The Royal Shakespeare Company’s
contribution to Hull’s year as UK City of Culture is this co-production
with Hull Truck, which opened there in March and now transfers to the
other partner’s home turf (where I saw its final preview).
Native Hullensian Richard Bean’s play is steeped in Hull. Its subject
matter comes from the city’s status as one of the initial crucibles of
the English Civil War (it housed a strategically vital arms magazine),
and its governor Sir John Hotham’s 1642-3 change of sides from
parliamentarian to royalist. Bean ascribes this Janus-facedness to
Hotham’s greed to secure money for his daughter’s dowry, and proceeds
to cook up a farce on sex, money and power interspersed with
incongruously earnest protest songs drawing parallels between the
“world turned upside down” of then and that of now.
It’s packed with local jokes about everything from road names to rugby
strips and even, if I guess aright, a mickey-take of Hull Truck’s own
apparently platitudinous mission statement. Bean being Bean, the gags
come thick and fast and are often brilliant (Hotham, on being shown a
picture of his daughter’s elderly husband-to-be: “He’s covered in
scars!” – His wife, patiently: “It’s a woodcut”)... but also, alas,
quite often the kind of vulgar crack that believes vulgarity’s enough
to get by on without wit.
Discount the special status of the Hull dimension and the play is
judged solely on its subject matter and treatment thereof... and I’m
afraid that, while the source material is fascinating from all kinds of
angles, the play itself is a mess. Phillip Breen directs, and Mark Addy
and Caroline Quentin lead a cast who all act, with vim and vigour.
However, there are too many plotlines to keep in focus – it almost
feels as if there’s a separate subplot for every one of Hotham’s 17
children (although only three appear onstage) – and only one or two
strands are resolved at all; a couple more are entirely unexplained
from start to finish. Farce is a finely engineered machine; so far from
any kind of mechanism, this is an everything-that’s-left-in-the-fridge
frittata. As regards parallels with today, I rather think the
inadvertently accurate correspondence is one of information overload
leading us all to miss the real point.
Written for the Financial
Times.