Watford Palace deserves credit for bringing to light again one of the great plays of the forties, The Big Knife, and with it the talent of Clifford Odets, a writer who  had immense “commitment” before the word was fashionable. In The Big Knife Odets, who had been lured to Hollywood following the Broadway success of Golden Boy, bitterly savaged the hand that fed him for a few years.

Life in the film capital amply confirmed all his fears, and there is a strong autobiographical element in the characterisation of Charlie Castle, a film star who is rich, famous and desperately unhappy. His trouble is that he doesn’t know why, and it is the play’s task to bring him to a realisation. So seduced has he been by success that he has allowed his publicist to serve a jail sentence on his behalf.  So blinded has he become that he cannot understand why his wife prefers to live apart from him. What he does know is that he does not want to bind himself to the monstrous producer Marcus Hoff for another 14 years, feeling deep in his heart that his ornate Beverly Hills home and the girsl who throw themselves into his  bed are no compensation for loss of values and integrity. The Big Knife may lean towards melodrama at times but it has a satisfying surging impetus as Charlie wrestles, not so much with his conscience but with his real nature, for he is a man of intellect and radical instincts.

Ian McShane suggests his tough Eastern background and the sensitivity which has been sapped by the likes of Hoff, played with all the stops out, in the best Louis B. Mayer—Harry Cohn fashion, by Jeffrey Chiswick, and his sinister henchman Smiley Coy (Peter Marinker), the ex-officer who has completely sold out to the system and easily rationalises evil. But there is firm character drawing in all the roles, with Don Fellows as the fatherly Jewish agent, Stacy Dorning as a young victim of Hollywood, Bob Sessions as a writer on the point of throwing in the sponge and Gwen Taylor as Marion Castle, facing a reality she hates. Michael Attenborough directs and there is a superb setting by Joe Vanek.