It’s been more than 20 years since this double bill of short plays by Arthur Miller was last seen in London. Written in 1987, the pieces are piquant in places, but undernourished; and although Ed Viney’s revival is deft and delicately acted, they make thin theatrical fare, particularly compared with the meatiness of the playwright’s greatest works. Both are concerned, as the title suggests, with the ripples and eddies of memory – and, in a preoccupation that recalls The Crucible, with the turbulent cross-currents where forgetfulness and deception, subconscious or otherwise, commingle.
In I Can’t Remember Anything, two elderly New England friends, Leo and Leonora, share dinner and fractured reminiscences. Leo (played by David Burke), a staunch communist, clings to optimism; Leonora (Anna Calder-Marshall), widowed, wealthy and alarmingly incapable of recollecting chunks of her past, feels useless and despairing. “This country’s been ruined by greed, and mendacity, and narrow-minded ignorance,” she cries. He’s given up drinking, she knocks back his whisky; they bicker about who will die first.
There is regret for the erosion of ideals, as well as passion for their land – Leonora speaks rhapsodically of the ancient trees and wildlife. And beneath the tetchy exchanges, there is touching, longstanding affection.
Livelier, though equally overshadowed by death, is Clara. It begins with a man collapsed on the floor of a sitting room like a murder victim – all he lacks is a chalk outline. When he comes round, it is revealed that he is Albert Kroll (Rolf Saxon), father of a young woman who has, indeed, been brutally killed, and a police detective is on hand to question him. He himself is a suspect; so, too, is one of Clara’s ex-boyfriends, a Puerto Rican with a violent record.
But Albert cannot – or will not – remember the man’s name; and, as the detective probes, it emerges that to do so compromises Kroll’s liberal values and exposes his guilt-ridden notion that those very tenets may have contributed to Clara’s fate.
Advertisement
Like Leonora, the hard-bitten cop (Roger Sloman) believes that “greed runs the world”, and sees society as riven by racial difference; and once again there is a quiet sorrow in the writing. A pity that in neither case does it ever grow into anything more dynamic.
Box office: 020-7287 2875; to July 23