The American Clock

Reviews / Votes

This panoramic 1980 play about America during the Great Depression [is] described as "a vaudeville" [and] it shows how the nation's built-in optimism came up against economic reality ... The play, which combines the texture of despair with a residual hope epitomised in the line "a country can't just die", shows just how much the 30s shaped Miller's artistic imagination. ... It shows [Miller's] enduring capacity to capture the state of a troubled nation. -- Michael Billington * Guardian * The piece serves as a warning from history ... but there's nothing dusty or dutifully clock-watching about it ... [Miller] billed the show as a "vaudeville", likened it to a mural - and that gives him a means of pushing out across the nation, giving voice to a chorus of bewilderment, as the banks fail, the bailiffs call, the crops rot, and the air hangs heavy with resentment and revolutionary fervour. Yet swimming amid the tide of acrimony, there's stoical humour, resilient American optimism and even young romantic love ... [The play feels] eerily up to-the-moment and [serves] as an invaluable reminder of how an economic shock can change a country forever. -- Dominic Cavendish * Daily Telegraph * No 20th-century playwright was more gifted at depicting the downsides of the American dream than Arthur Miller -- Dominic Maxwell * The Times * Frequently magnificent and ... also ... nauseatingly prescient. [The play's] kaleidoscopic vision of an advanced society sleepwalking into an essentially self-inflicted disaster is certainly painfully relevant to Britain's current interests. ...It's a powerful, poignant and frequently enlightening journey ... This strange, flawed forgotten play is the most relevant piece of political theatre in town. -- Andrzej Lukowski * Time Out *