William Saroyan. THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE Finborough Theatre.
As the speaker in W. H. Auden's "1st September, 1939" gets drunk, so his ideals dissolve into gestures. That would be one way of explaining some woozy exhortations that even their author came to distrust. Not entirely coincidentally, Auden's poem was published in the New Republic in October, the same month in which William Saroyan's play, The Time of Your Life, opened in New Haven. The two works share a similar kind of location - Auden's dive on 2nd Street, Saroyan's San Francisco saloon - as well as an awareness that bars, though comforting, might prove only temporary shelter at the end of "a low dishonest decade". Where they differ is in their sense of politics: for Auden, a recent resident, the current issues are primarily moral; for Saroyan, born in the United States of Armenian parents, they are specifically American.
A hit when it moved to Broadway with Gene Kelly, a successful Hollywood movie with James Cagney in 1948, and enjoyably revived by the RSC in 1983, The Time of Your Life has survived its moment with some style. By choosing to stage the play at the Finborough, the Icarus Theatre Collective have taken two gambles: first, by assuming that there might be twenty-six actors in London capable of maintaining an American accent and, second, by cramming them into one of the smallest venues available. The first proves to be a delusion, the second amounts to a triumph. Even if the effect is sometimes like those rag-week stunts when students see how many bodies will fit into a telephone box, the design is warmly accommodating: audience and characters meet around tables on the margins of the acting area and they share a pre-war ambience of faux Tiffany lamps and champagne (sadly in plastic cups), with Bessie Smith in the background.
The central character is Joe, a rich "loafer" who wastes his days dispensing cash and advice to others less affluent but as directionless as himself. They include would-be hoofers, put-upon gofers, innumerable two-bit tarts - one of whom, Kitty Duvall, is eminently redeemable - and Blick, the thuggish head of the Vice Squad who is intent on cleaning the whole place up. Eventually, Blick goes too far by physically humiliating Duvall, which provokes "Kit Carson", that old-time Indian-fighter, to shoot him dead, thus winning general approval.
Theatrically speaking this is a late gasp of an American legend, the outlaw who knows the law better than the lawmen, somewhat before Sam Shepard finally put him to rest. Threaded between the main events are countless subplots, each one offering further vignettes of the lost and the lonely.
Once he has his actors on stage, the obvious problem for the director, Max Lewendel, is to devise constant but relatively unobtrusive business as they wait for their individual turn to come around again. Cards, drinks, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a telephone, a piano, even make-up, all help fill the time.
Wisdom and wisecracks alternate. Some characters say nothing for hours and, even when they do speak, their words are interrupted, or allowed to drain away.
Just when you think that there can't be any more, swing doors bang open and yet another character strides or staggers onto the scene. It's a play that needs to make its actors work unusually hard - which is what we like to see. Most of the cast seize their chance to impress: particularly Maeve Malley-Ryan as the initially embittered Kitty and Omar Ibrahim as a blindingly unfunny comedian.
In a role that would challenge Kevin Spacey, Alistair Cummings as Joe flags only towards the end, defeated by a contrived comic set-piece, a chewing-gum contest in which lines have to be delivered from between glued jaws.
Off stage, outside the bar, some sort of larger life is going on, if vaguely.
Joe buys newspapers by the bundle but not to read, merely to help out the newsboy. Hitler is mentioned in passing. Europe isn't really the point, not yet. The Time of Your Life is much more taken up with America's love affair with alcohol, with dreams, and with its own myths. There's a gentle stirring of the melting pot: Polish, Arab, Italian backgrounds are proudly, unaggressively, asserted. "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" is sung by a Greek. Apart from a blues pianist there are, noticeably, no black people. It's the big country on a small scale: the children's toys with which Joe enjoys playing making a rather too apt representation of the "little people" whom Saroyan seemingly admires.
Nevertheless, action on the Kit Carson model is clearly the product of a social life of a kind: a solo performance emerging out of an ensemble. As Joe observes, "it takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to get to be himself". In the end this is a homespun show - which makes for a timely revival and a memorably heroic evening.
