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archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage
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 A Story of Thunder Rock |
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| A Haunted
Lighthouse Against the Winds of War In the 1938 Munich Agreement, wherein Great Britain, France, and Italy ratified Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, playwright Robert Ardrey read the certainty of a coming war. Passionate about rousing his complacent countrymen, he conceived a stirring ghost story, Thunder Rock. In the play, a cynical observer of a broken world in 1939 takes solace in the company of sentimental phantoms from what he thinks is a more hopeful age. But gradually, the frustrations with the resignations and retreats embodied by these spirits drive him to cast off such ashen comfort and embrace the challenge of a world that needs his participation. The Group Theater, recognizing the play’s inspired urgency, brought Thunder Rock to life on Broadway in November of 1939, under the direction of 30-year-old Elia Kazan. But, perhaps because a period of relative calm in Europe had convinced many an isolationist that fears of European war were overblown, the play closed after 23 performances. Beacon of Hope Meanwhile, across the ocean where the threat of war was known to be very real indeed, Ardrey’s agent had secured a British production, with Michael Redgrave in the central role. Opening in June of 1940, just days after the fall of Paris, Thunder Rock was one of only two plays running in a London whose theaters had shuttered for the duration. Critic Harold Hobson lauded the inspiration he found in the play, drawing a comparison to nothing less than Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” address to Parliament: “though inevitably on a much smaller scale, one night in June 1940, simultaneously with the collapse of France, inspiration of the same quality was to be found in the tiny Neighbourhood Theatre in Notting Hill Gate. It came from a play written by an American, and played by British actors. Its name was Thunder Rock.”Churchill himself called the play “the greatest contribution to British morale there has yet been” and arranged for the British treasury to support a transfer to the far more prominent Globe Theatre in the West End. The play ran through the Blitz, survived a bombing raid that destroyed the theater next door, and toured the UK with Alec Guinness in the lead. Rising from the Rubble Following the war, the play found a new life in, of all places, Berlin. One of the first two productions in the defeated city, it was staged by American forces in their occupied zone. Patrons were obliged to walk over rubble to attend the premiere, where they were met by a set built from that same rubble, taken from the street. Post-war Berlin’s reception equaled that of pre-war London’s. In Ardrey’s own words: “The curtain rose on the interior of the lighthouse. And just as it had happened in besieged, isolated London over five long years before, an unaccountable emotion gripped an audience in Berlin. Behind the gowns, behind the white ties, lived a people sheltering an equivalent despair.”Subsequent productions played in over 40 cities through Germany, and one opened in Vienna within six weeks of V-E Day. Since then, the play found life in such diverse places as Norway and Australia; in Harare, Zimbabwe; in Alexandria, Egypt; and in Nairobi, Kenya. Thunder Rock also found life in other media: a 1940 BBC radio broadcast featuring the original cast; a film adaptation in 1942, starring Michael Redgrave and James Mason; and a BBC Television adaptation by Peter Simms, starring Robert Sansom, in 1946. Clear and Present Theater New York has seen occasional revivals of Thunder Rock, but it has never seemed more poignant than 2020, 80 years after its London triumph. The immigrant characters of the play itself sound unexpected echoes in our own time. Ardrey's ghosts of 1849--immigrants seeking opportunities in America that are closed to them in Europe--include a defeated British suffragist, despairing of hope that women will ever find respect, let alone equality, in a world run by men. Her doubts seem too apt in today's continued and more complicated struggles for gender equality. Likewise, an Austrian doctor on the brink of developing anesthesia is hounded from his home by a suspicious establishment that is more invested in retaining power than the embracing scientific discovery. In our day when science must defend its progress against climate deniers and flat earthers, his dilemma is disturbingly familiar. And an uneducated worker's family, risking their and their unborn child's lives for an uncertain chance of an education and wealth in a new land, stand for many braving our increasingly unwelcoming borders. If the circumstance of the play's characters find their parallels today, so does the circumstance of the play's creation. The divisions, both abroad and at home, that inspired Robert Ardrey’s admission of despair and his valiant assertion of hope, stalk us today like the ghosts that haunt Thunder Rock's lighthouse. We may well wonder if we are on the brink of another catastrophe. We grapple with forces of nationalist isolationism pitted against an inexorably shrinking globe. We feel the same helplessness in a world increasingly straining against itself. Metropolitan Playhouse is devoted to embracing the perspective of those visions from the past that can help us see our present more clearly. All the more apt that the theater should present Thunder Rock, for the very perspective that Thunder Rock offers its tormented protagonist is insight gained by comparing the present with the past. In his isolated reckoning with humankind’s failures, he appreciates the progress made since the era of his defeated phantoms. It is a small step, then, for him to conceive of a future whose achievement is unimaginable from the point of view of the present. Much has changed in the world since 1939; our global oppositions and fearsome technologies make even the battles of that era appear almost quaint—but that was exactly Ardrey’s message in 1939. In our very blinkered frustration, we may find hope. |
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| Robert Ardrey (1908 - 1980) Born and raised in Chicago, Robert Ardrey found a mentor in Thornton Wilder at the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1930. THUNDER ROCK (1939) was the most famous of his plays, all of which he wrote to be articulations of a social conscience, and which include CASEY JONES (1938), JEB (1945), and SHADOW OF HEROES (1958). Screenplays include popular adaptations of the Oscar-nominated original screenplay for KHARTOUM (1966, with Charlton Heston and Sir Laurence Olivier). He is also known for his often controversial nonfiction on human origins and behavior: AFRICAN GENESIS (1961), THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE (1966), THE SOCIAL CONTRACT (1970), and THE HUNTING HYPOTHESIS (1976). |
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