In the 1950s, four years apart, the director Elia Kazan and the playwright Arthur Miller were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
As friends and collaborators, Kazan had once been a member of the Communist party, while Miller had associated with those in it. Under the shadow of the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten”, with McCarthyist fear at fever-pitch, Kazan named names in front of the committee while Miller refused to do so, and was punished for it with a suspended prison sentence.
David Edgar brings these two giants of stage and screen together in this flawed, yet intriguing, ideas play. It is clunky in its setup, the drama’s engine taking too long to start, but there is lively and intelligent debate at its centre – when you finally get there – about the political responsibilities of the artist, cowardice or courage in the face of tyranny, and what endures of a friendship after ideological betrayal.
Kazan (Shaun Evans) and Miller (Michael Aloni) are shown to be intimates here – they have worked together, they know of each other’s infidelities, and have both been to bed with Marilyn Monroe (before Miller marries her). They amicably refer to each other by nick-names: Art for Miller and Gadg for Kazan. Playing at 80 minutes, the meat of the play is in Kazan’s home, where they hash out their differences.
The first part is stuffed nakedly with expository information; characters recount basic biographic details to one another. Much of this information is familiar for those with a passing knowledge of these events and, even given the compact run-time, it feels flabby. Stanislavski’s method is mentioned, though not by name, and the various familiar films and stage projects of both men are shoehorned in.
Kazan’s wife, Molly (or “Day” in this telling, played by Faye Castelow), is shown to be a guiding anti-communist force, egging on her husband and arguing her position with Miller in a way that feels forced and crude. Edgar throws in Marilyn Monroe under the name Miss Bauer (Jasmine Blackborow), as a ghost representing the men’s consciences, complete in famed white halter-neck dress, dropping in heavy-handed mentions of her early life in foster care. Her portrayal feels cliched and discomforting.
The play feels essentially like a two-hander, the women vehicles for delivering information or aiding the men’s memories. Aloni, making his UK stage debut, is strong as the upstanding Art, while Evans is never less than likable as Gadg, though he has a variable American accent.
It is a peculiar title, with a suggestion that things in America are now as they were then. The programme points out that Roy Cohn, chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy, was involved in the rise of Donald Trump. While it could be argued that America is in the grip of a fever, dividing friends and loyalties, Trump’s brand of populism cannot compare to the witch-hunts, enforced by law, that The Crucible makes manifest, and it does not feel quite right to equate the two.
What saves the play, in part, is the cleanness of direction by James Dacre, staged on Simon Kenny’s simple set design of benches, coffee table and autumnal leaves. But the complicated arguments that eventually surface also grip. Like Miller himself, Edgar refuses to draw these men either as straightforward heroes or villains; Kazan is not fully a coward, Miller not wholly noble. At its best, their arguments on communism, capitalism, their betrayals and belief systems, tread on some similar ground to CP Taylor’s Good, in how friends justify their actions to one another, and to themselves.
• At Orange Tree theatre, London, until 19 October.
