Throughout his career Clifford Odets was overshadowed by Arthur Miller. Nowadays, his plays tend to be classified on a topsy-turvy scale beginning with the least completely forgotten. One of the lesser forgotten, A Rocket to the Moon, is a flawed, steamy, bourgeois melodrama.
At first it seems crammed with gestures that don’t quite gel. The setting, a New York dental practice, seems to symbolise the American dream with the handbrake on. The characters’ names hint at their function. Belle is a flouncing beauty, Mr Prince is jolly rich, Willy Wax is a slippery, priapic seducer. There’s an earnest deadbeat dentist, Ben Stark, whose name vividly evokes the lead in his boots. Stark’s new assistant, Cleo, shimmers with unspoken eroticism which, by a handy coincidence, finds its counterpoint in the stifling summer weather. Phew, boys, it’s get’n kinda hot’n here. Odets is never quite that blunt but he comes close.
The play develops into a love joust between the decent, timid Ben and the maverick Mr Prince, who wants to woo Cleo with luxury and riches. In a rhetorical tour de force he invites her to take him on for 20 years and, after he’s dead and gone — ‘cremate me, throw me away!’ — to inherit his fortune and live out a magnificent widowhood as ‘a great woman, scattering riches’. It’s a terrific speech. Money was never so romantic and materialism never so seductive.
Nicholas Woodeson invests the declaration with biblical potency that makes it seem like one of the pinnacles of American oratory. But it’s a solitary highlight in a play that struggles to overcome a more basic failing. Odets’s characters, alas, are a gang of good-for-nothing pests. Joseph Millson can’t bring any comic warmth to the strained, handsome weakling Ben (although on his day Millson is one of the theatre’s sprightliest comic talents). Ben’s dipsomaniac colleague Phil ought to be a right old hoot. Phil slugs back six whiskies each morning before approaching his patients’ abscesses with the drill bit quivering in his hand like a twig in a gale. Yet even Peter Sullivan, with all his lugubrious wryness, can’t get much more than impassioned self-loathing from the role.
And Belle, a needy nag-box shackled to a plodding dunce, is the easiest character of all to dislike, so Keeley Hawes deserves some credit for sweetening the arsenic. The brightest ray of sunshine comes from Jessica Raine as the insecure sexpot Cleo. I’ve seen Raine in several casts and never given her a second look. Here it’s hard to give much else a first look, so completely does she capture the eye. If she ascends the heavens, and evidently she’s got the talent, Miss Raine may well look back on this show as ‘the moment’. This is a decent shot at a second-rate script but give me Arthur Miller any day. If you’re offered a free ticket, go. I wouldn’t buy one.
Ella Hickson is a young writer on the brink. But on the brink of what? Awards and commissions from august bodies throng her CV. Headlong Theatre, the Lyric in Hammersmith and the Old Vic are slavering to get their mitts on her work. The latest bubble of ink to erupt from her busy Biro has a wonderful and daring title, Precious Little Talent. Wonderful because it’s cheeky and memorable. Daring because it invites jesting reviewers to allege that it quantifies the writer’s ration from the Muses.
It’s Christmas Day and we meet a curious trio hunkered down in a New York flat. Joey is a stuck-up, jobless English graduate whose poverty, mystifyingly, hasn’t stopped her purchasing a transatlantic flight. Her boyfriend is a wholesome, handsome and immensely tedious all-American charmer. Her dad is an alcoholic professor suffering, in secret, from Alzheimer’s. Interesting crew!
During a game of Trivial Pursuit, Dad’s inability to answer a simple question reveals to Joey the tragic news that the old man’s loaf is toast. That’s it. That’s the highlight of the drama-ette which in all other areas feels misshapen, glib and overhastily assembled. I wouldn’t blame Miss Hicks for cranking out a play like a length of curtain fabric but her exalted customers might examine her wares with more discernment.
The actors do what they can. Olivia Hallinan throws tremendous quantities of vitriol into the role of Joey. Anthony Welsh is sweetly impressive as Sam, and Ian Gelder, the drunken Dad, has a great time pretending to destroy various fake-glass props. (Actors love ‘playing drunk’ because it enables them to take revenge on unfriendly producers by incurring a large repair bill at every performance.) Miss Hicks will hopefully recover her powers once she takes a breather from her punishing work schedule. Her talent is considerable, and precious, and needs careful nurturing.
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