Trumbo
Jermyn Street Theatre, London
THE McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s were an unsavoury episode in American post-war history – and were met with a strong response by liberal journalists and playwrights. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is perhaps the best of the works inspired by the crazed Senator Joseph McCarthy who led the anti-red crusade. But there were some casualties with less clear-cut stories.
Dalton Trumbo was one of the “Hollywood Ten” screenwriters blacklisted during the hysteria. Hauled up before the villainous House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he was then imprisoned for a year, lost his livelihood, went into Mexican exile and lost the shirt off his back. He later wrote screenplays for films such as Spartacus and Exodus, but had to wait a while before he was credited for them.
Trumbo is a selection of Dalton’s letters from the 1940s to the 1960s put together by his son Christopher and taken from his 1970 book, Additional Dialogue. Performed by Corin Redgrave as Trumbo, with help from Nick Waring as the narrator, the evening gives an excellent account of what it was like to be persecuted for being a communist sympathiser. At the same time, this is a history that flatters Trumbo and glosses over the less heroic aspects of his life and times.
On the plus side, Trumbo comes across as a doughty defender of liberty – a man not afraid to speak truth to power and to stand up for his rights. When he excoriates the stupidities of state repression, he seems absolutely up to date in his relevance and inspirational in his bravery.
He is also a humorous letter-writer, and this collection brings out both his wit and his sagacity. Some of the more personal letters also underline the cost to his family of his political activities: the most moving describes how his daughter was bullied at school. The flight to Mexico, which bankrupted him, is also vividly rendered and painful to hear.
Equally moving is the brave performance of Corin Redgrave, who I saw play the role the evening after the news came through that Natasha Richardson, his niece, had been seriously injured in a ski accident. Redgrave, who is himself recovering from an illness, lends Trumbo a quiet dignity and passionate urgency which builds slowly but strongly during this 110-minute show.
What’s missing in the play is any real engagement with Trumbo’s questionable political choices. In 1939, like other American communists, he argued that the United States should not get involved in the war on the side of Britain, since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression meant that the Soviet Union was at peace with Germany. In 1941, he wrote a novel, The Remarkable Andrew, in which the ghost of Andrew Jackson appears to caution the United States not to get involved in the war.
In 1941, he also gave the names of those, including Nazi sympathisers, who requested copies of his pacifist book, Johnny Got His Gun, to the FBI. Having thus named names, it’s a bit rich that he should complain when he, in turn, was denounced. Since he joined the Communist Party in 1943 and boasted in the Daily Worker that communist influence in Hollywood had quashed adaptations of Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist novels, he certainly wasn’t an innocent victim.
Directed by John Dove, Trumbo has a scratch aesthetic, with both actors holding copies of the script. This works very well and the evening presents a solid mix of serious history, moral outrage and some very dry humour. As Gene David Kirk’s inaugural show as this venue’s new artistic director, this surely bodes well for the future.
Aleks Sierz
