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Lyttelton, London
What was Clifford Odets up to in this strange 1938 play? Was he, as he once claimed, writing about the near-impossibility of love between man and woman in a deeply competitive society? Or was he writing a study in female self-realisation? I suspect it was the latter since what you see is Odets, against his own prescription, falling in love with his central character.
Her name is Cleo Singer; and she works, in the course of a long, hot New York summer, as a dental secretary. Through her combination of ingenuous charm, waif-like solitude and physical attractiveness, she hypnotises all the men around her. First and foremost is her cautious boss, Ben, who is unhappily married to a domineering wife and who finds Cleo a dream of freedom. But Ben has to compete for Cleo's affections with his own rich, rambunctiously eccentric father-in-law, Mr Prince. And, to add to the mix, Cleo is also ardently pursued by a showbiz dance-director who turns out to be a wolf in wolf's clothing. The play's tenuous suspense depends on Cleo's ultimate choice.
Harold Clurman, who directed the original production, put his finger on the play's central flaw: it starts out as a study of a meek dentist and turns into an account of Cleo's self-awakening. But, although the play is clumsily structured, Odets captures the quality of desperation that haunted Depression-era America. If Cleo is desperate, it is because she yearns to escape from a squalidly overcrowded family apartment and achieve true love. But, as a leftwing writer, Odets also understood economic desperation, which he vividly shows in one of Ben's impoverished tenants who resorts to selling his own blood to survive. Even Ben's bossy wife suffers her own sense of despairing isolation, crying "a woman wants to live with a man, not next to him."
Odets often over-writes, but he creates strong roles that are all avidly seized on in Angus Jackson's production. In a part tailor-made for Marilyn Monroe, Jessica Raine is highly impressive as Cleo: she has exactly the right mix of provocation, native wit as when she claims "you know I can't read Shakespeare – the type is too small" and sense of spiritual generosity. Joseph Millson also captures exactly the shy, goofily smiling tentativeness of the dentist who is afraid of total commitment. Nicholas Woodeson savours every line of the rantipole, self-regarding Mr Prince who proudly announces "I am the American King Lear" and Keeley Hawes elegantly makes a case for Ben's reproving but desolate wife. Anthony Ward's set, with its sun-kissed corridors, also catches the atmosphere of a big Manhattan office-block. Odets may not have been sure what kind of play he was writing, but what finally emerges is a prolonged love letter to Cleo.
