I found the experience of watching In The Republic Of Happiness surprisingly interesting.  In the few days between its opening and the performance I attended, it had already become known as “theatrical Marmite” – people either loved it or hated it – and I wasn’t acting as one of its prime cheerleaders myself.  I was, to be honest, finding it fairly annoying… though evidently not as intensively so as some other members of the audience.  That last phrase is deliberately ambiguous: I mean both that I didn’t find it as annoying as they did, and that I didn’t find it as annoying as I found them.  There seemed to be something about the play that provoked not just discontent, but conspicuous discontent.  The woman sitting beside me, for instance, seemed unable to restrain herself from kvetching about it to her companion.  In the end I fell prey to some fairly base rancour myself, and whispered sarcastically to her, “Could you speak up, please? I can’t quite make out everything you’re saying.” 

Only a little while after that did it occur to me that Crimp’s intention may have been to so provoke and irk us, that the play’s very function may have been to get up our noses like a little finger.  After all, director Dominic Cooke had said (in words he may have come to regret) that he wanted in his time at the Court to address its middle-class primary constituency more directly: what can be more direct than goading it?  To which the affronted response is, yes, but what’s so elevated about just insulting your audience?  Nothing, of course, but that’s not what Crimp’s play does.  It doesn’t tell us how ridiculous our attitudes and values are – it shows us.  It even does so in song, parodying itself along with us.  Suddenly, I began to admire the play much more… though not to like it.  I might just manage even that if I were to see it again armed with the insight of Messrs Hitchings and Billington that it is structurally a caricature of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Well, maybe just possibly.
 
Written for Theatre Record.