Theatre review: The American Clock

London's improptu Arthur Miller festival continues with my second of his more obscure works in a week. The Old Vic will be featuring one of the more famous plays in a couple of months when All My Sons opens, but first The American Clock, which has another close link to The Price in that it's once again a story of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the resulting Depression. Except this is a much more on-the-nose approach, a sweeping review of the way people were affected throughout America, although it does have a single Jewish family at its heart, played in Rachel Chavkin's production by three sets of actors: We follow Moe Baum, initially played by James Garnon, his wife Rose (Clare Burt) and teenaged son Lee (Fred Haig - you know when you suddenly realise something like "oh he must be David Haig's son seeing as how they have the same last name and THE EXACT SAME FACE" and then feel stupid for not noticing it the first second you saw him? That.)

The Baums are a well-off New York family whose money is largely in stocks but not so much as to completely wipe them out on the day of the crash; instead we see them over the years as their comfort is slowly chipped away and they start to realise they won't be able to afford the life they always assumed they'd have.

The play's occasional narrator is Robertson (Clarke Peters until the 2nd of March, Sule Rimi replaces him after that,) a millionaire who was among the few to predict the crash and liquidate his assets in time. He watches over the ensuing carnage from a position of comfort and disbelief, and is often the point of contact to the many other stories across the country that Miller touches on. These do include a lot of powerful one-off scenes, including Francesca Mills as a woman on the day of the crash, hoping it'll all blow over but unaware that her stockbroker brother was one of those to throw himself out of a window; and Ewan Wardrop as the president of General Electric, tap-dancing out of his office as he quits.

Music and dance feature heavily in a play Miller styled as a vaudeville, and while at times this helps lighten the bleak mood it can also contribute to it, as the deadly dance marathons that became a popular bloodsport in the Dustbowl are a dreamlike recurring motif, spinning around Chloe Lamford's traverse redesign of the Old Vic. Haig and Golda Rosheuvel get to steal the show a couple of times belting out popular songs of the time, and the energy and commitment of the cast helps the longer first act go comparatively quickly. By the second though, the flaws in Miller's structure become a lot more apparent. Lee (now played by Taheen Modak, and later by Jyuddah Jaymes,) has replaced Robertson as our guide to the fallout throughout the States, a cross between Miller himself and Studs Terkel, the writer whose interviews with people hit by the Depression formed much of the basis for the play.

The stories are still compelling - a Louisiana cook (Abdul Salis) wryly observes that black people can barely tell the difference in the level of poverty, and the Depression is only big news because white people have been affected; and there's a focus on how close America came to a communist revolution before World War II intervened, with Rosheuvel's Irene a stirring rabble-rouser. But there's less variety of tone, so it's more apparent how the play is a sometimes awkwardly thrown-together patchwork of stories and ideas. The relentless diversions start to make it feel worryingly like the play might last as long as the Depression itself.

And while Chavkin's idea of having the central family played by three sets of actors of different races to reflect the diversity of those affected makes some sense, the sheer blur of characters and actor doubling over the three hours means it doesn't really make much impact. In the end the play's obscurity is understandable (I have actually seen it before, in a Finborough production that must have been heavily edited as it was a full hour shorter than this one) as it tries to do far too much to actually hold the attention, but it's hard to imagine anyone making a better fist of it than Chavkin does here.

The American Clock by Arthur Miller is booking until the 30th of March at the Old Vic.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.