David Edgar is among the most thoughtful and intelligent and the least shouty and tub-thumping of British political playwrights. But I’m afraid you wouldn’t know it from this pair of prolonged talkfests. Firstly, their subject matter is American (because that’s where the commission came from), and secondly they’re so over-directed that it’s often hard to listen to properly.
At first I thought director Tony Taccone had taken a deliberate decision to make everyone “speechify” so that, as with Brecht, we don’t get distracted by the story, and focus on the content. In fact, though, all the orating makes it harder to stay tuned in to what’s being said rather than how it’s said. And aren’t people already disillusioned with political oratory? The staging needs to solve this, not indulge it.
The pair of plays look at the same election for governor in a Pacific state (Oregon, basically, though never named) from the Republican and the Democratic viewpoints respectively. In Mothers Against, a Republican candidate with too many scruples has to be bullied into the party spin machine. In Daughters Of The Revolution, an old student radical rakes up his ‘60s past with repercussions for the present.
Both plays involve the conflict between shining individual ideals and murky reality, and how “tough choices” usually involve selling out personal principles for a shot at power. The difference is that the Republican Vine family’s quarrels are largely confined to those around the table now. In contrast, Michael Bern’s quest for the truth on the left is plainly a symbol for a whole generation’s doubts.
In Daughters Of The Revolution, viewers in the know can identify specific members of the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the like, all thinly fictionalised. However, Edgar keeps nudging you about it, so you can’t avoid the symbolism even if you can’t decode it all. It also takes too long labouring the point that today’s eco-warriors are the heirs of that radical generation.
As Daughters... goes on, Edgar writes with increasing passion of his own liberal views, then has to ratchet up the contrary side to make it fair, and the whole thing becomes an exchange of stump speeches, and frankly drags. My heart is with the lefties, but I have to admit that the Republicans in Mothers Against get the better lines. In the end the plays don’t examine the crisis in politics, just restate it.
Written for Teletext.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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