The Time of Your Life
Finborough, London
Michael Billington
The Guardian,
Tuesday December 2 2008
A Scene from The Time of Your Life. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Who now remembers William Saroyan? Clearly the fashion-denying
Finborough, which marks the centenary of the American-Armenian writer’s
birth with a revival of this 1939 Pulitzer prize-winning comedy. It may
not be one of the great American plays but, written in the same year as
The Iceman Cometh, it emerges as a cheerier version of Eugene O’Neill,
and a refreshing hymn to human goodness.
The Time of Your Life Finborough, London Until Until December 21 Box
office:
0844 847 1652 Venue details Director and critic Harold Clurman, who
rejected the play for the radical Group Theater, defined its style as
one of "lyric anarchism". That’s exactly right, since Saroyan
celebrates life in all its variegated oddity without creating anything
so ordered as a plot. His setting is a San Francisco waterfront dive
populated by habitual boozers, dreamers and drifters. Presiding over
the bar is the philosophical Joe, who freely dispenses the money he
once guiltily earned and who helps his fellow topers realise their
fantasies. Among them are a sad streetwalker, a gauche errand boy and
an ageing Native American. Finally, they achieve fulfilment, proving
Joe’s point that "it takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to get to be
himself".
You could accuse Saroyan of many things: not least a Capra-esque
sentimentality and an unwillingness to acknowledge world crisis. But he
anticipates one of the great themes of postwar 20th-century drama,
which finds its consummation in Beckett: life as an endless process of
waiting. There is also an uncanny Brechtian ring to a character’s cry
of "the more heroes you have, the worse the world becomes". Behind the
play’s whimsy lurks a genuine detestation of power, money and
materialism. And, through the use of a honky-tonk piano, harmonica and
phonograph, Saroyan creates moments of pure theatrical poetry.
Even if Max Lewendel’s fluid production can’t match Howard Davies’s
1983 RSC revival, Christopher Hone’s set achieves minor miracles in a
tiny space, and there are some fine performances from the 26-strong
cast. Alistair Cumming perfectly catches Joe’s weary benevolence and
sozzled charm. There is sterling support from Jack Baldwin as an
idealistic longshoreman, Maeve Malley-Ryan as a sweet-natured
prostitute and Omar Ibrahim as an aspiring comic whose constantly
swivelling eyes remind one of Harpo Marx. O’Neill created a tragedy out
of barflies and their dreams; Saroyan’s play has a genuine love of hobo
eccentricity and convinces you that it really is a wonderful world.