Director Michael Wilson’s staging is highly effective, with sound and projection effects heightening the tension at key moments. Still, the brief work has a gripping cumulative power that builds to a surprising conclusion, which is at once uplifting and tragic. Toward the end, when Leduc and the Major engage in a lengthy philosophical debate about acting in defiance of evil, it feels more like the playwright talking than his characters. But the play is also talky and didactic, its themes expressed too baldly. It deals with powerful themes of guilt and responsibility, tautly dramatized and well-defined. Incident at Vichy reflects both Miller’s strengths and weaknesses as a dramatist. Their unwillingness to do so, as well as the frustrations voiced by a sympathetic German Major (James Carpinello), is reflective of the inaction that the Nazis preyed upon in pursuing their horrific agenda. Leduc is the most assertive member of the group, convinced of the Germans’ evil intentions and desperately attempting to rally his fellow detainees to join him in an escape attempt. The businessman assures the others, “It’s just a document check, that’s all.” But the artist, who was recently stopped on the street by authorities to have his nose measured, is afraid the reasons are more sinister.Īnd he turns out to be right, because one of their detainers is an officious German professor (Brian Cross), who proudly announces that his specialty is “racial anthropology.” Those assembled are understandably anxious to know why they’ve been detained, espousing contrasting theories. Read More ‘A View From the Bridge’: Theater Review Joining them shortly afterward are two men who prove central to the proceedings: Leduc (Darren Pettie), a psychoanalyst, and Von Berg (Richard Thomas), an Austrian prince. Tickets: 08 .D'Arcy Carden to Make Broadway Debut in 'The Thanksgiving Play' Almost 80 years after the silencing horror of Auschwitz that question rings out like a gun-shot. “Tell me how there can be persons anymore?” a splenetic German officer demands of a pivotal, resilient psychiatrist, sneering at his ideas of individuality and virtue. The tension, assisted by the Finborough’s cramped confines, is stoked to perfection by director Phil Willmott and his 13-strong cast. As they wait, scraps of gossip are exchanged, tempers fray some, like a stoical socialist electrician are taciturn, others - a famished painter, a highly strung actor - become garrulous. There’s no making a run for it – this part of France wasn’t under full occupation in 1942, but the German jackboot is here one by one, they’re summoned by a doctor for examination (the circumcised won’t be released), their papers verified. Leaving that studied quality aside, though, this short work is hugely effective in evoking a historical moment of a kind that history is never done with: 10 citizens, carted off to a detention centre, forced into jittery companionship, each sweating with his (and this is an all-male haul) individual anxieties. The concluding noble gesture (literally so, here, as the obliging Gentile is an Austrian prince) betokens an admission of wider societal guilt. Miller’s interest lies in exploring how Nazism was able to feed on a denialism in the European psyche – that civilised people could behave like barbarians. There’s something slightly bloodless and abstract about it, though. The sacrifice, a Gentile putting his neck on the line for a Jew in wartime Vichy France, allowing the latter to escape a police round-up, is drawn from real-life. Its scenario is simple but involving, its characterisation rudimentary but compelling, its resolution undeniably arresting - entailing a sacrifice that lends itself to comparison with the denouements of other Miller plays. Incident at Vichy isn’t stumbled-upon gold but it glisters with fascinations. But if you include radio-plays there are more than 40 dramas knocking around the Miller canon. The Crucible is currently touring, while that hardy perennial, Death of a Salesman is shortly to be reprised in Northampton. Not seen in London for more than 50 years, it’s already almost completely sold out. Here’s an idea: every year, why don’t London’s fringe and off-West End theatres co-operate to mount a retrospective festival celebrating a major playwright?Įasier said than done, of course, but the thought is prompted by this excellent revival of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (1964).
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