Playing for Time by Arthur Miller

Yes, readers of the blog. You may have noticed that things here have slowed down [again].

They have, yes.

But, my fine online friends, do not worry – this doesn’t mean that scott manley hadley has slipped back into the rabbit warren of their own thoughts, fears, horrors and depressions, but instead it means two things: 1) that I am busy (yes, I’m switching between first and third person, so what?); and 2) that I have hit a technological snag in what has been my standard blogging practice in the almost full year since my baby was born: I am not currently able to blast out the first drafts of these things using Android’s (sub-optimal) voice-to-text function, as I am on a temporary phone (now for the fourth week, I think) because I broke my phone screen and have chosen to not prioritise replacing it, while I have access to a backup that fulfils the basic functions of a phone, though not very well.

This temporary phone – an iPhone so old that it has a physical button on it, which probably means it’s pre-millennium bug – can barely be typed on, as it autocorrects almost every word I input to the dullest noun with the same consonants, and it has to pause to regroup itself every 10 characters. And the voice-to-text function is even worse.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m intentionally not working much at the moment in order to prioritise hanging out with my baby, which means that although I’m not on the poverty line¹, it does mean I have to make tough-adjacent choices: do I go on two day trips and buy a new musical instrument this month, or do I replace my phone screen? Do I have four flat whites or three beers this week… Do I buy two books or one tape from the weird vintage entertainment store? Decisions, decisions, very nearly tough decisions… (I chose day trips and music, two flat whites and a beer and a half (#balance) and five VERY CHEAP tapes. (As mentioned, the choices are not actually that tough.))

But, yes, I’m also very busy – with the baby (who becomes more demanding of attention and engagement day by day, which is fulfilling and fun, though does mean that some days I have to choose between shitting and showering, which is a genuinely tough choice, especially because I like being clean but I won’t spontaneously shower if I go too long without doing it), with freelance work (thank you, clients!), with creative practice and its related admin, with doing video editing for my new interview series, with laundry, with grocery shopping, with trying to have a moment or two of a social life and also putting some time/attention/care into my romantic relationship, because – after my partner was away for a few days last week – I have realised that I am not in a logistical/economic/emotional/practical place to be a single parent any time soon. (There are people who are round-the-clock solo parents for years and years and years, not the three days I had. I don’t know how they do it, especially as most children I’ve met are much more annoying/ugly/boring than my perfect child.)

So that’s where I am mid-June! Admin out of the way!

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I read Playing for Time by Arthur Miller ages ago. I read half of it on the same night bus journey when I read all of the superb After Dead, and then the rest in the days that followed. Below are the notes I scrawled soon after finishing the book. Which is probably all the commentary I need here.

THREE WEEKS AGO:

I don’t know if this is just because it’s late Arthur Miller and he let his eye off the ball due to age, but this may well be the first time I’ve ever read the script of a play and thought this might be better on a stage than on a page.²

This play, Playing for Time, is about an orchestra of Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration/death camp, who are literally playing for time, as the longer they can continue to cohesively perform music that entertains the local Nazi elite, including infamous [later cartoon] villain, Joseph Mengele, the longer they are kept from execution…

What this means is that this play is an overall unsubtle depiction (to the point of almost feeling trite) of a deeply serious situation. The title itself functions linguistically as a play on words – an idiom being used as literal feels somewhat unserious, or at least feels playful in a situation (and a text) where there is no meaningful “play”…

However… does the idea of musicians in a death camp performing for their lives feel clichéd because Miller did this story so definitively in the 1980s, or had it already by that point become unsubtle?

Is it that the stories and narratives of the characters here are just too bleak and too dark and too serious for a dramatisation of them to function as art that doesn’t feel sledgehammer subtle?

Is any depiction of people seeking humanity and connection in a space devoid of it inherently going to lead to simple questions and answers, due to the bluntness of the situation being depicted? In any story, a villain of pure evil can seem like a simplification. But in the 1940s, acts of genuine and unequivocal evil took place in industrialised parts of the world. It’s horrendous and horrible and awful and an unforgivable crime against humanity, and it’s important for people to know that it happened, in the hope that said knowledge will prevent something like it from happening again.

But (other than a tiny minority of the hate-filled and self-destructively ignorant), we all know that the Holocaust happened. Yet… which horrors of the contemporary world have been stopped because of that knowledge?

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I don’t know if Playing for Time is a good play, but it did make me feel like this is probably something worth watching. There’s a filmed version of it starring Vanessa Redgrave, which I plan to look up, because this is an emotive and evocative topic, though it doesn’t feel as complex as Arthur Miller’s work usually does… and I don’t know if that’s just because it is a lack of allegory… Miller is drilling down into the simplicity of cruelty and bigotry and violence, which is elsewhere in his work cushioned through imagery and symbolism… Is this what Miller was always moving towards?

Maybe this lack of subtlety was what he always wanted to offer? And maybe he’s right to be unsubtle… to be clear and direct and comment accordingly.

Maybe allegories about horrors, maybe allusions to cruelty, maybe parallels are just too unclear for too many.

Maybe more people need to remember what happened then and reflect on what it means when actions and ideologies bubble up with too many similarities, and only the demographics of the victims changed…

We have to do better, as a species, as a world, as a society. But we’re not doing better. We’re doing the same, but with the knowledge of what happened before clear in our minds.

Maybe, you could argue, acting like this without ignorance is worse. Acting like this with an awareness of historical monstrosities is less forgivable than being able to argue you had no knowledge of comparable acts. Or maybe it isn’t.

Again, I think again to recommend ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’.

Thank you.

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1. I recently joked at a gig, “I’m so poor I’m considering dropping toner from my skincare regimen.” After consideration, I decided I couldn’t afford to not keep toner in my skincare regime. Thank you, Aesop. 🙏🙏🙏 ↩︎
2. I joke often about this being my opinion, but I think it’s a silly opinion of mine that has accidentally become a sincere one: I, generally, would prefer reading a play to watching one. That is borne out by behaviour. ↩︎