Here in America, Orange Tree Theatre review - Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller lock horns in McCarthyite America

The clue is in the title – not Then in America or Over There in America or even a more apposite, if more misleading, Now in America, but an urgent, pin you to the wall and stick a finger in your face, Here in America.

Pre-Trump 2.0, David Edgar’s new play tells us (at least twice, Edgar not shy of driving home a point) that we can learn from past trauma in order to guide current behaviour. So, 300 million+ Americans are to draw on Stanislavski's Method in the polling booths come November?

The memories Edgar conjures are from the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee went after Hollywood (but not Broadway) with their infamous question, “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Elia Kazan, celebrated director of A Streetcar Named Desire and already an Oscar winner, had been exactly that in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union was both a naive vision of a better world and a bulwark against fascism. Arthur Miller, a soulmate in many ways of his theatrical collaborator, had not, but he was often in the room where it happened, which proved enough for a 12-month suspended prison sentence.

Not that such details mattered much in the feverish moral panic underway in Washington. What the machinery of government wanted was names, a blacklist of "dangerous radicals" to purge, killing careers the way Lavrentiy Beria had killed apparatchiks in Russia 20 years earlier. It doesn’t take much to foresee something similar playing out in DC come 2025.It’s not the worst set-up, even if it does take a fair bit of exposition to establish the historical moment and describe how Kazan moves from being a (not quite, to be fair) true believer in The Cause to a embittered betrayer of his erstwhile comrades. Much of that journey appears to be piloted by his wife, Molly Day Thacher, to whom Faye Castelow (pictured above with Shaun Evans) lends a Fox News host’s veneer of polish to her crude "Reds Under the Beds" / "Deep State" fanaticism. 

Away from her prompting, Gadg (short for his nickname, Gadget, as Kazan could fix any problem on stage or screen) isn’t so sure, Shaun Evans speaking from the heart about social injustice but parroting cliches about The Left leaving him rather than the reverse. We never quite see why a man who must surely have had the money and reputation required to ride out the storm of right-wing madness, which always seems to blow out in the English-speaking world, goes all in on aiding and abetting the witchhunt. This is a man whom actors would follow into the metaphorical trenches, yet there’s little here to suggest that they would so much as follow him into the Green Room.

Michael Aloni’s Miller gets a few wisecracks and moral wins in the passive-aggressive alpha male battles with his friend and director, but the character doesn’t live and breathe as he should. There’s nothing of Gore Vidal’s sardonic wit in James Graham’s Best of Enemies (with which this play shares much), too many lines feeling like debating point prompts at the Oxford Union rather than how a real person, even a playwright, would speak to an old friend.    

Jasmine Blackborow goes full Madonna in "Material Girl" as Miss Bauer, the Marilyn Monroe avatar, who appeared in both men’s lives and in both men’s beds. She is largely a ghostly presence, teasing Gadg and seducing Miller, her naive intelligence clarifying both men’s confused thinking. As usual, Marilyn gets a poor deal from male creatives, then and now, a vehicle to illuminate men’s desire and ego, rather than a person in her own right, maybe not as egregiously as in Andrew Dominik’s misguided biopic, Blonde, but surely it’s time to set her free from the pout, the push-up and the peroxide?

Director, James Dacre, keeps things tight, literally and metaphorically, on the Orange Tree’s tiny set strewn with New England leaves (not Californian palms) delivering the play in 80 minutes. Perhaps with a little additional time, we might have learned more about the men and women, sufficient to care properly about their fates. But maybe not. Kazan completed his long rehabilitation with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at the Academy Awards 1999, pithily acknowledged and condemned by Orson Wells’ remark, "Kazan is a traitor, but he is a very good director." Molly Day Thacher was taken off by a cerebral haemorrhage at 56, and Miller’s work will live forever. Marilyn, long divorced from Miller, was gone with an overdose at 36. 

It was a bloody time then and Edgar plainly wants to warn of a bloody time to come, but has written rather a bloodless play, better at ideas than drama, more suited to an innovative induction to a module in an American Studies BA than to be considered a fully realised work of drama. Plenty good enough to hold the attention, but there's surely more to be said about these four compelling people caught in a hurricane that was not of their own making.      

• Here in America at the Orange Tree Theatre until 19 October
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk