David Edgar’s new play presents two important figures of American theatre, playwright Arthur Miller and stage and screen director Elia Kazan, at a crucial time in their lives. It is the 1950s, and Senator Joseph McCarthy is leading the witch hunt for communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), before which both men are called to testify.
Though the committee was set up earlier in 1938, it was not until after the war (when Russia became an ally against Hitler) that it turned its attention to Hollywood, and Kazan was subpoenaed in 1952. Miller arranges to meet Kazan in a park. “Why?” he asks; he’d rather they were in a restaurant. Because there’s less chance they’ll be seen together. They aren’t really there to talk about him directing Miller’s next play, but about what Kazan will tell HUAC.
You may feel there is not much more to be said about the McCarthy witch hunt, but that now familiar history resonates against today’s nationalistic paranoia, and Edgar’s play presenting what follows shows them trying to reason their different stances. Both men were involved in relationship with a young actress, and Marilyn Monroe appears, sometimes for a just a few moments, within a scene to add information by question or comment. It is a device that director James Dacre makes work fluidly.
The characters call each other (and are named in the programme) by their nicknames: Art for Miller, Gadg for Kazan, Miss Bauer for Monroe and Day for Kazan’s wife Molly. This puts the emphasis on the personal, with Edgar suggesting betrayals not only of political comrades but in personal life too.
This isn’t strong drama, there is no great dénouement, but there’s intelligent writing that presents a Gadg concerned for his own future and pressured by his wife, while Art may seem more loyal but, though risking imprisonment, more serpentine in his argument. Michael Aloni (making his UK stage debut) suggests a troubled conscience behind Art’s glasses, while Shaun Evans’s Gadg is more naïvely honest in his betrayals. Faye Castelow is splendidly forceful as Day, putting the pressure on, and Jasmine Blackborow, who moves just like the real Marilyn, presents a Miss Bauer with a lively intelligence.
In the intimacy of this theatre, with Simon Kenny’s stark setting and Charles Balfour’s lighting giving a sense of the drama of these events at the time, this held me right through its single 80-minute act. I wonder, was this what it was really like?