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Reader rating
Dir: Michael Attenborough.
Cast: Stockard Channing, Trevor Cooper, Keiron Jecchinis, Paul Jesson, Nigel Lindsay, John Lloyd Fillingham, John Rogan, Ben Turner, Jodie Whittaker
Description: Clifford Odets' witty drama starring Stockard Channing as Bessie, the head of the lower-middle-class Berger family of the Bronx. Directed by Michael Attenborough.
Trains: Tube: Highbury & Islington/Angel 
Phone: 0207359 4404
Website: www.almeida.co.uk
Matriach: West Wing star Stockard Channing as the dominant Bessie with Jodie Whittaker as Hennie in Awake And Sing! at the Almeida
No famous British play of the Thirties would have dared boast a working-class, Jewish grandfather, taking a Marxist line and complaining about the bitter fruits of capitalism.
Thanks to stage censorship, mention of contemporary politics was then forbidden on English stages.
Just such a grandfather, though, fulfils a crucial, combative role in Clifford Odets's Awake And Sing! So Michael Attenborough's starry revival of this lower middle-class, Jewish family drama - a young playwright's alarm call to America in the grim Depression years when bread lines formed on Times Square - comes as a slight theatrical culture shock.
Of the clash of political views, though, there is next to nothing. Odets observes the contrasts between John Rogan's Grandfather Jacob's wistful, idealistic Marxism and the understandable materialism of the rest of the Berger family.
They struggle to make ends meet, while Trevor Cooper's rich Uncle Morty keeps his money to himself. Attenborough's neither authentic nor well-cast production, set in a cramped but too well-heeled apartment, makes it clear that the enduring appeal of Awake And Sing! has little to do with politics, but plenty with the mordant comedy of Jewish family life and the fine cut of its verbal comedy.
Odets harks back to Chekhov and O'Casey in style and technique. He also records a cherishable lingo - the clever wisecracks, the cynical-ironic repartee, the odd syntax and sheer street poetry of period Jewish-Americans.
This is a play which appeals to the ear, more than to any other body part.
"I'll tango on a dime. Don't gimme ice when your heart's on fire," orders Nigel Lindsay's nonchalantly rude, racketeering Moe Axelrod to Jodie Whittaker's hyper-cool Hennie Berger, the girl Moe has hopefully loved, lost and gone on losing for years. "You got no shame - to start a scene in front of Uncle Morty. Once in a blue moon he comes. You made enough mish mosh with her until now," Hennie's mother, Stockard Channing's Bessie, accuses her lovesick son, Ralph, who is determined to coax a poor little orphan girl, without a dime to her name, into marriage.
Bessie, whom a handsome, miscast Channing makes far too stylishly middle-class in manner - neither as Jewish nor as humorous as Odets can have intended, has a life mission. She plays the dominant, selflessly hard-working momma, attempting to control the love and sex lives of her adult children so they make good or respectable marriages.
The play's whispily insubstantial plot lines depend upon Jacob's insurance policy and this matriarch.
She sends pregnant, under-characterised Hennie into an unwanted marriage with John Lloyd Fillingham's convincing, wimpy Russian immigrant. She easily scuppers the love affair of Ben Turner's impressively emotional and passionate Ralph. There are, sadly, no serious conflicts.
While Big White Fog, the Almeida's recent, analogous drama about the struggles of black Americans in the depression, comes to a shocking conclusion, Odets resolves problems of love and Jacob's insurance money in outbursts of romantic sentimentality and optimism. Hennie abandons her child and husband to run away with Moe, while Ralph settles for non-material things, a sexless life at home and crazy hopes of changing the world.
Miss Channing apart, Paul Jesson as Bessie's ineffectual husband, Cooper's Uncle Morty and John Rogan, bravely returning to the stage in a wheelchair after a horrendous accident, never much sound or behave like Jewish-Americans. Odets's precious essence of authenticity is lost.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
