2011: Panic by Archibald MacLeish

Panic by Archibald MacLeish, directed by Andrew Holmes, School of Cultural Inquiry, College of the Arts and Social Sciences, at ANU Arts Centre. August 18-20, 25-27, 2011. Free entry.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 25

The purpose of a doctoral study is to research an original topic in the hope of establishing a new understanding to add to a body of knowledge, and perhaps confirm or change the direction of academic thinking. Since this production is presented as part of Holmes’ PhD studies, my first question is “Is there anything new about it?”

For me there was. I had long been aware of MacLeish as a poet, but I hadn’t thought of him as a significant playwright – or even as a playwright at all, to be honest. Yet he won a Pultizer prize for J.B. in 1958 (my first year at Sydney Uni) which ran for 364 performances on Broadway, directed by the key to American theatre of that time, Elia Kazan. While Martin Esslin calls Panic, with the lead played by Orson Welles in 1935, “a sophisticated agitprop drama of the Wall Street crash” – of 1929, of course; not 2008. What had I missed? And why?

The why is easily explained. My 1950s Anglo-Australian background only took a few American playwrights seriously: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. If I looked for social criticism I saw Bernard Shaw. For agitprop I thought of Bertolt Brecht. Should I now include Archibald MacLeish?

Perhaps the 1992 advertisement for Archibald MacLeish: An American Life by Scott Donaldson. (Houghton Mifflin; 622 pages; $35) suggests not:

“THIS year marks the centenary of the birth of Archibald MacLeish, one of the most unusual figures in 20th-century American letters and a man who prospered at both poetry and public service. As this massive biography documents, nothing seemed impossible to him: he played football like a demon while at Yale; he was brilliant in debate; he practised law with panache after graduating from Harvard Law School; he wrote some of the finest lyric poetry of the century and he transformed the Library of Congress from a dull but worthy repository….” (www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-12428195.html)

So what was it that made Andrew Holmes want to focus on MacLeish, rather than plays such as O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) or The Great God Brown (1926), or indeed Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (1929) or Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui written in 1941 in Helsinki while waiting for a visa to enter America?

The answer has to be, the poetry.

Verse drama in its modern form goes back to the Romantics: The Cenci by Shelley was written in 1819, but was first presented publicly on stage in London in 1922 (after a private production in 1886 attended by, among others, Bernard Shaw). Shelley’s play was historical, about Beatrice Cenci of the late 1500s. MacLeish’s play is set in his own time, in the Great Depression when, by 1933, 21 US States had closed all their banks and Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a four day Bank Holiday throughout America and began his “fireside chats” to keep the populace calm while the banking system was restored. The new aspect of MacLeish’s work was to take such a prosaic situation and write in the mode of Romanticism. Not exactly the style of a Brecht, nor even a Shaw or O’Neill, though one might see it as a forerunner of Tennessee William’s work.

So my second (and final) question is “Does Andrew Holmes’ production take us in a new direction?”

The poetry begins with words spoken by the common people in chorus with soloists, highlighting words like “closed”, “foreclosed”, “moratorium”, “McGafferty” – the “hero” who claims he will keep his bank open – and finally “death” as McGafferty “tragically” shoots himself. The reference in rhythmic form which goes back to the Ancient Greek – I was particularly reminded of Sophocles’ Antigone – is effectively done. There are references to the future as well. Keeping the American idiom, accent and phrasing must have been a considerable challenge for largely untrained actors, but the effect was almost like some parts of Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

But MacLeish keeps the chorus in its place, concentrating the action on McGafferty and his woman Ione (the relationship is undefined). Tony Turner and Christa Dejager stand out in these roles not just because they are the wealthy elite but because each of them used the verse to create individual characters and timed their interactions with the kind of staccato effect their side of the story required.

The Blind Radical, who I take as a Tiresius sooth-sayer figure, was played very effectively by Simon Thomson, reminding me especially of Lucky in Waiting for Godot.

In the end, as Holmes explained in the follow-up discussion, the story can be interpreted (and was when first staged) by Communists as a vindication of the failure of Capitalism, or by industrialists and bankers as a tragedy of a hero with a fatal flaw. I could not see the play as “sophisticated” nor as true “agitprop” since the story is simplistic, the economic and social issues are not made clear, and the characterisation is minimal, except – interestingly – of Ione, who clearly understands her role as support for the go-getting banker until she recognises the reality that he is done for. She leaves to look for other opportunities, while McGafferty suicides.

But the poetry works. Sound, rhythm and images swirl around, creating their own sense of chaos to suit the theme. There is something here worth attention for modern playwrights: perhaps we have lost the habit of using the sounds and structure of language as integrated elements in theatre, especially in “naturalistic” drama. So, I conclude, writing today does not mean going back to the Romanticism still wafting around MacLeish’s Panic, but we have a model in today’s hip-hop or rap rhyme, rhythm and strength of word choice. Steven Berkoff, do I hear? In the Australian context, Louis Nowra, Dorothy Hewitt and perhaps Stephen Sewell, as well as Richard Frankland as directed by Wesley Enoch in Conversations with the Dead?

And, noting that it is some time since university theatre was a regular feature of the Canberra scene, it is good to see the new ANU structure for Drama teaching providing support for the practical production on stage of work under study, and I trust the performance program will expand once again.

© Frank McKone, Canberra