The Bite Magazine - Spring 2019 - Issue 24

bite theatre Lisa Ogun’ attended the final showing of Arthur Miller’s play The American Clock at The Old Vic theatre, London, only to be inspired by what else is on this season would have read this growing up. Then, the fantastic direction by Tony Nominee: Best Director, Rachel Chavkin whose work includes Hadestown - National Theatre/Edmonton Citadel/ New York Theatre Workshop; I’ll Get You Back - Roundhouse; The Royale - Old Globe, Lincoln Centre, to name a few, helped put light and life into this grey period of history. For me, it was a chance to see something I had neither read nor seen whilst ticking off my culture box for the week. Miller partly based his story on Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, however, this was set to a backdrop of live music in the form of a piano, a clarinet, and a drum belting out classic 1930s jazz music, and not all three in- struments at the same time made the sound gentle yet vibrant, interspersed with dance and choreographed scene-change movements. It sure was a jolly way to learn some historical facts; the characters are fictional but the subject was real. With the main characters in form of the Baum family – a quite naïve Moe, wife Rose and their son Lee - becoming poor and having to eventually go live with relatives, the play highlights the levels of hardship the decline inspired. The knock-on ef- fect of Wall Street crashing, business owners having to close stores due to lack of business, the impact on workers losing their jobs, the banks who had to close one by one, to the farms that were auctioned off, it was indeed total hardship of an en- tire nation resulting in thousands losing their livelihoods dai- ly and becoming homeless. Welfare assessments scrutinised every aspect of each person’s life and family, to the point of even the in-law’s family assets were being considered, before accepting to offer support, if they even did. This pot too was slowly running out of money. Arguments over whom and who was trying to claim welfare support without really needing it broke out, causing even more tension to an already taut nation. As for the family: Moe loses all of his money but keeps op- timistic (though I think naïvely), Rose secretly sells off her jewellery bit by bit and Lee, who had initially been kept away from the fact they were becoming poor, slowly starts turning to radical forums and groups. When his bike is stolen outside CLOCK AMERICAN  THE Ewan Wardrop and the cast of The American Clock