The 20-year-old's "No Villain" is no masterpiece, but a tantalising prelude to his later work
By S.W.
PEOPLE have been losing literature for as long as they’ve been writing the stuff. Accident and war, censorship and self-doubt, careless estates and callous posterity—all have ransacked the world’s library. Some losses are physical and irreversible (ask Gogol, Strindberg or Larkin about fire). Some works go missing, presumed permanently. Others are lost because the author says so, and more often than not the public is happy to take his or her word for it. These are perhaps the most problematic: they are lost because no one wants them found.
In October this year, Sean Turner, a British theatre director, announced he had tracked down the little-known, never-performed first play of Arthur Miller, which he planned to stage as part of the centenary celebrations of Miller’s birth. This week, with the blessing of the Miller estate, “No Villain” received its world premiere at a small fringe theatre above a pub in London called the Old Red Lion. Although the production was by some counts 79 years late, the mood was jolly. Guests drank champagne while a band played “We’ll Meet Again”.
Mr Miller was a 20 year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan when he wrote “No Villain” in 1936. Money, not the Muses, motivated his decision: he was short on cash and hoped to win a $250 university drama prize (which he duly did). In the years following, as his reputation as one of America’s leading playwrights grew, his interests moved to other projects. “No Villain” found itself in that dark place known as the writer’s drawer.
Mr Turner first learned of the play in Mr Miller’s autobiography “Timebends”, where it merits a single lonely mention. He approached the University of Michigan and found they still had a copy on microfilm. What he read, and what we can now watch, is a highly personal account of the young Mr Miller and his family, thinly veiled behind the story of the Simons, a Jewish family living in Brooklyn during the Depression. Abe, the father, owns a failing garment business. His eldest son, Ben, works for him; the younger, Arnold, has just returned from university, stoked up on Marx and the rights of the working class. When strikes threaten to destroy Abe’s business, the father turns to his sons for help, and the fuse is lit.
“No Villain” is no masterpiece. It is the work of a talented amateur still learning his craft. For every skilful rendition of character there is another which is too on-the-nose. The marriage of personal and political, revisited in “All My Sons”, fails to mesh with the harmony of that later work, while the crux of the drama feels somewhat messily established and hurriedly resolved.
However, Mr Turner has done an impressive job smoothing out the bumps and wrinkles: the pacing is taut, the staging clean and effective, the cast highly watchable. His direction manages to convey emotions the young playwright aims for and doesn’t always earn—no mean feat.
Beyond this, “No Villain” is worth watching to see the first exploration of themes which will consume Mr Miller’s later work. It is all here: the compulsive, controlling fathers inflicting their shortcomings on their children; the personal ignorance passed off as the rules of life; the corrosive obsession with others’ affairs; the tyranny of family; the elusive, plastic qualities of success, love, and happiness; the tragic commitment to the wrong dreams.
You might call this the “Go Set A Watchman” defence, after the speculation and soul-searching Harper Lee’s “long-lost” first novel provoked when published earlier this year. Critics and readers wondered, often with no little anguish, what we hope to gain from looking at the early and abandoned works of the greats.
The most comforting answer is that these flawed works enticingly predict the classics which follow. You can spot an author’s gifts, how they will develop, also their problems and how they will overcome them. They are the necessary trial and error. Without “No Villain”, would “Death of a Salesman” exist? And is that genetic claim enough to validate its own existence? All his life Mr Miller answered that second question for us. In the end it will be history which decides, but for now at least what was lost has been found.
