THE SECRET THEATRE
Shakespeare's Globe (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse), London SE1
Opened 22 November, 2017
****

Playwright Anders Lustgarten has lately been presenting his incandescent political radicalism through intriguing allegorical filters. This time last year, his The Seven Acts Of Mercy for the RSC set contemporary social depredations against the work of Caravaggio; now The Secret Theatre considers the surveillance state through its effective inventor in England, Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Elizabeth I in the 1570s and ’80s.

The parallels between today’s war on (principally Islamic) terror and the Elizabethan war on (largely Spanish) Catholicism aren’t exactly opaque; nor are the realities behind the rhetoric, the “false flag” operations, the nurturing of threats in order to create insecurity as a pretext for increased “security” and the like. Lustgarten even goes all-out for chucklesome topicality now and again with amusing but heavy lines such as “If we tax [the bankers] they will leave” and, so help me, a summer/tennis gag, which can feel as if he’s proving to himself how we lap up the simple stuff. Elsewhere, though, individual lines burn with the intensity of the social rage that fires him as a writer, and the clarity of the main analogy is a strength rather than a weakness.

Matthew Dunster’s direction is in keen sympathy with both the thematic and dramatic drives of the play. Aidan McArdle’s initially unflappable Walsingham, later increasingly prey to both illness and what Harold Macmillan called “events, dear boy, events”, and Tara Fitzgerald, unrecognisable beneath white lead and ginger fright-wig as a petty, arrogant, vindictive and occasionally plain vulgar Elizabeth, duel in the Wanamaker’s trademark period-faithful candlelight. Indeed, Dunster and lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth make full use of this aspect to drive home the most common metaphor for espionage: as we watch all these candles being repeatedly extinguished and relit, it is borne directly in on us how much of this business takes place in the shadows, how much we are kept in the dark. And by the final phase, with its talk of Walsingham having created “an apparatus of security which will never be dismantled”, we are sharply aware not just of how little has changed but of how long it has been maintained. As cynical bumper-stickers say, “Support your local police state”.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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