Uniquely, Clifford Odets’s 1938 play is set entirely in a dentist’s waiting room. It’s a place you’d expect to find fear, anguish and boredom (which are indeed the throbbing roots of this subtle portrait of American working life). But in this Depression-era heatbox, a handsome sepia-toned museum piece thanks to designer Anthony Ward, it’s the driller who feels the pain.
When it comes to capturing the grainy voices and mannerisms of four working men and a working girl, Odets has the naturalism of Studs Terkel and the flair of vaudeville. Even more than in the work of Arthur Miller, who took on his leftwing mantle, there's a danger that the stage can seem occupied by walking worldviews. But Angus Jackson’s fine National Theatre ensemble brings every one of the characters to persuasive life.
Joseph Millson is on fine form as handsome middle-aged dentist Ben Stark. His physical posture defines his particular worldview, beginning with an ingratiating smile and ending with a stoop of defeat. Ben’s rich, lonely father-in-law, Mr Prince, who declares, ‘I am the American King Lear', is a feast of aphorisms. Nicholas Woodeson plays him with dignity, urgency and masculine flamboyance.
Keeley Hawes is all drawling elegant tyranny as Ben’s wife, Belle – though unfortunately Ben and the dramatist both lose interest in her after the cartoonish entrance of dental assistant Cleo Singer. In Jessica Raine’s excellent performance, Cleo's goofy incompetence and dumb stories initially mask the raw power of youth, which she flaunts without subtlety or stockings. She draws Ben, his alcoholic colleague and Mr Prince like moths.
Odets’s play starts out looking like ‘Death of a Dentist’ and ends up as ‘Birth of a Dental Nurse’: it’s Cleo’s surprising yet wonderful ascent to self-consciousness which becomes its most important business, making the initial scenes in which everyone analyses Ben seem somewhat irrelevant.
'Rocket to the Moon' lacks the devastating structure of tragedy. But despite its flaws it is absorbing, humane and humorous. It has that authentic twang of everyman’s despair in the shadow of American hope, the great and enduring subject of 20th Century American drama.