The American Clock is one of Arthur Miller’s more effortfully serious plays. Dating from 1980, its inspiration was Studs Terkel's book Hard Times, an oral history of the Great Depression. Miller also drew on his own experience of the Thirties, in which a whole generation seemed to be withering.
The result is an episodic piece with a vast number of characters, many of them mere wisps of cliché. The main figures are the upper-class Baum family, whose financial troubles take them from Manhattan sophistication to a bare room in Brooklyn. Rose Baum sells her beloved piano, her husband Moe becomes a salesman, and their son Lee, who has to revise his plans for a college education, flirts with political extremism.
Prescient banker Arthur Robertson (Patrick Poletti) acts as narrator, introducing scenes of desperation, compromise and corruption, in which hunger and the bailiff are rarely far away. This isn’t the only framing device. At the outset, in the present, a clutch of suited businesspeople are attending a private view of photos documenting the desolation that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. This is the backdrop to all the action; it suggests uncomfortable historical symmetries.
Director Phil Willmott gets committed performances from a cast of 12. Although some of those taking on multiple parts don’t differentiate between them clearly, there’s good work from Christopher Heyward and David Ellis. Issy van Randwyck is vividly emotive as Rose, and Michael Benz does a nice job of conveying the idealism of Lee.
It’s perhaps overambitious to squeeze such an epic into the Finborough’s tiny playing space. Yet the production manages to be fluent, even if it doesn’t feel gritty.
The real problems lie in the play itself. Miller’s interest in greed and austerity has a certain grim appeal right now. But the panoramic approach isn’t involving, and the writing drips with platitudes, its preachiness significantly weakening the drama.
Until April 21 (0844 847 1652)
