Brunton Theatre,
Musselburgh
4 stars
Arthur Miller's little
seen Broadway flop might just have found its time in this new touring
co-production between the enterprising Sell A Door company and Mull
Theatre. When the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh presented it on
their main stage in 2009, the ongoing recession was already biting
hard. Three years on, Miller's tale of one man finding material and
domestic success while all about him flounder feels even fresher and
more pertinent than it did then.
Miller's play was
written in 1940, and first seen in 1944. It focuses on David Beeves,
a young mechanic in a small town in middle America. When he attempts
to speak to his sweetheart Hester's father about marrying her, the
tyrant is hit by a car and killed. When Beeves is flummoxed as to how
to fix a particularly flashy vehicle, Austrian whiz-kid Gustav turns
up to show him how it's done, this ensuring that Beeves' business
thrives.
So it goes in a flawed
but still beautiful play which taps into the everyday fears of the
common man as much as any of Miller's later works. There's a raw
power too in David Hutchinson's impressively stately production. As
nice guy Beeves, Stephen Bisland looks increasingly haunted as he
wrestles with his own good fortune, almost willing himself to fail
while Megan Elizabeth Pitt's sweet Hester looks on. While the play's
dramatic shifts are kept low-key, there's a brightly-lit starkness
that bathes its more unsavoury exchanges with an unholy glow. David
Ben Shannon's lush, string-laden score also lends poignancy to a tale
in which failure and success are unflinchingly dissected in a
painfully realistic fable.
The Herald, November 9th 2012
ends
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