Review: The Value of Names, The White Bear Theatre
Review: The Value of Names, The White Bear Theatre
By Julie Anderson
‘I have given you my soul; leave me my name!’
The words of John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) about the seventeenth century Salem witch trials and an allegory for McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the 1940s and 50s. This is the territory of The Value Of Names, written in the early 1980s, but given its UK premiere at The White Bear Theatre, Kennington this week.
Benny Silverman is a comic actor, living in his comfortable beachside house in California, when he is visited by his daughter, Norma, also an actor, who has news for him and some questions. She is changing her name, wanting to escape the shadow of her famous father, a change that her father does not approve of. Also, Norma has secured a role in a new play which could define her career, but the assigned director of the play is Leo, a close friend of Benny in their radical agit-prop theatre youth, who denounced Benny to the HUAC thirty years before as a communist. Formerly ignorant of this element of her father’s past, Norma questions why he has not told her about it and how relevant it is after so long. Should she resign from the play or continue? Then Leo turns up at the house, anxious to persuade Norma to remain with the play.
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The performances are excellent – one believes completely in these complex and sometimes difficult characters. Katherine Lyle does well in a slightly underwritten part and in the sparring with her father about identity there are some of the funniest lines in the play. Tim Hardy imbues Leo with a persuasive power made all the stronger by his quiet and understated delivery. His portrayal is of a man who, despite public success, could be unquiet in his soul, or he could merely be seeking advantage, this time to keep Norma in the play and, if possible, be readmitted to the friendship with Benny. A delicately poised performance allows for these ambiguities.
Benny is the play’s centre and Jeremy Kareken is on stage for most of it. He moves from quick-fire combative wit, through slightly uncomprehending parental hurt, to revealing layers of bitterness and an implacable resentment of the man who betrayed him and others. Benny cannot forgive and Karekan shows the self-destructive nature of unforgiveness in a character who continues to function, even to charm, but who cannot heal. It’s an impressive performance.
One has sympathy for Benny, his career as an actor and, it is implied, his marriage, destroyed by the subsequent blacklisting. Norma doesn’t understand the depth of pain and bitterness in her father, yet she makes a good case for living her own life. She tries to be kind. Leo is persuasive and we learn that, despite an award-laden and successful career, his betrayal has consequences for him too, even thirty years later. Life is messy and complicated. People are imperfect. The relationship between the two men is one which neither of them can be free of. Could it be time, as the men approach their final years, to set the enmity aside?
The Value of Names touches on questions of individual identity, betrayal, victimhood, ideology and non-personhood. That is a lot to fit into such a small space and there is a bit of ungainly exposition. It is a play of its time, but is particularly relevant today when, again, careers may be destroyed by the intolerance of prevailing orthodoxy. Go and see it. It’ll make you think.
The Value of Names runs until Saturday 1st March at The White Bear Theatre.
