BWW Reviews: ROCKET TO THE MOON, The National Theatre, March 30 2011

Just when you think you're in for rerun of the Rosalind Russell / Cary Grant banter-fest set in a Thirties New York office, the mood turns darker, and you realise that soft-hearted Ben and his well-heeled, deeply pissed-off wife Belle, have real problems that these days would see them in a therapist's waiting room, rather than that of Ben's struggling dental practice. Trapped in a loveless and, after a stillbirth three years earlier, childless marriage, Belle bullies and Ben bends. Enter Cleo Singer, a sexy, but silly, secretary, spinning stories (in an accent that speaks of a rather different upbringing to the one she claims) and radiating all the energy and hope that has ebbed away over the ten years that Ben and Belle have been bickering. Soon Cleo is turning heads and breaking hearts and Ben has some difficult choices to make.

As Ben, Joseph Millson has to spend a lot of time staring into space, anguish all over his face, as he is pulled and pushed by his father-in-law (Nicholas Woodeson) who is keen to avoid seeing his daughter hold back Ben the way her mother held him back; his fellow dentist Phil Cooper (Peter Sullivan) even more emotionally wrecked than Ben and selling his blood to pay the rent; and long-time patient Willy Wax (Tim Steed) who fancies Cleo as another notch on his bedpost. As if the men weren't enough to deal with, dominating Ben's stifling summer are the opposite pulls of his guilt at not being a better husband to his harridan wife (Keeley Hawes) and his growing, soon all-consuming, love for his secretary (Jessica Raine).

In order for the plot to work, the play demands much from Ms Raine, and she delivers in a wonderfully judged performance of sensitivity and charm. Over the summer, Cleo grows from a wannabee dancer who is little more than a child, into a girl in whom the woman she will become is sufficently apparent to convince as the object of not merely the lust, but the love, of men much older and more sophisticated than her. Imperceptibly, Cleo stops preening and posing and starts declaring and demanding and Ben, as weak before her as he was before Belle, crumbles again.   

Despite one-liners and some fun with caricatures, Odets' play is about how the choices that one makes in love are seldom right or wrong, merely somewhere in between. When Ben says to his wife that he doesn't know what to do about her and Cleo, a London audience - with a Royal Wedding coming up, thirty years on from another Royal Wedding in which neither principal ever worked out what to do - can sympathise, but it can't advise. Odets' jaundiced view of love has become the orthodoxy in soap operas, so it is a testament to the quality of his writing and the brilliance of the acting, that the play is as fresh today as it was 73 years ago. 

 

Rocket to the Moon is at The National Theatre through April, May and June.  

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