Theatre
The Last Yankee
Summerhall, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
Four stars
Disappointment pulses throughout every second of Arthur Miller's late period 1993 play, revived here by Rapture Theatre as the second part of the company's 100 Years of Miller celebrations following their large scale tour of All My Sons last month. It's there on the face of Leroy Hamilton, the wilfully underachieving descendent of one of America's founding fathers, who sits in the waiting room of the state mental hospital where his wife Patricia is spending a third period in an attempt to keep her depression at bay. It's there too in the face of John Frick, who may have embraced the American Dream that Hamilton rejected, but whose own wife Karen is in the same hospital. Most of all, however, it is Patricia's soul itself that is so fatefully marked by failed expectations as she attempts to take control of her life once more.
It's key to Miller's chamber piece that we see how men are prior to the doors opening on Patricia and Karen's world, and director Michael Emans has cast things beautifully. David Tarkenter's banjo playing Leroy is an insular, mono-syllabic sociopath in stark counterpoint to Stewart Porter's bluff Frick, the epitome of a blue-collar capitalist success story. It is Jane McCarry's sad-eyed Karen and especially Pauline Turner's furiously self-determined Patricia who are psychologically crippled by the long-term side-effects of their respective husbands choices in life.
Touring as part of this year's Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, Emans' production is a fascinating glimpse into one of Miller's most intimate works in which an entire system seems to have left its casualties in need of collective medication.
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