rounded-off Aristotelian sense, but rather a number of dramatic highlights in an etude de moeurs. It is a young man's play, and very naturally the most clearly conceived and best written part is that of the son of the house. We see him develop, largely through the love and influence of his old grandfather, from a rebellious boy conducting an abortive love affair by telephone, into a purposeful man, a constructive revolutionary, determined to " take the earth in his two hands " and make sure that " life isn't printed on dollar bills." This part was beautifully played by Mr. Basil C. Langton, with a fine impulsive sincerity.
For the rest, the daughter of the house is persuaded by her parents to marry a weakling foreigner so that her baby may have a father, but later escapes with her first and genuine lover ; the old patriarch throws himself off the roof so that his grandson may collect his life insurance ; the wealthy uncle chatters and laughs at his own jokes. And all the time we are vividly aware of the life of the whole apartment, and of the hundreds of blocks of other apartments which surround it. The political implications of the story are implicit but never obtrusive.
It is not a particularly easy play for an English audience to grasp fully at first hearing ; there are too many esoteric and baseball allusions and too much Jewish-American dialect. All the same Mr. Odets makes full use in his dialogue of the meaty local idiom of the Bronx, which after all is the way in which his characters would naturally express themselves. The Stage Society production was on the whole adequate, despite one appalling piece of miscasting. Miss Joan Miller and Messrs. William Mendrek, Robert Christie and Joe Hayman gave good performances.
Mr. Odets may have read his Tchehov and his Sean O'Casey, but Awake and Sing has a vigorous life of its own which owes nothing to earlier playwrights, and we await its successors with high expectation. Meanwhile the Stage Society has added another to the almost incredible list of dramatists whose work it has first introduced to the somnolent English public.
" Mary Goes to See." By Rosemary Casey and B. Iden Payne. At the Haymarket Theatre _THERE is little to be said in favour of this play except that it does provide a vehicle of sorts (" Not a bus, not a bus, but a tram ") for the perennially delicious comedy of Dame Marie Tempest. It also contains one sentence, the curtain-line of the first act, which, in the context and as spoken by Dame Marie, is exceedingly funny. Apart from that, there is the usual family imbroglio which our heroine resolves gracefully before eleven o'clock. In the present case, even the authors seem to have found their material somewhat thin, for on to the beginning of the play they have tacked a wholly superfluous prologue, involving two unimportant and non-recurring characters and a costly change of scene.
What's the matter with a revival of Hay Fever?
RUPERT HART-DAVIS.
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